Mutually Assured Hesitation: How A Deadly Shadow War Is Sowing Chaos Across Europe

In the shadows, Putin’s intelligence services have been leaving civilian casualties, sabotaged infrastructure, burnt out buildings and downed planes in their wake for over three years. A ravaged Europe lies almost completely unresponsive.

For sixty heartstopping minutes, a full-to-capacity Falcon 900LX jet circles above Bulgaria in a state of panic. The pilots and security detail are frantically scrambling over paper maps and charts, desperate to plot a safe route to the ground as the needle on their fuel gauge dwindles towards zero, their aircraft slicing through the crisp Plovdiv air whilst those inside have no way of knowing exactly where they, or anything or anyone else, is. One of the passengers at risk, and the main focus of everyone onboard and on the ground: the President of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen.

There is little doubt that this was an act of Russian GPS interference. In response, no sanctions, no condemnation, no counteraction - just a press release. 

This, readers, is not a work of dystopian fiction, but a reality to which Europe has, by choice, consigned itself. 

Since the outbreak of all-out war in Ukraine, Russia has waged a simultaneous conflict across the breadth of the European continent to support itself in the former. This murky hybrid war, often labelled the shadow war - a misnomer for all is being played out before our very eyes, has been Putin’s comprehensive attempt to starve the Ukrainian front lines, turn the tide of public opinion against antagonising Russia and push the unity of Western resolve to breaking point. It has left a wake of fatalities and destruction throughout Europe, and has posed the greatest threat to NATO’s resolve in a generation. Scarier still, with an abject lack of any prospective Western pushback, Russia’s actions have now begun to become so escalatingly audacious as to risk unintentionally causing catastrophes so severe that the West would be compelled beyond choice to respond in full force.

The hybrid war began as a simple effort to sabotage the supply lines of donated Western military aid at all possible journey points before it reached Ukrainian divisions. Soon after, in the dying days of February 2022, it became apparent to Russian generals that their initial special military operation had resoundingly failed to deliver Ukraine into Putin’s hands. 

In July 2022, an explosion ripped through an EMKO ammunition depot in Bulgaria. EMKO has long been targeted by Russian saboteurs for its purported sales to Georgia, but this is the first known instance of a direct attack on Ukrainian-bound aid on sovereign European territory. The same depot would be rocked by another catastrophic explosion, triggered by remote detonation, in June 2023. A month later, a large-scale rail sabotage plot to halt aid sent to Ukraine within Poland was foiled by police, who arrested a network of Russian sympathisers supplied with £30 radio devices designed to trigger the emergency stop function on Polish freight trains. The group had already halted 20 at the time of arrest. 

Aggression of tactics, however, quickly escalated. In March the following year, Wagner group operatives burnt down a large factory and warehouse supplying Ukraine with internet satellite equipment and humanitarian aid in East London. Within the next two months, an explosion would rip through BAE system’s largest arms factory in South Wales, who’ve been contracted by the British government to provide Ukraine with artillery systems and other weapons, and a fire would be deliberately set at the Diehl Group’s factory complex in Berlin, which produced metals used in the production of arms and ammunition supplied to Ukraine. In June, multiple trucks bound for Ukraine produced by Germany’s largest arms manufacturer Rheinmetall were torched before leaving the country. Then in July, German prosecutors arrested two German-Russian nationals for plotting to attack US bases with explosives and assassinate Armin Papperger, Rheinmetall’s head. A Polish man was also arrested in April 2024 for a plot to assassinate President Zelensky at Rzeszów Airport whilst on a visit to Poland. Finally, Spanish authorities report that an explosion targeting a warehouse containing communications equipment on its way to Ukraine was targeted with a Russia-linked explosives attack, although they have opted not to release the details of when and where into the public domain.

But Putin’s saboteurs have not just had Ukraine-linked targets in their sights as Russia has ramped up its campaign of terror against domestic European audiences.

In September 2022, underwater explosions would permanently disable the Nordstream 2 pipeline. In October 2023, a Chinese-flagged vessel would rupture the Balticconnector pipeline so severely as to shut it down for months, as well as a vital data cable by running its anchor along the seafloor as it sailed. A year later and an anchor also severed the Estlink 2 supercable and two more fibre optic cables over the course of a month in the same area of the Baltic Sea.

In October 2022, an attack on Deutsche Bahn’s communications system ground the whole of their North German network to a standstill for three hours. Two years later, saboteurs would cut cables disabling the entire French TGV network on the opening day of the Paris Olympics.

In Estonia, multiple pro-Ukraine political figures were violently targeted throughout 2024, including an attack on the car of Estonia’s Interior Minister and the attempted assassination of Leonid Volkov, former aide to Alexei Navalny. The year before, GRU operatives attempted to assassinate Christo Grozev, the director of the open-source journalism group Bellingcat, within Austrian territory. In February 2024, operatives succeeded in assassinating defected Russian helicopter pilot Maxim Kuzminov at his newly established Spanish home.

On the 8th May 2024, a catastrophic fire ripped through the Ikea in Lithuania’s capital of Vilnius. Just three days later, Marywilska 44, the largest shopping centre in Poland’s capital, was completely destroyed by flames. In May this year, Lithuanian prosecutors revealed that both of these attacks had been carried out by the same members of Russia’s security services.

Countless other high-profile civilian targets have fallen victim to hoax threats of similar violence. In the UK, hoax bomb threats have been made against London’s Gatwick Airport and Euston Station. Across Europe, many other similar locations have faced a deluge of threats in the last few years - the common denominator is how innumerable such threats have become pretty much overnight since Russia launched its invasion. Some of these bomb threats have progressed beyond hoax. In July 2024, five highly sophisticated improvised explosive devices disguised within consignments of personal massagers were inserted by Russian operatives into DHL and DPD’s European airmail distribution networks. The bombs travelled on cargo aircraft having live, primed fuses before detonating at a transport depot in Warsaw, at a distribution centre in Birmingham and in a container just moments from being loaded onto a DHL aircraft in Leipzig. It was widely speculated by some that these bombings were a test run for targeting transatlantic flights. The fatal crash of a DHL Boeing 737 just months later, in November 2024 was feared by many intelligence agencies to have been a result of a similar act of sabotage.

What is certain, however, is that European airspace has been under near-constant siege since the war began. GPS jamming both along border zones and more deeply inside of national airspace has forced countless pilots to fly blind in Estonia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland and Bulgaria - and not without major incident. In recent weeks, Europe’s skies have filled with Russian Drones, from a barrage of Shahed-style attack drones overflying (most likely intentionally) deep into Polish airspace, being shot down by NATO air defences before striking their unknown targets, to sophisticated drone swarm operations targeting key German and Belgian civilian and military infrastructure - launched from ships within Russia’s shadow fleet.

Finally, there’s the many infrastructure failures that some on the intelligence fringes are willing to claim could have Russian links.

In March of this year, a fire at North Hyde electricity substation meant that Heathrow airport lost its entire electricity supply for over 16 hours, leading to over 1000 cancelled flights throughout the UK and affecting over 200,000 passengers. Given how widely the substation was known by airport and government officials as a strategic vulnerability for Heathrow’s operations, it’s not that far-fetched to assume that Russian officials could have known too. Just over a month later, Spain, Portugal and Southern France suffered one of the most severe electricity blackouts in living memory, grinding transport networks, businesses and public services to a halt for over 10 hours and causing untold disruption following a chain reaction of overvoltages, with governments, private utility providers and power generation firms, and Spain’s’ national grid all struggling to agree on a cause. In the absence of answers sufficient to satisfy media scrutiny, beliefs that Russia played some part in the outage have become widespread. It doesn’t really matter if Russia was actually behind these, because the very idea that we could be discussing whether these, or any other disaster, could have somehow been caused by Russia clearly shows the horrifying efficacy of Putin’s campaign to sow terror and fear throughout the continent.

To be clear, Putin is not angling to wage an open conflict with Europe or NATO, nor is engaging in any meaningful activities associated with softening enemy targets to shape the battlefield in advance of a conflict - Russian forces cannot even sustain a war effort the full length of its border with Ukraine. But Putin’s campaign of terror across the continent is still a major provocation and inaction threatens escalation into a wider conflict. 

This is where we return to Ursula Von Der Leyen over Bulgaria. As readers will no doubt by now have observed, Russia’s actions across Europe are only increasing in severity in both scale and potential impacts. 

If the President of the European Commission’s jet had been taken out of the sky at the hands of a targeted Russian-backed operation, it would have equated an act of war against the west so egregious as to have either required a resounding NATO response of force less the underlying principles sustaining the whole global security system collapse. Both would have the same catastrophic global consequences. Yet whilst Europe sits idly by, a power-crazed Putin will continue to see just how much further the rest of the world is willing to let his saboteurs push the limits of the carnage they can inflict upon them. Even Putin would surely never intentionally try to push Europe anywhere near as close to war as such a crash would be, but as his attacks and provocations become more audacious, these are the inherent risk factors that are increasingly brought into play.

Europe must begin to meaningfully respond to the hybrid war - every minute we don’t is a minute Putin pushes us further and further towards the threshold at which it could spiral into an instant, inescapable all-out conflict.

Image: Flickr/The White House (Daniel Torok)

Licence: public domain (US Governmental Work)

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