Moscow doesn’t want a conventional war, but it is busy fighting a hybrid one.
On Russian state television, the Kremlin’s propagandists have for years threatened to bomb European capitals, even while the country’s diplomats insist that no such war is imminent. Lately, the denials have gotten hard to sustain, as European intelligence agencies have ascribed hundreds of clandestine sabotage operations—cyberattacks in Italy, arson in the United Kingdom, undersea-cable ruptures in the Baltic, severed pig heads left outside French mosques—to Russia.
U.S. intelligence assessments conclude that a conventional Russian attack on a NATO country is likely to happen sometime from this fall to 2029. But another possibility is that Moscow will remain content with sabotage and intimidation. This hybrid campaign is all the war Russia wants or needs—and stoking fear that Moscow just might directly strike Ukraine’s European allies is part of it.
