Russia’s alleged sabotage campaign in Europe raises fears of escalation 

Russia appears to have escalated its shadow war in Europe this year.

European officials have alleged that Russian fighter planes have veered inside Polish, Lithuanian and Estonian airspace, testing reaction times. Suspected Russian drones have been downed over Poland, Finland and the Baltic states.

And Moscow has been accused of bringing trouble to the Black Sea.

In two separate operations in October, Ukraine accused Russia of using aerial and surface drones to sink four cargo ships just outside the territorial waters of Bulgaria, a European Union and NATO member, in an apparent warning that Ukraine’s grain exports through NATO territorial waters may not be safe for long.

Russia and Belarus have also been accused of trying to destabilise the Baltic states by making their borders appear fluid.

“Masked and most likely armed individuals on the Belarus side of the border escorted and attempted to push groups of illegal migrants into Latvia,” Ieva Cesniece, Latvia’s ambassador to Greece, told Al Jazeera. “Those individuals expressed threats to Latvian soldiers and border guards. On the same day in a separate incident, masked individuals crossed into Latvian territory and carried out deliberate sabotage. Bborder infrastructure was damaged, and surveillance equipment was removed.”

Latvian media have reported that asylum seekers and undocumented migrants who tried to run back from the Latvian border were rounded up by Belarusian authorities and pushed towards Latvia again.

Cesniece drew a direct link between the Russian war in Ukraine and its shadow war in Europe.

“The weaker Russia appears in Ukraine, the more it tests our resilience, trying to weaken NATO and EU resolve and support for Ukraine,” she said.

As European governments warned of an imminent escalation of a Russian shadow war on the continent, experts said the bloc needs to do more to deter Russia as well as defend itself.

“Protecting critical infrastructure, strengthening intelligence services and preventing attacks are essential, but deterrence is about more than preventing the next incident,” said Olena Tregub, cofounder and head of Ukraine’s Independent Anti-Corruption Commission. “It is about convincing your adversary that continuing these operations will become too costly. And I’m not sure Russia currently sees those costs as sufficiently high.”

As an expert on following money trails, she believes European governments have not done enough to identify the networks behind operations, expose the command structures, disrupt their financing and logistics, and impose consequences.

Meanwhile, Russia’s war is going badly on the ground.

Two Ukrainian counteroffensives have blunted Moscow’s main thrust to capture the eastern region of Donetsk and in effect have deprived it of any territorial gains this year.

Since a failed August operation to blow up cargo planes at Germany’s Leipzig/Halle Airport, which was later verified by the European Commission as a Russian operation, warnings of further escalation have multiplied.

Czech spy chief Michal Koudelka warned in September that Russia might attempt a military attack on a NATO member in “months, not years”.

Days later, Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Maria Zakharova openly declared that European defence industries supplying Ukraine were legitimate targets for Moscow.

“Russia does not necessarily distinguish between the military capabilities Ukraine uses on the battlefield and the European infrastructure that makes those capabilities possible,” Tregub told Al Jazeera.

“From Moscow’s perspective, a factory producing military equipment for Ukraine, a logistics hub transporting that equipment or a company providing critical technology can all become potential targets of disruption.”

This month, representatives of five EU intelligence agencies told the Financial Times that Russia was seeking to “kill” European defence bosses and target their supply chains.

That followed a report from a German newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, that Russia had planted incendiary devices in the offices of defence companies Rohde & Schwarz and Helsing in Munich. It also followed a report on the Politico news site in which EU security officials said Russia was planning to move beyond messaging and claim lives on European soil.

European officials have spoken of strengthening the resilience of their data centres, telecommunications, and other vulnerable networks and industries, but they have not spoken of retaliation.

From the Ukrainian point of view, though, Europe has been slow to see sabotage, manned and unmanned military operations, cyberattacks and information warfare as the early stages of a multidimensional war with Russia, and that failure of perception is itself a weakness.

“Where will he stop if he is currently testing all these drones against European countries, even NATO countries?” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy asked journalists on October 16, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “They are not talking about it very loudly yet. They don’t want escalation, … but you will talk very loudly when there are ballistic and cruise missiles and also thousands of drones.”

“Ukrainians don’t know about any war in Ukraine. They know about war in Europe,” said Oleksandr Danylyuk, a long-serving adviser to the Ukrainian Ministries of Defence and Foreign Affairs and now a Russian warfare expert with the Royal United Services Institute.

Like Zelenskyy and Tregub, he believes the lack of retaliation to its apparent hybrid war encourages Russia.

“Russians are limited right now only by their capabilities because they do whatever they want. There is no reaction,” he said.

He said he believes NATO needs to place more forward troops in the Baltic states to create “deterrence by denial” and to strengthen Ukraine.

Minna Alander, a leading European researcher in security and defence with the Center for European Policy Analysis, said denying Russians travel visas, carrying out retaliatory cyberattacks, further interdicting the Russian oil fleet and sanctioning Chinese suppliers of defence goods to Russia were all realistic retaliations Europe could impose immediately.

Danylyuk said money remains the most potent tool of deterrence.

“The most direct way to punish Russia is to actually increase support to Ukraine,” he told Al Jazeera. “Each time we detect Russian intelligence operations in Europe, we will increase combined support of Ukraine [maybe] 10 percent, 20 percent.”

Yet Ukraine’s allies are signalling the opposite, he observed.

The United States withdrew its military and financial support in January 2025 and recently placed the dependability of its satellite services in doubt. In France and Germany, the governments trail opposition leaders who want to stop aid to Ukraine.

Ukraine has performed better than many expected.

Since 2023, it has designed and built its own weapons and developed its own strategy to halt the Russian advance. It has punished Russia by striking oil installations and weapons factories deep inside its territory.

To reverse the tide of the war and reclaim its occupied territories, it is asking for more money, and it is asking it from the people providing the vast majority of it – Europe.

“Next year, the war will cost 155 billion euros [$170bn]), and we need at least 70 billion euros [$80bn] more from you,” Zelenskyy told the European Council on October 16.

“We could double or even triple the production of drones,” he said. “Just imagine how much more pressure we could put on Russia if we could do two or three times more.”