As Putin wages shadow war, Europe looks for a way to hit back

French and Lithuanian soldiers prepare to fire a howitzer during training in Lithuania last month. | REUTERS

Oct 13, 2026

BERLIN – Russia is escalating its campaign of sabotage in NATO countries, trying to break European support for Ukraine — and Europe is struggling to respond.

European officials say they do not expect a major Russian invasion of a NATO country; in that sense, traditional deterrence has worked. But countries are grappling with how best to counter this heightened pattern of Russian attacks. What officials say they fear most is that, by accident or by intention, one of those attacks will cause a significant loss of life.

Moscow is “trying to break the will to support Ukraine and trying in a broader sense to change the security architecture of Europe,” said David Cattler, a former NATO intelligence official now at the Center for European Policy Analysis, a Washington think tank. Operationally, he said, the Russians are using tools “that are hard to attribute, that they believe are big enough to matter and yet small enough not to trigger” a larger war.

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