The West can’t ignore Russian advances

While Russian troops advance across Ukrainian fields, Moscow is assaulting Europe from within, waging a parallel war across the continent’s infrastructure, politics, and public discourse.

This is not a conflict contained to the Donbas or Southern Ukraine. It is a two-front campaign designed to stretch western unity to the breaking point. Russia is not waiting for a future conflict with the West. It is already waging one. Moscow has unleashed a blended campaign of hybrid and conventional warfare designed to weaken, divide and reshape Europe’s security order.

What Russia is doing in Ukraine cannot be separated from what Russia is doing in Europe. They are two fronts in a single strategy: a grinding military assault abroad paired with a sustained hybrid campaign across NATO states to undercut cohesion and delay support. This is not improvisation — it is Russian doctrine.

Across Europe, the pattern is becoming impossible to ignore. Germany has endured repeated railway sabotage, including simultaneous cable cutting, arson at switching stations and targeted disruptions on routes potentially vital to NATO military mobility. France faced co-ordinated rail arson during the Paris Olympics — timed to embarrass and destabilize the host nation during a global event. Finland, Poland and the Baltic states have faced a weaponized migration campaign designed to overload border systems and force political divisions along with rail line sabotage.

Undersea infrastructure — cables, pipelines and communication lines — has been probed, tampered with or mapped for future action. Russian-origin drones and unidentified unmanned arial vehicles (UAVs) have increasingly violated European airspace — from the North Sea to the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea — probing radar coverage, testing air-defence reactions and mapping critical infrastructure in a pattern that mirrors pre-invasion reconnaissance in Ukraine.

These actions, some unattributed, sit squarely in Russia’s “grey zone” toolkit. They allow maximum disruption for minimum attribution, keeping NATO below Article 5 thresholds while still inflicting political and economic cost. It is a strategy calibrated for ambiguity. Moscow’s fingerprints are visible, but never cleanly enough to guarantee consensus on retaliation. This hybrid battlefield is not limited to physical infrastructure.

Russia’s influence operations flood Europe’s political space with disinformation, amplifying both far-right and far-left narratives, attacking Ukrainian refugees, undermining NATO or promoting isolationist voices in the U.S. Across Europe, Russian intelligence services have escalated election interference efforts — funding fringe parties, amplifying divisive narratives online and deploying co-ordinated disinformation campaigns designed to weaken pro-NATO governments and fracture western political cohesion.

Meanwhile, cyberattacks on energy grids and government agencies create the constant hum of low-level instability that weakens democracies from within.

Nonetheless, this hybrid campaign is only half the story. The other half is unfolding in Ukraine, where Russia’s military has evolved into a ruthless, adaptive force. The war that began as a multi-axis invasion has transformed into an industrial-scale war of attrition.

Russia has accepted extraordinary casualty levels because its strategy is grounded not in manoeuvre warfare but in the logic of exhaustion. Penal battalions and mobilized infantry conduct relentless assaults to bleed Ukrainian forces white, reveal weak seams and fix defenders in place before pounding them with overwhelming artillery fire.

Moscow has modernized quickly under wartime pressure. Drones now dominate the battlefield, replacing or augmenting traditional artillery. Small units equipped with FPV drones and electronic warfare systems can neutralize armour, deny manoeuvre space and impose constant pressure along the line of contact.

This combination — hybrid warfare abroad and attrition warfare in Ukraine — reveals a sober truth: Russia is adapting faster than the West is responding. Western political cycles create windows of indecision that Russia exploits relentlessly. Russian hybrid attacks are testing European resilience in ways that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

The lesson for the West is not simply that Russia is expanding its toolkit. It is that Russia is treating the conflict as a war for the future of Europe, while the West still treats it as a crisis to be managed. This reality must sink in — not only in European capitals, but also in Washington and Ottawa, without delay.

The West must now grasp three essential truths. First, hybrid warfare is war. When railway networks are sabotaged, when borders are flooded with engineered migration, when energy grids are disrupted, when critical undersea cables are compromised — these are attacks on national security, even if the perpetrators never wear uniforms. The response must be collective, co-ordinated, and — when appropriate — public.

Second, Ukraine is the front line of European security. The battlefields of Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson are absorbing the violence that would otherwise reach into NATO states. A weakened Ukraine is a direct threat to the stability of NATO Europe.

Third, deterrence begins at home. Europe’s infrastructure — rail lines, ports, power grids, military mobility corridors — must be hardened. Counterintelligence services must be empowered. Russia is betting that the West will tire, fracture or retreat.

The way to defeat Russian strategy is straightforward. Act like an alliance that understands it is already under attack. NATO must stop being Russia’s punching bag and become its sparring partner.

For Canada, this is not an abstract European crisis — it is a conflict that already touches our borders and our obligations. Our Canadian-led brigade in Latvia is part of NATO’s tripwire force precisely because hybrid warfare can spill over without warning. In the Arctic, where Russian submarines, long-range aviation and electronic warfare push ever closer to our doorstep, Canada must recognize its role as a front-line state in a continental battlespace.

The sooner Ottawa understands that Europe’s war is tied to our own strategic environment, the stronger our defence — and our alliances — will be.

» Joe Varner is deputy director of the Conference of Defence Associations and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (Ottawa). His column originally appeared in Real Clear World.