December 9, 2025

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Europe Builds Deterrence as The Kremlin Escalates Hybrid Warfare

(AP Photo/Thomas Krych)

Yesterday, Britain’s Ministry of Defence unveiled its new plan to counter Russian submarines in UK waters. The initiative, dubbed “Atlantic Bastion,” comes after months of escalating Russian underwater activity around the UK. This includes repeated encounters with the spy ship “Yantar,” which is widely believed to be responsible for the tampering of critical undersea infrastructure like energy pipelines and internet cables across the Atlantic Ocean. Under Atlantic Bastion, the Royal Navy will pair its new Type 26 anti-submarine frigates and P-8 Poseidon patrol aircraft with a network of autonomous underwater gliders and sensors knowns as “Atlantic Net,” creating something akin to a mobile underwater listening grid in key chokepoints such as the Greenland-Iceland-UK (GIUK) gap to spot, track, and deter Russian submarines before they can get close to cables and pipelines.

Just days before the announcement of Atlantic Bastion, London and Oslo had announced a joint naval alliance that will integrate anti-submarine warfare capabilities and also deploy a combined fleet of Type-26 frigates to monitor the GIUK gap, a critical chokepoint in the fight for control over the Arctic, where Russia currently maintains a strategic advantage. Norwegian officials said Russian submarine activity near their waters has increased by roughly 30 percent in two years. This agreement folds into the UK’s earlier £10 billion frigate deal with Norway and underscores a rapid shift underway in northern Europe: the states most exposed to Russian hybrid attacks are no longer content with symbolic deterrence. They are preparing for sustained high-intensity vigilance and kinetic deterrence. Further south, kinetic responses to Russian hybrid threats are also increasingly supported. In Italy, defense minister Guido Crosetto has argued for the establishment of a 5000-strong civilian and military unit to combat hybrid threats in the country.

This change is also echoed in Brussels, both at EU and NATO headquarters. Member States are working on improving their deterrence posture and resilience against escalating Russian hybrid threats without publicly responding to every, increasingly brazen, provocation, even as Russia’s operational tempo accelerates. This delicate balance between stepping up against the multidomain offensive waged by Russia and its proxies and simultaneously refusing to cede ground to the Kremlin in setting the pace of escalation by responding to every incident has proven difficult. In the past week, Belarusian balloons have violated Lithuania’s airspace, temporarily shuttering Vilnius Airport, unattributed drones flew over France’s fleet of ballistic missile submarines, and a Russian disinformation scheme has been exposed in Norway.

Russia's hybrid warfare has evolved into tactics more reminiscent of terrorist groups, including some it is accused of supporting. In Poland, investigators say two Ukrainians working for Russian intelligence carried out a railway bombing on the Warsaw-Lublin line earlier this month, part of what Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk called an “unprecedented act of sabotage.” Days later, Poland ordered the closure of Russia’s last remaining consulate in Gdansk, calling the railway attack “an act of state terror.” Moscow retaliated by shuttering Poland’s consulate in Irkutsk. Further west, unidentified drones repeatedly appeared over major European airports in early autumn, shutting down operations in Warsaw, Copenhagen, Aalborg, Munich, and elsewhere.

Europe’s security services have quietly warned for years that Russia was engaged in a continent-wide shadow war, but historically, Western European governments rarely publicized these activities. Many European officials feared political blowback, accusations of alarmism, or the perception of being weak or vulnerable due to the lack of a comprehensive strategy to deal with hybrid threats. Throughout the 2010s, despite covert sabotage and assassination attempts in Germany, disinformation campaigns in the UK, financing for far-right parties in France and Italy, clandestine operations in the Baltic states and Russian-linked arson plots in Spain, Western European leaders often downplayed Russian hybrid tactics that Eastern Europeans insisted were warnings of an escalating conflict with Russia that could creep out of the shadows at any moment.

Now that reticence is evaporating, talks of “pre-emptive strikes” against Russia have been floated by senior NATO officials, while NATO’s top military officer, Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, recently told the Financial Times that the alliance is studying whether it must become “more aggressive” in its response to Russian tactics. Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte, has stated that he is “not going to react to everything Putin is saying,” underscoring the tension between strengthening Europe’s deterrence posture and avoiding the trap of giving Russian President Vladimir Putin the attention he craves. The Kremlin, for its part, is almost certainly trying to destabilize Europe directly through more kinetic hybrid tactics, such as interfering with critical infrastructure, while also seeking to create social unrest and provoke a response from Europe or NATO — one it can easily rebrand through its propaganda apparatus as Western warmongering, for both domestic and international audiences.

Russian hybrid threats over the past months in Europe, targeting its military, information, economic, political, and infrastructure domains, come at a time of the most far-reaching reconfiguration in North Transatlantic relations since the end of the Second World War. Last week, the newly released U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) outrightly called for Europe to commit to strategic stability with Russia. At the same time, officials from the Trump administration have also communicated to European diplomats that they will be in charge of the majority of NATO’s defense capabilities by 2027. The NSS also clearly expresses criticism about the EU’s supranational structure, declaring that Europe is facing a “stark prospect of civilization erasure” at the hands of “transnational bodies that undermine political liberty.” It encourages European nationalism and praises the rise of “patriotic” parties across the continent — groups that are often far-right in nature, and that Russia itself frequently courts, finances, or influences.

The bureaucratic nature of the European Union, and other transnational organizations, can complicate efforts to build a unified defense architecture — due to the different security priorities of member states and the disparity in economic and social realities. Nevertheless, European cohesion is integral in not only continuing the continent's rearmament, but also in countering Russian tactics that seek to divide Europe and undermine democratic processes and social stability.