While the West has supported Ukraine in its defense against Russian aggression, the United States and our European allies have taken care so far to avoid direct confrontation with Russia. Russia has not been so cautious.
A few weeks ago, the U.S. Helsinki Commission, an independent government agency led by members of Congress, held a hearing on Russia’s shadow war on NATO that cataloged many of these incidents. The threat is known, yet many U.S. political actors and the public at large seem unconcerned or unaware yet of its size and scale. Political leaders in Europe are also split on how to counter it, with some leaders pushing for a more aggressive response, while others urge caution.
The pace has ramped up, but Vladimir Putin’s Russia has been engaged in this type of warfare against the West for two decades.
In 2007, after Estonia removed a Soviet war monument from downtown Tallinn, Russia conducted a massive cyberattack, paralyzing the country’s internet infrastructure for three weeks. In 2011, Russian intelligence reportedly blew up an ammunition storage facility in Bulgaria, causing the evacuation of an entire town. The Czech Republic has accused Russia of several cyberattacks and the 2014 explosion of two munitions depots in Vrbetice, which killed two and caused $42.5 million in damage. In 2015, Russian agents tried to kill the owner of a Bulgarian arms factory with poison, a tactic Putin has also used to target many Russian dissidents at home and abroad.
One reason Russia has been so successful is the variety of tactics and targets across a range of countries and time. This has made it harder for the West to get a collective sense of the magnitude.
That is changing. Heavy sanctions and closer scrutiny of Russia since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 have hampered Russia’s traditional approach of relying mostly on its own spies secretly living in foreign countries. It has become much harder for Russian agents to move undetected across the continent. This, however, has only led Russia to take more creative approaches, and the internet has offered an open door.
