Russian Hybrid Warfare Steps Up

By Lady Olga Maitland

This week Polish President Donald Tusk warned his Parliament that "Russia is preparing missile attacks against Ukraine's allies." Polish intelligence assessments, he said, show "very consistent and convincing plans" for Moscow to stage strikes it can then dismiss as "accidental," an attempt to paralyse NATO's resolve to invoke Article 5.

Tusk's warning follows a watershed moment in Germany. In early August, an armed drone carrying explosives was found hovering near two Ukrainian Antonov-124 heavy freighters at Leipzig airport. It was defused. Twenty minutes later, a DHL aircraft's tail collided with an unidentified object, damage too severe to have been a bird strike. Ten days on, a second explosive-laden drone came down in a field near the airport, gouging a six-foot-wide crater.

Germany protested to Moscow. Moscow protested back.

Britain was drawn in directly. The Foreign Office summoned Russian chargé d'affaires Vasily Tsiganov, telling him the UK's commitment to defending its NATO allies and supporting Ukraine is "iron-clad," and that any Russian attempt to undermine that resolve would fail. The Russian embassy replied that any escalation by Britain or other European states would draw "an adequate and calibrated response from Moscow." Angry words have continued to flow from Moscow since.

Tusk's statement lands amid a broader pattern. A Russian drone recently struck the engine of a stationary passenger train at Yahodyn, two kilometres from the Ukraine-Poland border. It struck an hour after a VIP train carrying Boris Johnson and senior European security officials had passed through. A second train, carrying former CIA director David Petraeus, was still at the station when the strike occurred.

Moscow has not forgiven Britain for being the first Western power to back Ukraine in 2022. That may explain the marked rise in hybrid attacks on the UK, predominantly Russian, though in part Iranian.

MI5 Director General Sir Ken McCallum has been blunt: "the UK is under threat from state actors intent on doing us harm." Sabotage is increasingly subcontracted to criminals. State-threat activity has risen 35% in a year. MI5 points to cyberattacks on power stations and drones flying unchallenged over airports and military bases. Sabotage and espionage are also increasingly common on British soil. MI5 now treats this as routine, present-day activity rather than a hypothetical future risk.

Can Britain defend itself? At 2.7% of GDP, UK defence spending falls well short of what NATO's Secretary General, Mark Rutte, says is needed. He has urged Britain to raise its budget to realistic levels now, rather than wait for the planned rise to 3% in 2030. Time, as he put it, is against us. "Let us not be naïve about what Putin might do against NATO."

It is scant comfort that Prime Minister Andy Burnham has told the House of Commons that "national security cannot come at the expense of social security" - not when MI5 has set the UK's threat level at severe, meaning an attack is highly likely.

We will hear more on 29 September, when Sir Laurie Bristow, former UK ambassador to Moscow, and James Nixey, former head of the Eurasia programme at Chatham House, join Defence and Security Forum to decode Putin's strategy against NATO.