The Responsible Statecraft: Evidence of a Russian 'hybrid war' in Europe is vanishingly thin

These days, barely a week goes by in Europe without a drone sighting, a fire or a power outage being blamed on Russia. We’re told that these incidents are all part of a relentless, and escalating, “hybrid war” that Moscow is waging against the continent.

Tensions escalated dramatically last month after Germany formally attributed to Moscow a “failed” drone attack on Leipzig/Halle airport. But does the evidence support Western claims that Russia is engaged in a systematic hybrid war against Europe, The Responsible Statecraft puts a question.

Various datasets and reports are regularly cited as evidence, including from Leiden University, the Soufan Center, the Associated Press and defense-related think tanks like the IISS, CSIS and GLOBSEC. Taken individually, each paints a bleak picture. Read side by side, however, they tell a very different story. For starters, the numbers don’t add up: depending on the report, Russia has launched between 52 and 255 hybrid attacks in Europe since February 2022, a fivefold discrepancy for what is supposed to be the same campaign.

The reason is that there is no agreed-upon definition of what a hybrid attack even is. The IISS itself admits that the term is “amorphous.” Some reports only count acts of physical sabotage; others include pro-Kremlin stickers, graffiti, peace demonstrations and even the Russian Navy passing through the English Channel. In other words, it is a concept that can be used to include almost anything. Moreover, in most cases, the evidence linking Russia is very weak or, in fact, non-existent. Evidence of Russian responsibility usually consists of news articles reporting that Western officials suspect so. If a government claims “Russia did it,” the case ends up on the list.

The same goes for the drone panic that swept Europe in the fall of 2025, when near-daily sightings caused the closure of several airports across the continent. Leaders openly blamed Moscow, yet virtually all the “Russian drone” sightings turned out to be unfounded: a Dutch investigation of some 60 incidents found “much panic and hardly any evidence of Russian involvement,” with many sightings turning out to be hobby drones, planes, helicopters, satellites or even stars.

But even assuming that Russia is indeed behind all these cases, the picture that emerges is one of few sporadic incidents with limited damage — hardly the “war” that European leaders routinely invoke.

So is this just a case of collective panic fuelled by click-addicted media? Or, given that the claims of a Russian “hybrid war” against Europe appear to rest on little more than propaganda, is there a concerted effort by the European Union-NATO establishment to condition citizens to believe that Europe is under attack from Russia?

The narrative clearly serves a variety of interests. For starters, it helps governments maintain support for an increasingly unpopular war in Ukraine and for a continental rearmament campaign that will require painful cuts to spending on other sectors. As a report by the Latvian Institute of International Affairs put it, the “nebulous tagline” of hybrid warfare would appear to be driven “by the need to goose flagging defense budgets and waning NATO cohesion.” It has worked: the drone panic has led to increased counter-drone spending at both the EU and NATO levels. Meanwhile, intelligence services have invoked the threat of sabotage to gain broader powers.

The specter of “Russian interference” also offers a broader authoritarian dividend, justifying everything from online censorship to the repression of dissent to election management — most egregiously in Romania, where an entire election was annulled because of an alleged Russian disinformation campaign for which no evidence of Russian involvement was ever provided. More recently, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham, amid a push for greater EU ties, said it was “clear” that Russia interfered in the Brexit referendum, without providing any evidence, even though several investigations have found little or no evidence to support this claim.

One may conclude that, to the extent that a “hybrid war” is being waged against Europe, it is being waged by the EU-NATO establishment itself against its own population, in the form of a prolonged campaign of psychological warfare aimed at inflating the Russian threat.

What is most concerning is the risk that this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. NATO countries continue to enable — through intelligence, satellite and targeting support — Ukrainian deep strikes on Russia, including on civilian infrastructure, and each attack makes Russian retaliation against NATO territory more likely. If and when such an attack comes, it would be framed as an unprovoked escalation of Russia’s ongoing “hybrid war,” leaving little room for European restraint.

This is a classic security dilemma. In such a climate, it would take very little for a “hybrid war” that so far largely exists only on paper to rapidly evolve into a hot war between nuclear-armed powers.

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