The Financial Times is rarely accused of excitable reporting, so when they are caught out inflating a story, you know something is up. This is exactly what happened in a now notorious report (“Ursula von der Leyen’s plane hit by suspected Russian GPS interference”) in September 2025, alleging that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s plane had its GPS jammed and was forced to land at Plovdiv airport in Bulgaria using “paper maps” after “circling the airport for an hour.” The story dominated European media but quickly started to unravel, although the claims made were never retracted or clarified.
A flight tracking service demonstrated that the signal was never lost and the plane was actually only 9 minutes late. Bulgarian Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov stated there was nothing to investigate. This was a significant case of claims promoted by sources close to the top of the European Commission being prominently exposed as false. It should have given rise to serious questions about the wider narratives they have pushed, but the story’s implosion has largely gone unscrutinized.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte was quick to suggest that the incident was part of a wider pattern of “hybrid warfare” that included “cyber attacks and severing subsea cables.” This is a narrative that those seeking to promote increasing militarization in Europe had repeatedly pushed in the preceding months. In a presentation to the European Parliament earlier in January 2025, Rutte had claimed that Russia was engaged in a “destabilization campaign” consisting of “cyber-attacks” and “acts of sabotage.” The idea of a ‘hybrid’ or ‘shadow’ war has a longer historical precedent and it has achieved a prominent position in the Western media since late 2024.
The main assertion made is that Russia is offensively attacking Europe, either as an alternative to, or as a prelude to, conventional hostilities. We must ask what substance there is to these claims of ‘hybrid war’ and, in particular, whether there is evidence of the Russian state engaging in a significant pattern of nonconventional aggression. In answering these questions, we need to be very careful to distinguish between reactive actions within the context of the admitted proxy war in Ukraine, and aggressive acts which might suggest that Moscow is moving to an offensive stance. If significant evidence substantiating claims of a hybrid war cannot be found, we must ask how this narrative has become so ubiquitous and what function it serves.
Sir Richard Moore, the head of MI6, speaking at the British Embassy in Paris in November 2024, alleged that Russia has launched a “staggeringly reckless campaign of sabotage” in Europe. But very little evidence has been brought forward to corroborate this view. Newspaper reports of Moore’s Paris speech highlighted the crash of a DHL plane in Lithuania days before Moore’s speech. Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s then Foreign Minister, claimed the crash was the result of a Russian attack. In March 2025, exhaustive investigations by the Lithuanians revealed that the crash was caused by pilot error, a finding that was not reported with anything like the prominence of the original allegations that the plane was brought down by Russian action. Again, notable accusations have been demonstrated to be provably false in a way that should raise questions around the wider narrative being pushed.
Assertions that a ‘sabotage campaign’ is underway repeatedly reference the March 2024 arson attack on a warehouse in East London which contained supplies for Ukraine. The estimated damages totaled £1 million. The seriousness of such an act of arson, and the potential for a threat to life, should not be underestimated. The case has been heard in court and a number of British youths have been given lengthy sentences. But are there any grounds for saying that the Russian state was behind the fire? The puerile chatter reported during the trial of those convicted reads like a Chris Morris-written screenplay for a sequel to ‘Four Lions,’ his comedy about hapless British would-be Islamist terrorists. The youthful perpetrators were immensely inept and left an extensive trail of evidence at the crime scene and on devices.
The court heard that the juveniles were recruited over the internet and the Wagner Group was specifically named. There is no evidence of any state involvement on the part of Russia. Far from being part of an ongoing ‘hybrid war’ of covert attacks, the incident looks much more like freelancing by a mercenary group that has since been firmly shut down. That there have been no other similar attacks in the UK since suggests it is incorrect to present this single incident as part of an ongoing ‘campaign.’
Minor fires at properties and a car in May 2025 linked to the British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer were given extensive coverage during the spring but, when the case came to court, prosecutors said that it was “not being treated as having a terrorist connection.” Most media coverage did not mention Russia, suggesting contexts such as Starmer’s then recent comments on immigration and ongoing protests against him by pro-Palestinian activists. Yet the ubiquity of media chatter about ‘hybrid war’ left many who do not inquire into details with the impression that Russian involvement is likely. This is typical of how attempts to establish the narrative of ‘hybrid war’ have proceeded, with unspoken insinuation being far more important than substantive demonstration.
Following arrests in the autumn of 2025, a GRU-led multi-country plot from July 2024 on the continental mainland has been publicized but, again, who precisely was behind it is far from clear. Given the chaotic and unprofessional organization, it looks far more likely to have been the responsibility of freelancing militants than the Russian state. It involved incendiary devices being placed in parcels sent by courier firms. The plot was delayed by a month, and the devices themselves were sent on an inordinately complex journey by bus around Eastern Europe, because a key figure got lost in a Lithuanian apartment complex. If these bungled farces really were GRU-organized plots, it is no longer the fearsome organization that it once was. Moore and his colleagues must be laughing up their sleeves rather than quaking in their boots.
We saw Rutte speak of ‘cyber attacks’ when attempting to substantiate his claims about ‘hybrid war.’ This particular accusation has a superficial degree of plausibility. With criminal ransomware attacks now routine, the news is regularly filled with talk of compromised computer systems. Those not paying close attention might be inclined to attribute every such event to nefarious actions by the Russian state. Yet any impression that the Russian state is engaging in significant activity in this area is undermined by a mid-2025 statement by no less than GCHQ, the United Kingdom’s intelligence and security organization for signals intelligence, which names the major actor in recent years as China.
Indeed, in a May 2025 Guardian article, a former U.S. intelligence official is reported as stating that massive cyber attacks were expected by the West after it started assisting the Ukrainian war effort but they never came. Even a July 2023 report (“Cyber Operations during the Russo-Ukrainian War: From Strange Patterns to Alternative Futures”) from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, ostensibly seeking to bolster a hybrid war narrative, declares: “Russia has not launched an all-out, costly cyberwar against Ukraine or its backers in the West. The so-called ‘thunder run’ never materialized.” It can only be concluded then that Russia has deliberately exercised restraint in the cyber domain and avoided risking escalation. This is especially notable when attacks on the computing systems of Russian airline and banking sectors have been admitted by Ukrainian groups openly linked to the state. Devastating attacks on critical systems are undoubtedly within the power of the Russian state. The news, then, is that far from engaging in debilitating cyber warfare, Moscow has refrained from crippling Western computer systems.
Beyond sabotage and cyber attacks, we also saw Rutte mention damage to undersea cables. This is an oft-repeated accusation that merits more scrutiny than it has received. As an example of how uncritically the hybrid war narrative is handled by the Western media, we might again look at reporting from the normally sober Financial Times. In a splash feature on ‘hybrid war’ from March 2025, a notable assertion is made about ships “dragging their anchors.” This is said to be “a low-risk, high-reward tactic for malign actors who can claim plausible deniability;” “at least eleven incidents of cable damage since October 2023” are noted. One might wonder though at the failure to explain why these occurrences began precisely in the autumn of that year, a full 18 months after Ukraine was invaded.
The answer is in plain sight: in September 2022, the $11 billion NordStream pipeline carrying Russian gas to Europe was blown up. Although a February 2023 BBC report shortly after the explosion attempted to suggest that Russia had carried out the attack itself, this was, prima facie, highly implausible. Investigations by the German prosecutor, made public in August 2025, point to a group of Ukrainians being the perpetrators. Much remains to be learned about the precise details of the planning and implementation of the attack. It has often been remarked that threats against NordStream had been publicly made by President Biden and, even before the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the U.S. was strongly opposed to the project.
The anchor-dragging incidents when situated in context—rather than being evidence of Russia assuming an offensive stance towards the West—are more plausibly understood as a reaction to a devastating attack on important infrastructure. We have already seen how Russia’s failure to engage in significant cyberattacks when military support was given to Ukraine surprised Western defense establishments. Again, the rather restrained response to the destruction of NordStream might be understood as Russia seeking to avoid escalation by responding in a cautious and measured way.
The narrative of ‘hybrid war’ has been vigorously promoted at the highest levels in the EU and NATO. Its success has depended both on the enthusiasm with which the media has seized upon it as well as a wider failure to scrutinize it. On November 18th, 2025, the Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk spoke of “an unprecedented act of sabotage” on the Warsaw to Lublin railway line, and coverage dominated the Western media that weekend. Yet no photos or footage of damaged rails was ever produced and services resumed almost immediately. What actually happened remains unclear.
Likewise, a similar situation played out when Heathrow airport near London shut down on March 21st, 2025, after an electricity substation caught fire. Accusations that this act was part of a hybrid warfare campaign were widely publicized. Philip Ingram, a former colonel in British military intelligence, was quoted as saying that the attacks looked like something “straight out of the Russian military intelligence playbook.” Yet the cause was rather more prosaic: it turned out that there had been a failure to maintain and update the installation by a privatized electricity company.
It is revealing how some reports of a ‘hybrid war’ are reduced to desperately scrabbling around for evidence to substantiate wide-ranging yet nebulous claims. When The Guardian is reduced to filling out such a May 2025 piece with mentions of “five coffins inscribed with the words ‘French soldiers in Ukraine’ left under the Eiffel Tower” and “in Estonia, the car windows of the interior minister and a local journalist were smashed,” doubts about the narrative can only be raised. Important elements of the Western media, rather than subjecting the narrative of hybrid or shadow war to serious questioning, appear to be active in its elaboration and promulgation. Undoubtedly commercial temptations, in what is now widely recognized as an attention economy, play an important role. ‘Hybrid war’ ticks many boxes on what the media looks for in a story. There are dramatic events, mystery, intrigue, and a caricatural bad guy whose shadowy hand is apparently everywhere. It is a story machine that could almost have been dreamed up by experienced PR consultants.
When an officially promoted narrative remains unquestioned by the bulk of the media and is, indeed, actively bolstered, we are in a fairly unusual situation. Something similar happened during the pandemic and one might suspect that the media management techniques finessed then have now been repurposed. In both cases there is an attempt to mold public perceptions and behavior primarily through fear. We do not have to examine too closely to see the media being carefully handled. German newspaper Bild conveniently obtained ‘a secret plan’ in January 2024 that detailed how the German government was preparing for potential Russian aggression following ‘cyber-attacks’ in the Baltic States. When Heathrow shut down, we saw that there were claims that ‘the Russian military intelligence playbook’ was being deployed. After scrutinizing the weak basis for claims of ‘hybrid war,’ we might begin to suspect that there is indeed a ‘playbook’ at work, but one that is being run by NATO and the EU.
As we examine the hybrid war narrative, the line between active propaganda and lazy misattribution is frequently hard to discern. Having obtained a certain currency, the narrative starts to take on a life of its own. French prosecutors have groundlessly, and highly implausibly, attempted to suggest Russian involvement in a series of May 2024 neo-Nazi attacks on memorials. In October 2025, the Lithuanian Prime Minister Inga Ruginienė claimed “smugglers transporting contraband cigarettes from Belarus into the EU” by balloon are part of the ‘hybrid war.’ Preposterously, she threatened to invoke NATO’s Article 4 in response. That the petty criminality that manifestly does not originate in Russia is framed as part of the supposed ‘hybrid war’ suggests both desperation and a shamelessness born of knowing that probing questions will not be asked.
The hybrid war narrative from the EU and NATO has also been enthusiastically promoted by organizations outside of the Western media. In August 2025, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a prominent London-based thinktank, produced a glossy illustrated report titled “The Scale of Russian Sabotage Operations Against Europe’s Critical Infrastructure.” This thin document amounted to little more than smoke and mirrors. An infographic from it that circulated on Twitter supposedly identified various hybrid attacks across Europe. Although differently colored according to ‘confidence’ (from ‘realistically possible’ to ‘almost certain’), there was little detail provided about the alleged incidents. In the absence of arguments substantiating the claim that Russia was behind any of these attacks, the report is little more than a tissue of speculation and insinuation.
When such barefaced propaganda can be presented as analysis by a respectable thinktank, we are in qualitatively new territory. The journalist Christopher Caldwell has declared in a November 2024 article that “as in Britain, America’s Ukraine policy has been carried out through a campaign of war propaganda extravagant enough to undermine the government’s reputation for truth-telling more generally.” The false claims about GPS jamming and downed cargo planes give reason to widen such observations to include prominent EU leaders and European politicians. Indeed, a close examination of the alleged ‘hybrid war’ gives support to the May 2025 claims by former Moscow correspondent for The New York Times Mary Dejevsky that we are in the midst of “a state-of-the-art information war.”
Given that claims that Russia is engaged in a ‘hybrid war’ against the West appear to be little more than propaganda, we need to ask what function they perform. Moore’s Paris speech came just a couple of weeks after Trump was elected U.S. President for the second time. Immediately on that development, the chances were certain that European members of NATO were going to receive forceful demands to increase their defense spending. At the NATO meeting in the Hague at the end of June 2025, Member States did what they were commanded to do and pledged to spend 5 percent of GDP on their militaries.
This is a huge cost at a time when governments are struggling simply to keep up with existing commitments. It will be immensely difficult to implement and, certainly, can only be achieved at the expense of significant cuts elsewhere. When the European public sees Russian forces struggling just to maintain a limited and localized conflict in Eastern Ukraine, they might be skeptical regarding whether such vast sums should be lavished on defending the continent against a country that has neither the interest in nor the capability to mount an attack. This is where the idea of a ‘hybrid war’ comes in. It allows defense spending boosters to claim that Russia is offensively striking European nations in nonconventional ways and to imply that such covert aggression might at any moment move to open hostilities.
A number of respected international relations scholars have suggested that this is indeed what is happening. A February 2025 report (“ ‘Hybrid War’ Thinking Hobbles Europe’s Response to Russian Sabotage”) for the Latvian Institute for International Affairs by Galvin Wade—a former Director for Russia, Baltic, and Caucasus Affairs at the US National Security Council—contends that the employment of the “nebulous tagline” of hybrid war is “driven as much by the need to goose flagging defense budgets and waning NATO cohesion as to analyze Moscow’s behavior.” Before Russia’s 2022 invasion, Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute spoke of the Russian threat being “assiduously stoked” by British top brass “desperate to preserve their shrinking budget.” More recently in December 2025, John Foreman—a former British military attaché in both Moscow and Kyiv—has specifically contended that Rutte is “using the specter of the Russian threat … to encourage NATO nations to meet their spending commitments.” Similarly, Mark Galeotti, a King’s College London Russia expert—and Spectator columnist who has shown considerable enthusiasm for the war in Ukraine—has maintained in a September 2025 article that “everyone needs to be scared straight, so they—like their Russian counterparts—accept the price to be paid.”
The newest chapter in the ‘hybrid war’ narrative has focused on drones. There seems to be no question that unarmed Russian aerial vehicles have overflown Poland and Russian fighters have infringed Estonian airspace (for eighteen seconds in a typical incident). Galeotti has described these events as “demonstrative but essentially trivial Russian airspace violations.” These minor incursions have occurred against the background of demands by Kyiv for long range missiles that could strike deep into the heart of Russia. These flights might most plausibly be read as a warning against further escalation on the part of Ukraine’s backers rather than in themselves constituting offensive acts.
Instead of measured assessments, in the context of the ‘hybrid war’ narrative, the autumn of 2025 saw a veritable media frenzy around drones. Numerous reports were published of sightings in various parts of Europe. Again, we must ask whether there is substance behind the hype. Massive publicity attended the September 2025 sightings in Denmark. It needs to be stressed that statements by the military to the media at the time were very carefully worded. Detailed reports suggest a ‘show off’ rather than offensive approach. Even articles actively seeking to whip up fear—such as a Matt Oliver and Mathew Field Telegraph article from October 2025—mention that “authorities have not yet provided proof that Russia was responsible.” A September 2025 reconstruction by Danish broadcaster TV2 suggested many supposed drone sightings could be attributed to regular air traffic.
These events were very conveniently timed, coming immediately in advance of an October 2025 meeting of European leaders in Copenhagen on whose agenda the financing of a ‘drone wall’ and other defense measures was prominent. It is perhaps pertinent that a ‘power struggle’ has been observed with “Germany and France wary of handing power to the Commission” on the issue. The sightings were thus providential for those wishing to rally the Member States behind the Commission’s proposals. Should Putin turn out to be responsible, he would be a very poor tactician who has played right into the hands of those who wish to militarize the EU.
Yet again the media has proved highly uncritical of the officially promoted narrative. Drone sightings are now exclusively reported in the context of a ‘hybrid war’ narrative, with Russia immediately presumed to be the perpetrator. Yet globally, the phenomenon long predates the current standoff with Russia. Gatwick airport famously closed during the Christmas of 2018 in events that even the police involved have attributed to mass hysteria. That event was a one-off only in terms of the scale of the response, but sightings have been a mundane occurrence in recent years. Restrictions implemented in the wake of the shutdown led to a standoff with British hobbyists—some of whom have engaged in aggressive protest tactics in response.
Given the availability of drones commercially, there is a high likelihood that any particular event is the result of irresponsible behavior by individuals rather than offensive action on the part of a state. Although Schiphol airport in the Netherlands was briefly closed around the same time of the scare in Denmark, Dutch military police were quick to attribute events to the recklessness of an amateur. Such realistic assessments were previously the norm. Reports of a closure due to drone activity at Frankfurt airport in 2023 noted that airports in India and South Korea had also been recently closed due to drone sightings. Hence, this is an ongoing large-scale global phenomenon and there are a wide variety of plausible origins. Prosecutors closed a case in Italy in December 2025 after supposedly sophisticated drone detection systems were found to be triggered by a Wi-Fi booster. A November 2025 report by the Dutch newspaper Trouw and the specialist site Dronewatch could find no substance to the vast majority of supposed sightings in Europe during the autumn of 2025. Significantly, despite numerous reports in Western Europe, not a single Russian drone has been physically produced in evidence.
We have seen that a ‘hybrid war’ narrative has been vigorously promoted over the course of 2025, but the idea has a longer, and rather revealing, history. With some irony, the term ‘hybrid war’ originated in 2002 in Western academic literature to describe Chechen tactics against Russia. It was taken up in Russian discourse (gibridnaya voyna) mainly to describe Western destabilization operations against Russia, particularly the color revolutions in Russia’s neighborhood from the late 1990s on, the most notable of which was the Maidan revolution of 2014.
The idea of ‘hybrid war’ that has gained such currency in the West is different. It presents Russia as engaging in extensive nonconventional warfare. Galeotti played a prominent role more than a decade ago in creating the idea that Russia had an active ‘hybrid war’ doctrine—claims he has since withdrawn. A 2019 academic paper in Defense and Security Analysis described “the Russian hybrid warfare strategy” as “a Western myth.” Long before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the idea had largely been discredited in the scholarly international relations literature. However, the bloc had by this stage institutionalized the idea by funding a European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats (Hybrid CoE) in Finland. It was in a February 2023 report on the work of this little-known organization that the BBC made the bizarre suggestion that Russia might have blown up its own gas pipeline.
It might be contended that claims of a ‘hybrid war’ are a harmless PR campaign to boost military spending in the face of U.S. retrenchment. Analysts have, however, warned of “the risk of militarizing our overall perception of and responses to Russia while inadvertently blurring lines between military and non-military domains.” Crying ‘hybrid war’ is not consequence free. Since 2022, the U.S. and the EU have been involved in a risky proxy war against the world’s most nuclear-armed power in which red lines over the supply and deployment of weapons to Ukraine have been repeatedly revised. We have already seen that there has been surprise that their arming and provisioning Ukraine in the conflict has not been responded to more forcefully.
Reckless claims abound in the media. German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius is reported in November 2025 as declaring that “last summer may have been our last in peace.” The fact that he does not assert this himself but attributes it to “historians” does not register strongly in the media coverage. Likewise, at the end of 2025, Rutte spoke of “a conflict reaching every home, every workplace, destruction, mass mobilization, millions displaced, widespread suffering and extreme losses,” declaring “we must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured.” Such rash rhetoric poses a danger in and of itself. In the context of the increasingly confrontational and impetuous conduct of the Trump administration, it is foolhardy.
In January 2026, American troops seized a Russian-flagged tanker in international waters. This is an unprecedented level of direct engagement between the U.S. and Russia. One which passes the normal threshold for being considered an ‘act of war.’ American strategists of the Cold War era would be aghast to hear of such openly hostile conduct.
Ironically, given that so many European leaders spent 2025 talking up the prospect of a Russian attack, when a pressing threat to the territory of an EU Member State did emerge, it came from a quite different direction. It was President Trump who openly spoke of annexing Greenland—a territory of fellow alliance member Denmark. However this situation develops, these events have irrevocably damaged the basis on which NATO is built. If it was not already obvious to European leaders that their interests and those of the U.S. diverge significantly, it should be now. Wider questioning of the security assumptions made by European leaders must surely follow.
Media management no doubt has always had a place in the conduct of foreign policy. What EU and NATO figures have engaged in recently goes far beyond what might be considered either acceptable or sensible. They have created a false geopolitical reality for their publics and, most foolishly, gone on to believe in it themselves. They have raged against phantoms of their own creation and consequently have become unable to successfully orientate themselves in the strategic landscape they find themselves in.
This has risked increasing tensions in what is already a parlous proxy war context. Spurious allegations that Russia is offensively engaged in nonconventional warfare as a prelude to militarily attacking the West increases the risk for open conflict. There is an urgent need for NATO and the EU to defuse tension by reconsidering how their rhetoric might be received in Moscow. This urgently needs to be undertaken as part of a wider and more candid review of the security situation faced by Europe.
