A photo taken on December 28, 2024 in the Gulf of Finland shows oil tanker Eagle S, suspected of … [+] cutting an undersea cable supplying electricity from Finland to Estonia. (Photo by JUSSI NUKARI/Lehtikuva/AFP via Getty Images)
Lehtikuva/AFP via Getty Images
Looking back, Estonian officials are confident that they handled the May 2024 buoy incident about as well as it could be handled. Estonian border guards caught the Russian theft on video: a handful of uniformed men in patrol boats moving slowly up the river between the two countries, systematically removing 25 of the 50 buoys laid down by Estonia to mark the frontier. “Moscow is testing our reaction,” director general of the Estonian police and border guard Egert Belitšev tells me as we watch the tape. “When we don’t react, they go further.”
A tiny country of 1.4 million, formerly occupied by the Soviet Union, Estonia has long seen itself as the front line between Russia and the West, and Estonians are used to the so-called “hybrid” aggression that has been escalating elsewhere in Europe in recent months. The day after the buoy incident, the foreign minister summoned Moscow’s top diplomat in Tallinn and told him in no uncertain terms that the theft was unacceptable. Will that be enough to deter similar sabotage this year? Belitšev shrugs off the question. “We couldn’t follow the provocation,” he explains. “We do not enter Russian territory. Our job is to keep Estonians safe, not provoke World War III.”
It has taken the rest of Europe several years to recognize the growing challenge posed by Moscow’s shadow warfare. But with the provocations increasingly frequent and increasingly menacing—not just cyberattacks and disinformation but bomb threats, arson, and a foiled assassination attempt last year—officials across the continent are wrestling with how to react.
Western countries’ commitment to the rule of law generally prohibits responding in kind—what separates us from the Russians, after all, if not our commitment to a rules-based international order? But it’s not clear that the tools we have at hand are enough to deter Moscow from further aggression. In Western Europe, as in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin believes might makes right, and the civilized world has been largely unable to come up with a counterargument.
Cheap, Easy To Orchestrate, And Low-Risk For Moscow
Western intelligence officials have compiled a long list of hybrid incidents they believe can be traced back to Moscow. In the past year alone, there were arson attacks at a Warsaw shopping mall, a German weapons factory, and a Ukrainian-owned logistics firm in London. The assassination plot targeted Armin Papperger, chief executive of the German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall, a leading European producer of artillery shells and military vehicles for Ukraine. Among the most alarming incidents, in July, improvised incendiary devices that security officials believe were meant to detonate on transatlantic flights exploded in DHL cargo facilities in Lithuania and Britain.
In November, the focus shifted to the Baltic Sea—the latest in a series of incidents involving commercial tankers with what appear to be ties to Russia or China. All told, in the past year, three ships have dragged their anchors across underwater cables and a gas pipeline, severing vital links between European countries. But according to Marek Kohv, a former Estonian intelligence officer now working at Tallinn’s International Centre for Defence and Security, none of this sabotage is as alarming as Moscow’s suspected interference this fall in elections in Georgia, Moldova, and Romania. “Terrorism is nothing,” Kohv tells me, “compared to a stolen presidency.”
What the incidents have in common: compared to military aggression, hybrid warfare is cheap, easy to orchestrate, and low-risk for Moscow. The perpetrators are generally civilians, often drifters or petty criminals. Many have been recruited on the internet and paid in cryptocurrency. This makes it hard for the West to trace the aggression to Moscow, and until recently no one imagined that shadow tactics could trigger Article 5 of the NATO treaty obliging all members to defend each other against “an armed attack.”
Just what Moscow hopes to achieve varies from case to case. Cutting cables in the Baltic Sea tests Europe’s preparedness and its appetite for fighting back against foreign aggression. Setting fire to commercial sites in Germany, where the public is divided about aid to Ukraine, can spur sharpened debate and perhaps a cutback in support. Installing a puppet government in a neighboring country like Georgia is the ultimate prize, but Moscow also wins by sowing fear in Western Europe. “People wonder what’s next,” Maj. Gen. Andrus Merilo, commander of the Estonian Defence Forces, said in a briefing I attended last month. “Terrorism? A full-scale military invasion? That’s the point with hybrid—you never know.”
Some European countries, including Estonia, are more acutely aware of the threat than others. But even those with open eyes often find it difficult to respond. The first challenge is political will. Before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, many Western nations turned a blind eye to Moscow provocations. “Russia’s constant intimidation was tolerated for the sake of good relations,” Finnish researcher Minna Ålander explains in recent report for Carnegie Europe. Governments also fear spreading panic, and many would rather absorb the threat than risk a tit-for-tat escalation with an aggressive Kremlin.
But even states that want to push back against shadow tactics often find themselves at a loss for how to do so. It can be hard to trace hybrid operations back to those who ordered them in the Kremlin. There’s no consensus on who should be responsible for a European response—the country that sustained the attack, the European Union, NATO or some other third party. And Western legal frameworks—national law and multinational agreements like the NATO treaty and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea—rarely make provision for shadow warfare, making it difficult for governments to justify hitting back with force.
It’s all but unthinkable for a Western European nation to respond in kind, as Israel might or Ukraine did last month when it allegedly hired an Uzbek civilian to assassinate Russian general Igor Kirillov in Moscow. “We can’t exactly blow up their hospitals,” Estonian parliamentarian and former chief of intelligence Eerik-Niiles Kross told me in an interview. “We have to find other ways to make things painful for them.” The upshot, according to Nele Loorents, a research fellow at Estonia’s International Centre for Defence and Security: “The West is always two or three steps behind—reactive, not proactive.”
What The West Can Do
Many Estonians say they are so used to Russian intimidation—from heavy-handed Soviet domination to regular vandalism and the never-ending cyberattacks that have been disrupting Estonian bank and government websites since 2007—that they no longer give it much thought. But Estonia has a lot of experience finding ways to respond within the bounds of Western ethics and legal constraints.
A first potential step, often harder than it sounds, Estonian officials say, is to recognize the provocation and talk about it publicly—in effect, acknowledging that the West is at war, or at least shadow war, with Moscow. The next step, also a long-standing practice in Estonia, is preparation: laying redundant cables under the Baltic Sea, for example, or strengthening public resilience by teaching people to recognize disinformation. Still a third step is to track and share information about shadow attacks, as many countries across Europe are starting to do in several forums, including NATO and the EU.
More decisive action can take the form of sanctions. In mid-December, the EU took a first step to implement the block’s new anti-hybrid sanctions framework: asset freezes and travel bans aimed at several Russian entities responsible for shadow activity. Other potential responses focus on the perpetrators rather than the puppeteers, prosecuting the petty criminals who carry out acts of sabotage or, in the Baltic Sea, boarding and impounding the offending vessel, as Finland did recently, and following up with a court case.
Still a third option for countries eager to act: what some call “asymmetrical” responses, such as increasing military aid to Ukraine. It’s no accident that Tallinn devotes a larger share of GDP than any other Western nation—a full 2.5%—to military and humanitarian support for Kyiv, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.
Will this be enough to deter Russian shadow warfare? Nothing the West has done to date seems to have had much effect in the Kremlin. Former intelligence officer Marek Kohv is among those in Tallinn who would like to see more aggressive action, including European cyberattacks on Russia’s military and weapons manufacturers. “Playing defense is not enough,” Kohv told me in an interview. “Defense by itself, with no offense, is just a way of losing more slowly.”
The challenge for the West: not just to prepare for aggression, but to punish Moscow—to convince the Kremlin there is a cost for waging hybrid war in Europe. Until we do, the attacks are sure to continue, along with an anguished Western debate about how to fight back without trampling on our values.
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Publish date : 2025-01-07 03:25:00
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