Sabotage, espionage, propaganda: Russia is supposedly already at war with Europe. How European elites and Western media keep pushing a dangerous but false narrative.
David Goeßman is journalist, author, and editor of the German news magazine Telepolis
Cross-posted from ZNetwork
On March 19, 2025, the Inspector General of the German Bundeswehr, Carsten Breuer, and the professor of international politics and military expert Carlo Masala were guests on the prominent TV talk show Maischberger of the public broadcasting network ARD with millions of viewers. They explained to the German audience that Russia is preparing for a major war.
The Narva Scenario
Masala described a scenario in which Russia could start with a small attack, for example on the city of Narva in Estonia, which is right on the Russian border, a mixture of “hybrid activities, very limited military actions, sometimes with ‘little green men’ [soldiers without marked uniforms, as during the annexation of Crimea in 2014], in this sense hybrid, where in the end a city of 50,000 inhabitants was taken, with the argument of protecting the Russian minority.”
Against this background, the question arises, Masala continued, of whether NATO and in particular the USA under president Donald Trump would start a full-scale war against Russia for the sake of a small city.
Inspector General Carsten Breuer added that Russian units were already being strengthened on the Western border – in preparation for a major attack. It is the intention of Russian President Vladimir Putin not to stop at Ukraine.
Russia is Already Attacking Europe
For the Bundeswehr general, it is clear that Russia has long been attacking Europe. He points to drones over army barracks and chemical parks, as well as increasing acts of sabotage and espionage.
“This is part of the hybrid warfare. The idea is to gain access for a possible larger war. So they want to know how to attack. And on the other hand, they want to create insecurity among the population. (…) We see the threat and have to counter it with something.”
In view of the hybrid warfare and the danger of a major war, Breuer and Masala are calling for a massive and urgent rearmament of Germany and the EU. It is now imperative to have the Bundeswehr comprehensively expanded and modernized in just four years, because Putin will be capable of a large-scale war by 2029.
Farewell to the Proxy
The view that Russia is already at war with Europe, albeit in a hybrid or small-scale way, is not new. As early as September 2022, Susan Glasser, a political columnist for The New Yorker magazine, and Fiona Hill, who served on president Trump’s first term National Security Council, stated that “we are already fighting World War III with Russia,” even if it is not admitted.
It is certainly true that a proxy war is taking place in Ukraine between the US-led West and Russia. This was already the case during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, albeit in different ways. But blurring the line between a shadow war and a direct military confrontation, a distinction both sides have strictly adhered to since the Cold War, is dangerous and irresponsible, as Anatol Lieven, Eurasia expert at the Quincy Institute, notes.
“It suggests a universal threat, and the need for, and the possibility of, absolute victory over absolute evil, as in World War II. But the war in Ukraine is nothing like that.”
The Rise of “Hybrid Warfare”
The term “hybrid warfare” has gained remarkable prominence with the Ukraine conflict since 2014 and especially since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine over three years ago, bringing into focus Russia as an imminent threat of war to Europe and NATO.
On March 20, Foreign Affairs published an article titled: “Arsonist, Killer, Saboteur, Spy. While Trump Courts Him, Putin Is Escalating Russia’s Hybrid War Against the West”. Peace talks in Ukraine seem therefore misguided as it is alleged that Moscow has already brought the war in Ukraine to Europe. While the insinuation of hybrid warfare makes Russia appear as an aggressor confronting the entire continent, there are calls to finally prepare for war.
War without War
But the assertion of Russia’s “hybrid war” against Europe encounters several problems. Whatever one thinks of the term itself (more on this later), there is no war Russia is fighting against EU or NATO states. Hence, there is no hybrid war either, a concept that is based on a mixture of regular and irregular, military and non-military means of conflict. So, unless one implies that Russian forces already fight British, German, French or NATO troops the essential ingredient for warfare is missing.
What is really happening is that political leaders, pundits and media focus on the alleged non-military means of Russia in Europe, i.e. “actions in gray areas” that affect the civilian sector (politics, economics, public opinion) – whereby the causer is often obscured like with espionage, sabotage, covert propaganda or cyberwarfare – in order to fabricate a war or an impending one even though there is none. In this sense every suspicion, every photo of an army barrack by a Russian, every damaged internet cable in the Baltic Sea is presented as part of a grand military strategy of the Russian president to wage war against Europe – first covertly, then openly.
Panorama of Horror
The media especially in European countries have not grown tired in recent years of unfolding a panorama of espionage and sabotage acts by Russia against European societies. The secret services are repeatedly referred to, who explain that Russian hybrid destabilization attempts are on the increase. Western experts on hybrid warfare are being interviewed, who speak of a “huge number of stiches” by Russia in Europe, with the Kremlin planning to be able to “finalize” them militarily as well.
On December 23 last year, the German weekly Die Zeit published a detailed chronology of the most important cases of hybrid warfare in Europe since 2022. It describes over 70 incidents in countries such as Germany, France and Poland, ranging from minor incidents to sabotage. The dossier states:
“Russia has long been at war with Europe – and not only with Ukraine. Any state that supports the Ukrainian government is an enemy for the rulers in Moscow that must be fought. The aims of this hybrid war, which is being waged against the people of the West with many means and in many places, are to sow uncertainty, instill fear, create divisions and undermine. It began with espionage and graffiti, with disinformation and lies. Then, with increasing attacks on critical infrastructure.”
When Suspicions Are Not Confirmed
Looking at the cases listed, it is often unclear who is specifically behind the actions. Most of them are suspicions, with no evidence that the Russian leadership is behind them.
But that doesn’t stop the media from categorizing the incidents as “Russian hybrid warfare” Ultimately, the narrative of a hybrid war in Europe consists of a widely accepted and practiced reporting based on suspicion, fed by secret services, ministries and investigators who make unverifiable accusations.
Just to take one example: when unknown persons cut two important DB German Railways communication cables in October 2022, there was immediate talk of a Russian attack. But the fact that the Russian government was behind it was pure speculation.
Later, in June 2024, it turned out that two criminals suspected of wanting to steal the cables were behind the attacks. The cases are considered to have been solved: no foreign state is responsible, according to the public prosecutor’s office in charge.
However, in its list of Russian hybrid actions, published at the end of 2024 and updated on March 3, 2025, Die Zeit continues to claim – counterfactually – that there is suspicion of sabotage in the case of the railway cable damage, implying that Russia remains the focus of the investigation. Not a word about the crime being solved.
Every Russian Acts on Behalf of the Kremlin
In other cases, there is at least circumstantial evidence that implicates a connection to Russia (though not the Russian state). During the German election campaign, the exhaust pipes of 270 vehicles were sprayed with foam, rendering them inoperable. Initially, it was assumed that the act had been committed by climate activists.
According to the police one of four suspects stated, that he had received instructions from a cell phone in Russia. The Spiegel speaks of “junk agents” who were recruited with money from Russia.
Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock was immediately certain that Russia was behind the alleged sabotage. Meanwhile, the Federal Ministry of the Interior stated that so far there is no concrete evidence of Russian clients.
Even if some kind of connection to Russia can be proven, it is a long way to claiming that the Russian government is waging hybrid warfare with these acts. Unless one assumes that every Russian acts in the name of the Kremlin and that every action of the Russian government or secret service agents is embedded in a war strategy against Europe.
The Baltic Sea Cable Affair
In other cases, the accusations against Russia petered out. At the end of 2024, communication, energy and electricity cables in the Baltic Sea that connect European countries were damaged by cargo ships. This triggered a wave of political outrage.
While Moscow has repeatedly rejected the accusation of sabotage against Western infrastructure, in Europe Russian acts of sabotage are again assumed, albeit without evidence.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte spoke of “hybrid warfare” and “sabotage” that must be deterred. German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius agreed. In a joint statement, the foreign ministers of Germany, Poland, France, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom accused Russia of “systematically attacking European security architecture.”
“Moscow’s escalating hybrid activities against NATO and EU countries are also unprecedented in their variety and scale, creating significant security risks.”
Futile Search for Saboteurs
As early as January, however, a consensus was emerging between the security services of the United States and Europe that the damage on the seabed was the result of accidents and not Russian sabotage, as reported in the Washington Post. Finland released the oil tanker that had been accused of damaging the power cables.
On March 8 of this year, the Wall Street Journal finally reported that NATO was looking in vain for undersea cable saboteurs, but found no evidence. However, most of German and European major media outlets are not interested in such news, which questions NATO’s narrative of Russia’s hybrid war of sabotage in the Baltic Sea, while continue to talk about sabotage.
The list of vague suspicions against Russia could be continued for a long time. When a DHL airplane crashed in Lithuania on November 25 last year, it was again wildly speculated that it was a Russian terrorist attack. The German Foreign Ministry and many others spoke again of a possible hybrid attack. Evidence, even proof?
On March 26 the investigating prosecutors in Lithuania declared that the crash was likely caused by an error of the Spanish pilot who is now the suspect in the case. “Other versions of the accident were refuted by the data obtained during the investigation,” the statement of the prosecutors reads.
The War Front: Graffities and Suspicious Russians
The alleged hybrid warfare of the Russian government, which has been defined as the security threat in Europe, ultimately consists of a hodgepodge of suspicions, some of which quickly dissolve into nothing. Let us recall the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipelines in 2022, which was initially blamed on Russia, while it soon became clear that the investigative leads point to Ukraine and even to the United States.
In addition to the high-profile cases of sabotage orchestrated by the media, which target the Russian government as the aggressor, a flood of smaller incidents is simultaneously being woven into a web of hybrid Russian attacks against the Europeans, in which it is also often unclear who the perpetrators are, not to mention the lack of a Kremlin connection.
The chronology of Die Zeit on Russian hybrid actions contains a whole series of mostly insignificant incidents, including “suspicious vehicles” that were registered in front of army barracks, or drones circling over bases, graffiti on Berlin walls calling for an end to the war in Ukraine, or social media campaigns.
The Media Battlefield
If you ask yourself: What has the Kremlin verifiably done in the last three years since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine in terms of sabotage and so called “hybrid actions” in Europe that pose a threat to the stability of EU states, then you likely come up empty-handed.
One would think that if Russia has been waging a hybrid war against Europe for over ten years, at least according to the prevailing narrative, then something of this unprecedent security threat should be noticeable. But beyond the media battlefield, there are no signs of destabilization.
No Peace Allowed
As for the term itself: it is nothing new that states not only act militarily in war, but also use non-military means – from propaganda and covert actions to sabotage – to achieve their war aims. Therefore, a number of researchers reject the notion that hybrid warfare is a new form of warfare. At the same time, the term, which emerged in the course of the US anti-terrorism wars, is criticized for its ideological orientation.
The argument is that the concept attempts to extend the right to military force to non-belligerent conflict situations. A whole range of terms such as “borderless war,” “asymmetric war,” “operations other than warfare,” “new kinds of battlefields,” and “irregular war” have been introduced with the aim of blurring the boundaries between peace and war.
According to this definition, war does not only take place when two states fight each other militarily with a certain intensity, but rather it starts with espionage activities, PR activities and acts of sabotage. However, according to critics, this is not compatible with international law and entails a dangerous expansion of war.
The Myth of Hybrid War
According to Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor of law at the University of Notre Dame in the US and an expert on the topic, the crux of the matter is not how the war is waged (and in the past, wars have always been waged in a “hybrid” fashion), but whether it is a war at all, which is linked to clear conditions (and thus also to corresponding rules and counter-measures). She speaks of the “myth of hybrid war”, while clarifying to what extent it makes sense to speak of a “hybrid war” in relation to Russia:
“Russia’s varied conduct in Ukraine can be termed as ‘hybrid warfare’ when it is integral to the actual organized armed fighting that is occurring in Ukraine.”
Germany is not Crimea
The important thing here is “in Ukraine” and integral to “fighting … in Ukraine”. Under these conditions, non-military methods can become part of warfare in Ukraine, according to O’Connell, such as the “little green men” in Crimea, propaganda campaigns in Ukraine, espionage, the use of irregular forces, corruption and various coercive measures beyond military action.
But Germany, France or Poland are not Eastern Ukraine or Crimea and have not been at war with Russia. As Russia experts repeatedly have pointed out, there are no intentions and strategies in Moscow to invade EU or NATO states, not to mention the lack of means to wage war beyond eastern Ukraine. But it is precisely this suggestion that is spread through the narrative of a hybrid war against Europe.
Cold War Conspiracy 2.0
Murat Caliskan, a senior researcher at Beyond the Horizon International Strategic Studies, a Belgium-based organization, believes the discourse around hybrid warfare is misleading. He criticizes that every Russian action is interpreted as part of a well-coordinated “hybrid warfare” campaign – similar to US President John F. Kennedy’s warnings of a grand conspiracy in Moscow during the Cold War of the 1960s.
At the time, Kennedy spoke of the enormous capacity of the Soviet Union to attack the West using “covert means”, “intimidation” or “infiltration”. “It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations,” Kennedy alerted the West.
Today, Moscow once again appears to be omnipotent, with its alleged monopoly on covert, indirect methods that Europe has no way of countering. For Caliskan, the talk of a hybrid war is a false label that the West is imposing on Russia.
The West’s Hybrid War
Furthermore the label is selective, while the focus on Moscow distorts the balance of power and the fact that it is not Russia, but the United States that is actually the master of hybrid warfare.
One only has to look at the indirect and covert methods used by Washington and its allies in recent decades, ranging from drone and dirty wars, private armies, cooperation with militias, financial blackmail of states, massive espionage (see the NSA scandal or the German BND program, which has been used to spy also on friendly states, the White House, the Vatican, international organizations and foreign journalists), to economic sanctions, propaganda, political influence on elections and support for uprisings and revolutions in former Soviet states.
Furthermore, the public debate in the West only focuses on Russia’s alleged hybrid warfare against Europe. Similar methods used by the West against Russia to put pressure on Moscow are not included in this category.
But the US and NATO countries also engage in espionage, PR and political influence against Russia. Adopting conventional standards, the NATO expansion to the east, the support of the Maidan uprising, the manifold sanctions against Russia, the military support of Ukraine since 2014 and the deployment of special forces and CIA employees should also be seen as hybrid tactics directed against Moscow.
The Kremlin’s Actual Doctrine
Russia itself does not describe its actions in Ukraine as hybrid warfare. Nor is Russia’s military doctrine geared towards such actions, as Michael Kofman and Matthew Rojansky of the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center in the United States emphasize.
The frequently quoted words of the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, Valery Gerasimov, from 2013, to pay more attention to non-military means, merely expressed a reminder to the Russian leadership to keep pace with Western warfare methods since its Global War on Terror. They are by no means proof that Russia has focused on a hybrid strategy, according to Kofman and Rojansky.
The term hybrid warfare is “as amorphous as the phenomenon it describes,” explained Florian Schaurer, then a strategy development officer at the German Ministry of Defense, as early as 2015. A study shows that in 66 examined media articles in which the term “hybrid warfare” was used, it was only applied correctly in 18 cases. Schaurer concludes that the term has lost some of its “analytical depth” in media use in connection with the Ukraine conflict and is now used primarily as a “political slogan”.
The Legend of the Superior Enemy
This applies all the more today, since the term has been extended beyond the borders of Ukraine to the whole of Europe, but only selectively for Moscow. By this, the narrative that Russia is already waging war on the European continent – albeit covertly and indirectly, or in preparation for an all-out war – is pushed forward.
Of course, we can fairly assume that Russia is interfering in Europe, engaging in espionage and trying to influence public opinion. That should come as no surprise. But Moscow’s room for maneuver is very limited and its actions are usually quite ineffective, as studies show. The US and NATO countries have a much more extensive arsenal of coercive and intervention measures at their disposal worldwide – and also a much greater reach of power.
It should become clear: Russian actions have nothing to do with a war against Europe. We are only talking about hybrid warfare in Europe because politics, the military, the secret services and the media want us to. Following this line of thought makes no sense and ultimately promotes solutions that could actually destabilize the continent.
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