Kremlin’s sabotage operations in Europe, 2018-2025


“Russia perceives itself to be in a continuous, existential and intractable struggle with the West. Russia blurs the lines between war and peace to achieve its political goals without triggering a conventional conflict…

Russian doctrine intentionally blurs the lines between war and peace, making it challenging for European [Western. – AI] governments to detect and respond to such aggression. The response by NATO and EU has been to define Russia’s unconventional war as operations in the grey zone, below the threshold of conventional war.

European [Western. – AI] governments have largely decided they are not ‘at war’, that Russia’s activities remain in the grey zone and will unlikely meet the Article 5 threshold, without a substantial shift. Europe [West. – AI] has been reluctant to impose sufficient costs, often fearing escalation.

European [Western. – AI] strategic culture further constrains effective deterrence. Western democratic legal systems and values impose limitations that authoritarian adversaries exploit externally and can ignore at home. Attribution remains challenging. While Western intelligence assessments frequently conclude with high confidence that Russia is responsible for sabotage, political and legal hesitancy often delays public attribution, undermining deterrence by signaling to the Kremlin that they will pay minimal reputational costs.



…by misreading Russia’s strategic calculus in the grey zone, Western states underestimate the necessity of deterrence through force, thereby weakening it…

Allowing the Kremlin to normalize sabotage as a tool of statecraft risks long-term strategic erosion and miscalculation that could drag Europe into deeper conflict.”

The Scale of Russian Sabotage Operations Against Europe’s Critical Infrastructure
The IISS report, Charlie Edwards and Nate Seidenstein, August 19, 2025
https://www.iiss.org/research-paper/2025/08/the-scale-of-russian--sabotage-operations--against-europes-critical--infrastructure/