TLast week’s unprecedented firing of British-made long-range Storm Shadow missiles by the Ukrainian military at military targets inside Russia made the UK, along with the US, a legitimate target for punitive and possibly violent retaliation from the Russian government. It means being considered.
In a major escalation over the missile launches, President Vladimir Putin acknowledged for the first time during the war that Russia had launched an intermediate-range ballistic missile targeting the Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk. Putin also said that he believes Russia has the “right” to attack “military facilities” in countries that currently supply Kiev with long-range weapons. Although he did not specify the details, he clearly meant an attack on Britain and the United States.
But the truth is that Britain and its allies have been under constant Russian attack since the war began. Using sabotage, arson, deniable cyberattacks, and covert “hybrid” and “cognitive” warfare in both aggressive and passive forms, Putin imposed high costs on Western aid to Ukraine. I’m trying to do that.
This largely silent struggle has not yet led to a conventional military conflict between NATO and its former adversary, the Soviet Union. But the Ukraine Missile Crisis, fought on land, in the air, and in the alleyways and byways of the digital world’s dark web, reminiscent of Cuba in 1962, is taking an ominous turn. .
Western politicians and military planners have long feared that Russia’s illegal and full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 could spark a broader war. The US, UK and EU armed and financed Kiev and imposed unprecedented punitive sanctions against Moscow.
However, US President Joe Biden remained cautious. His main objective was to contain the conflict. As a result, a convenient fiction was developed that the West was not fighting Russia, but rather supporting the defense of Ukraine, a sovereign state. That fantasy was never shared in Moscow.
Biden can’t do anything now to stop the war. He had a chance in 2021-2022, but he missed it.
From the beginning, President Putin portrayed the war as a fight against hostile expansionist NATO. Russia was already keen on overthrow. But as the conflict unfolded, it started a conflict and now appears to be accelerating a wide range of covert operations targeting Western countries.
Biden’s decision on long-range missiles and the Kremlin’s vow of a ferocious counterattack have drawn national attention to this covert operation. Russian retaliation could reach new heights. But in reality, Putin’s shadow war was already underway.
Last week’s cutting of Baltic fiber-optic cables linking Finland and Germany and Sweden and Lithuania, both NATO members, was widely seen as the latest manifestation of Russia’s hybrid warfare and a sign of more to come. has been done.
Some suggest the damage was accidental. German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius fumed: “No one believes that.”
Such skepticism is based on hard experience. Finland said last year that damage to an undersea natural gas pipeline to Estonia may have been caused by sabotage. Investigations in the Nordic countries also found evidence that Russia was running a spy network in the Baltic and North Seas using fishing vessels equipped with underwater surveillance equipment. The aim was to map pipelines, communication cables and wind farms that could be vulnerable targets for future Russian attacks.
Earlier this month, the Russian ship Yantar, described as an “oceanographic research vessel”, had to be militarily escorted out of the Irish Sea. There, and previously accompanying the Russian Navy off the North Sea coast and in the English Channel, the unexplained presence is an unprotected undersea interconnector cable carrying global internet traffic between Ireland, the UK and Europe. It is believed that this is related to the proximity of and North America.
Russia’s alleged hybrid acts of warfare on land in Europe and the UK are doubling in scope and severity. These range from large-scale cyberattacks, such as in Estonia, to hiding incendiary devices in parcels on planes in Germany, Poland, and the United Kingdom.
Western spy agencies have blamed Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, which was responsible for the 2018 Salisbury poisoning. Naturally, all this is denied by the Kremlin.
That becomes even more alarming. In the summer, US and German intelligence reportedly thwarted a plot to assassinate the head of Europe’s defense industry in an attempt to disrupt arms supplies to Kiev.
Putin’s operatives have been accused of crimes ranging from assassinations of regime critics in Europe, such as the killing of a Chechen dissident in Berlin in 2019, to this year’s arson at a warehouse in east London. are. Threats against journalists and civil rights groups, frequent harassment and beatings of exiled opponents.
Last month, MI5 chief Ken McCullum said the GRU had an “ongoing mission to cause mayhem on the streets of Britain and Europe”.
As the UK’s NHS discovered in 2017 and the US discovered during its two presidential elections in 2016 and 2020, countries’ infrastructure, elections, institutions and transport systems are all vulnerable to hostile online criminals and information warfare. , making it a potential target for fake news.
Some operations are random. Some are carried out by criminal organizations for profit. However, many of them appear to be Russian state organizations. Such provocations are aimed at causing chaos, spreading fear and division, exacerbating social tensions among Ukraine’s allies, and disrupting military supplies.
For example, in January, a group called the Russian Reborn Cyber Army caused significant damage to a water facility in Texas. Biden administration officials warned at the time that disabling cyber attacks posed a threat to water supplies across the United States. “These attacks have the potential to disrupt the critical lifeline of clean, safe drinking water,” the governors were told.
Warnings about Russia’s escalating activities have been coming loud and fast in recent months. Earlier this year, Kaja Kalas, the former Estonian prime minister and newly appointed head of EU foreign policy, spoke out about what she called the “shadow war” that President Vladimir Putin has waged against Europe. “How far should we leave them alone on our land?” asked the crow.
In May, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk accused the Russian government of repeated sabotage. In October, MI5 chief Ken McCullum said the GRU was engaged in an “ongoing mission to cause mayhem on the streets of Britain and Europe”.
Mark Rutte, NATO’s new secretary-general and former Dutch prime minister, also spoke out this month. He said Russia is “intensifying hybrid attacks across allied countries, directly interfering with democracies, sabotaging industry, and perpetrating violence… Ukraine is no longer the only frontline in this war.”
Despite these warnings, it remains unclear how Europe is prepared to realize that it is currently under sustained attack from Russia and is now involved in a virtually endless asymmetric war. It is. And second, how is it prepared to respond now that Donald Trump’s re-election has put US support for NATO and Ukraine in question?
When foreign ministers from Poland, Germany and France (the so-called Weimar Triangle), plus Britain, Italy and Spain, met in Warsaw last week, they sought answers. “Moscow’s escalation of its hybrid activities against NATO and EU countries is unprecedented in its type and scale and creates significant security risks,” they declared.
But the solutions they proposed – a stronger commitment to common European security, increased defense spending, expanded joint capabilities, intelligence accumulation, a strengthened NATO, a “just and lasting peace” in Ukraine; And strengthening the transatlantic alliance was more of a wish list than a convincing plan. action. Putin is unlikely to be dissuaded.
In fact, far from it. Last week’s escalation in missile-related verbal hostilities underscored the Russian leader’s categorical refusal to rule out any kind of retaliation, no matter how extreme.
His mafia-like threats included a threat to resort to nuclear weapons again.
President Putin’s public relaxation of Russia’s nuclear doctrine, which now virtually allows Russia to launch nuclear attacks on non-nuclear states such as Ukraine, is intended to intimidate Western countries. It was a well-worn propaganda ploy. Putin is a bad guy, but he’s not completely crazy. Mutually assured destruction remains a strong argument against such recklessness.
Putin has other dirty tricks in his arsenal, such as holding innocent foreigners as hostages. This type of intimidation worked recently when various Russian spies and thugs were released from Western prisons in exchange for the release of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and others.
President Putin also has another nuclear card up his sleeve. Greenpeace warned last week that Ukraine’s electricity grid was at “increasing risk of catastrophic failure”. The group said Russian airstrikes targeting substations are putting the safety of the country’s three operating nuclear power plants at risk. If the reactor loses power, it can quickly become unstable.
And analysts say Russia could increase support for anti-Western non-state actors, such as Yemen’s Houthis, in retaliation for Biden’s missile green light. In a sense, this is just an extension of Putin’s current policy of forging friendly relations with “outlaw” states such as Iran and North Korea, which are actively supporting Putin’s war effort in Ukraine.
All this together raises big questions that Britain and its allies have so far not answered. Probably because this issue has never been raised before. What should you do when a major world power, a nuclear-armed state, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, a country sworn to uphold the UN Charter, international human rights treaties, and the laws of war, goes out of control?
President Putin’s violent, confrontational, lawless and dangerous actions are unprecedented in modern times, not only against Ukraine but also against the West and the international order in general. How ironic, then, how punitive to think that just another rogue, Trump, could bring him to his knees.
Biden can’t do anything now to stop the war. He had an opportunity in 2021-2022 and he took it. His missiles, mines, and extra cash were probably too late. And in two months he will be gone.
Meanwhile, President Trump’s distorted peace vision of surrendering a quarter of Ukraine’s territory and excluding it from NATO and the European Union threatens how to curb Russia’s overt and covert aggression, or how to win the war. This may seem increasingly appealing to European leaders, who have few ideas about what to do. It’s a war we can’t win on our own.
President Putin has calculated that in the future, Europe, abandoned by the United States, is more afraid of an all-out war with Russia, which is no longer a hybrid, and which is all too real, than of the consequences of betraying Ukraine.
He is a cynical brute who will continue to secretly push, probe, provoke, and punish until someone or something breaks or Trump bails him out.
