EMILY FERRIS Russia will learn and evolve, and risk remains to non

‘The Kremlin is able to allocate the finances and personnel it needs to conduct probing attacks of NATO’s defences, to identify its vulnerabilities’, writes Emily Ferris, Senior Research Fellow at RUSI

To all intents and purposes, Russia believes that it is already at war with NATO allies.

Although this has not yet escalated in a military way, it does mean that the Kremlin is able to allocate the finances and personnel it needs to conduct probing attacks of NATO’s defencesto identify its vulnerabilities and see where its red lines are.

As a result, we have seen Russia waging an almost parallel war in Europe against NATO powers, taking place far from the frontlines. Acts of sabotage that have been attributed to Russia include attacks on the Polish railway lines; attempts to disrupt undersea cables in the Baltic Sea, and an increasingly aggressive and risky campaign by the GRU to target supply chains and logistics to hobble NATO’s military and political support of Ukraine.

The Kremlin has a number of aims here – to increase the costs for NATO of its military and economic support for Ukraine; temporarily impacting on supply chains, and creating a broader sense of discord in the West.

Russia’s actions have thus far stopped short of any threshold that could prompt a military response from NATO, and Russia’s use of third-party proxies – often recruited from social media – gives the Kremlin a degree of deniability and flexibility that makes attribution difficult.

But digging into the detail, these sabotage attacks are not particularly masterfully coordinated across Europe, and their intensity or targeting does not always match the degree of military and economic support that countries give to Ukraine.

While Germany, France and Poland have all been targeted with high degrees of physical attacks because of the military assistance they give Ukraine, the UK – despite sending one of the greatest amounts of military and economic aid to Ukraine since 2022 – has experienced overall fewer physical attacks.

As Defence Secretary John Healey noted in his press conference earlier today, this does not necessarily reflect the Russian intelligence services’ degree of interest in us. Indeed, Russia expends significant intelligence and practical resources on surveilling and gathering data on the UK, including the most recent incursion of the Yantar surveillance vessel in British waters.

One of the problems Russia has is that many of its intelligence networks in Europe were disrupted in 2022, when European countries expelled around 400 diplomats that they maintained were linked to the GRU.

This has meant that while Russia is working to rebuild them, they lack on-the-ground handlers and have had to resort to using local proxies, which carries its own risks.

For that reason, the attacks are probably less coordinated and effective than they could be. But Russia will learn and evolve, and there remains a risk to non-military targets in Europe, as well as the UK.