Russia has increased its use of grey-zone tactics against European countries in recent months, from sabotage and jamming GPS signals of planes and ships, to running largescale propaganda and disinformation campaigns. Tamsin Hunt investigates Russia’s motives behind its asymmetric tactics, and the challenges facing European governments in combatting such attacks.
Railways, flights, buses, and undersea cables. These are just some of the networks that Russia has targeted in one way or another in recent months as part of its largescale ‘grey-zone’ campaign against Western Europe. In essence, the 'grey-zone' refers to competitive actions between states that fall between peace and outright war. For Russia, the primary objective of this campaign is to sow disunity amongst Western allies, test the West’s response and appetite for retaliation, and ultimately, disrupt the West’s support for Ukraine.
To that end, Russia has various weapons in its arsenal. The attacks against military infrastructure are often easy to recognise, such as recent arson and bombing attacks in the UK, Germany and France, and the motives are easy to identify as undermining Western – and by extension, pro-Ukrainian – military capabilities. Russia, however, has not set its sights on military targets alone, waging a parallel and far more clandestine campaign against the populations of Western Europe. Here, Russia’s tactics range from physical attacks – such as arson, sabotage, and physical assault – to non-violent attacks simply designed to cause annoyance and chaos. GPS signal jamming, for example, is so commonly used that it is now considered normal for pilots to lose some satellite connections over the Baltic and Black Seas; and one airline, Finnair, was forced to suspend flights to Tartu in Estonia for a month after signal jamming repeatedly prevented its planes from landing safely at their destination. Disinformation and propaganda campaigns, too, are designed to sow discord among European populations. Russian propaganda and its actions that make daily life uncomfortable – like cutting off gas supply, contributing to an energy crisis in 2022 – are designed to make people doubt the wisdom of their country’s involvement in Ukraine, and in some cases like Moldova, disrupt its path towards EU membership.
Figure 1: Some of the high-profile attacks across Europe that have been attributed to Russian agents in recent months.
Europe’s response
European governments and intelligence agencies have several tools to combat covert Russian threats. In April, the UK passed the National Security Act, which tightens the country’s legislation around espionage and state-sponsored offences, and across the wider region, European countries have deployed existing policing and intelligence capabilities to foil plots of sabotage and uncover Russian spies. Furthermore, European leaders have proposed expanding sanctions, surveillance, and travel restrictions on Russian diplomats in their respective jurisdictions, increasing national cyber security measures, and launching social media awareness and literacy campaigns to guard against disinformation. But these are largely defensive and retroactive measures, designed to tighten protection, rather than acting to deter the attack itself. In that respect, Europe faces several key challenges.
Challenges in combatting asymmetric tactics
Aside from the logistical difficulties of physically securing sprawling infrastructure across a continent, the targets of Russian attacks are unpredictable, with no discernible target profile, and the methods of attack appear random and are often of low impact. The fires at a multinational retail store in Lithuania, a pharmaceutical firm in Copenhagen, and a scrap metal facility in Hamburg, for example, had little to do with their respective country’s military capabilities, but raised speculation of Russian sabotage nonetheless. In addition, Russia is increasingly recruiting local proxies, freelancers and criminal actors to work on its behalf across Europe, providing Russia with plausible deniability against accusations of its involvement. Even in instances where a fire or derailment or jammed signal can conclusively be classified as sabotage, it is typically very difficult to tie those directly back to Russian authorities.
Democratic governments are further constrained by a higher burden of proof than authoritarian regimes such as Russia. European governments are capable of capturing and prosecuting individual Russian nationals and local proxies, but must stop short of blaming the Russian government of complicity in specific attacks without explicit evidence. Further to the physical security challenges in-country, European governments also face limitations in their ability to ‘return fire,’ as it were. Democratic administrations are held to stricter rules of engagement than authoritarian regimes, limiting those countries’ intelligence and security services in their ability to respond in kind. The hands of NATO are largely tied too: Russian attacks do not meet NATO’s criteria for an Article 5 collective response, an agreement designed to respond to conventional warfare, rather than covert tactics. Latvia’s President Edgars Rinkēvičs put it succinctly when he said: “We are not going to fire missiles at Russia because of a rather small-scale incident.”
Bearing the brunt
While Russian sabotage will have little to no impact on Europe’s military strength, the nuisance effect on civilian life is pronounced. European citizens have to contend with the day-to-day frustration when their local store is closed for repairs, or their flights and trains delayed or cancelled. Not to mention the lingering economic fallout of the 2022 energy crisis, which saw household costs soar across Europe. Through low-impact attacks designed to frustrate and annoy, alongside largescale propaganda campaigns, Russia will continue to test the resolve and resilience of Western populations and governments. Meanwhile, in the absence of an effective retaliation from the West, Russia and its operatives will grow ever more emboldened, testing the waters, with a view to scale up asymmetric tactics in the event of an escalation with NATO.
