Across Europe, a quiet alarm has become impossible to ignore: the war Russia is waging is not confined to Ukraine. In capitals from Stockholm to Paris, officials are warning that Moscow is trying to undermine democratic societies from within, using disinformation, sabotage, cyberattacks and political destabilization to weaken support for Ukraine and shake public trust. With elections approaching in several EU member states, these fears are no longer whispered behind closed doors; they are being voiced openly by defense ministers, intelligence agencies and prime ministers. At a conference in Stockholm on August 20, Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur pointed to the calendar as a roadmap for Russian meddling: Sweden would vote on September 13, Latvia on October 3, and Estonia would follow in March 2027. “This means that Russia will look for ways to influence our societies and incite tensions,” he warned. Beside him, Polish deputy foreign minister Henrika Mościcka-Dendiš echoed the sentiment, noting that elections are perfect opportunities for Moscow “to try to sow distrust and test the resilience of our societies.” The solution, she insisted, is collective action. Yet for all the shared anxiety, European governments have mostly responded as individual nation-states, not as a united continent. They have passed new laws, mobilized intelligence services, and issued public warnings, but the threat is continental and coordinated, while the response remains fragmented. The gap between awareness and action is perhaps the most unsettling theme of the current moment: everyone seems to know what is coming, but nobody is quite sure how to stop it together.
The warnings are grounded in concrete episodes. Two days before the Stockholm conference, Sweden experienced a coordinated burst of fake videos posted on X, less than an hour apart, carrying the logos of Swedish and German national media. The videos claimed electoral fraud was being planned and accused Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson of corruption, an attempt to discredit the parliamentary election before it even began. The group Antibot4navalny, a Russian opposition collective that tracks pro-Kremlin disinformation, identified the material as part of a wider influence operation called Matryoshka, which has appeared across the continent. Kristersson acknowledged that such videos are now common throughout Europe, especially in countries that support Ukraine: “We see these kinds of videos all over Europe. The Russians are used to targeting countries that support Ukraine.” The Swedish Psychological Defence Agency, created to monitor destabilization efforts, explained that the goal was not necessarily to convince voters of fraud, but to flood the media with so much disinformation that the truth becomes impossible to distinguish. In Norway, researchers at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment discovered a group of pro-Russian hackers targeting the conservative Høyre party ahead of elections scheduled for September 2025. The cyberattack did not change the outcome, but it demonstrated intention. Denmark’s three main intelligence agencies also warned of pro-Russian disinformation before the March 2026 parliamentary elections, saying the aim was to promote Russian interests, sow discord, and weaken support for Ukraine. These operations, as Le Monde notes, were aimed at both the domestic and foreign policies of countries assisting Kyiv. The message is not subtle: no country that stands with Ukraine is safe from the Kremlin’s digital and psychological warfare.
Nowhere is the threat more acute than Germany, Europe’s largest provider of military aid to Ukraine. Germany has become a prime target for sabotage, espionage and information attacks. In August, an attempted attack on Leipzig Airport was uncovered when authorities found a drone packed with explosives in a secure cargo area near Ukrainian cargo planes. Another device reportedly struck a DHL plane minutes later, and a third was found in a nearby field ten days later. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who had previously been silent, warned that Berlin would make those responsible “pay a price for their actions.” In 2025 alone, Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office recorded more than 320 attempts at destabilization, including sabotage, theft, burglary and attacks on critical infrastructure, with Russia suspected of organizing most of them. German politicians and MPs were also targeted by phishing attacks on the encrypted messaging app Signal, attacks attributed to Moscow. Among those hit was the President of the Bundestag, Julia Klöckner. There were also waves of violent attacks before the February 2025 election, some deadly and often carried out by foreign nationals, which shocked the public and pushed immigration to the center of the campaign. German defense minister Boris Pistorius admitted that there is not always enough evidence to formally prove who was behind a drone incursion, but “there are many indications that can be used to determine who benefits” from flying such a device at a particular location. This combination of covert actions and public outrage has left Germany in a strange position: aware of the threat, yet constrained in how openly it can respond. For ordinary citizens, the effect is deeply disorienting — a sense that something is wrong, but no clear culprit, no clear courtroom, and no clear way to fight back.
The language used to describe these activities is itself becoming a point of contention. European leaders and officials often speak of “hybrid threats” or “hybrid warfare” — a term that, according to the European Commission, covers a broad mix of coercive and subversive activities, using diplomatic, military, economic and technological tools, designed to stay below the threshold of formally declared war. An EU official told Politico that this framing allows such activities to be treated as something less than an attack, meaning they do not automatically trigger a military response from the EU or NATO. But as sabotage, cyberattacks, drone incursions and hostile operations intensify, that terminology is drawing increasing criticism. Security experts, diplomats and defense officials argue that calling everything “hybrid” risks minimizing the seriousness of the threat and obscuring how much the confrontation with Russia has already escalated. Camille Grand, a former NATO assistant secretary general who now leads the Aerospace, Security and Defence Industries Association of Europe, put it bluntly: “We are truly in a hybrid war that is not so ‘hybrid’ anymore.” He described the gradual escalation with the metaphor of boiling a frog: “What was shocking to us yesterday becomes the norm tomorrow, and so on until you find yourself in a much more intense situation… They are testing the limits.” The phrase captures the eerie normalization of hostile acts that would once have been considered outrageous. A cyberattack on parliament, a drone over an airport, a fake video from a fake news outlet — each individual incident might be dismissed as low-level, but together they form a pattern of increasing aggression that undermines public confidence in democratic institutions. The problem, experts say, is not that Europe lacks the tools to respond; it is that the very way officials talk about the threat makes it seem manageable, distant, and somehow less than war.
Latvia offers a striking example of how Russian political warfare has evolved. The country is preparing for elections on October 3 and has intensified efforts to expose possible interference. Its government disinformation portal, Melns uz balta (“black on white”), warns of an avalanche of false and misleading information aimed at deepening divisions, particularly among Russian-speaking citizens, who make up nearly a third of the population. Yet authorities have reported no operations specifically targeting the vote itself. The apparent paradox is explained by the propaganda website Baltnews, which published an article on July 7 about the Latvian elections. Despite expressing support for the far-right Latvia First party, led by businessman Ainars Šlesers, the article concluded that a “turnaround” in Riga’s pro-European and pro-Ukrainian policy was “impossible” even if that party and a conservative coalition came to power, because Latvia’s economic and military dependence on Brussels leaves it little room for maneuver. The point, Le Monde observes, was not to install pro-Russian candidates but to undermine the Latvian state itself, attacking both its current policies and its history. Propaganda channels were flooded with narratives depicting Latvia as a puppet state whose independence, restored in 1991 after five decades of Soviet occupation, was illegitimate. Nostalgic, embellished portrayals of the Soviet era reinforce the claim that Latvia has failed since leaving Moscow’s sphere of influence. The relative calm of the campaign, the analysis suggests, is not a sign of ease but a threat to the survival of Latvia as an independent state. France, too, has faced highly targeted political destabilization. In early August, the Paris prosecutor’s office opened an investigation into suspected Russian interference targeting two former prime ministers, Gabriel Attal and Édouard Philippe, and MEP Raphaël Glucksmann, all potential candidates in the 2027 presidential election. They filed charges after deepfake videos and fake media reports spread claims about health problems and corruption. The French government agency Viginum, tasked with fighting foreign digital interference, complained that the publicity surrounding the operations gave “greater visibility to content that has been seen by a very small number of citizens” — a reminder that the aim of such operations is often to make ordinary people believe the system is rotten, not to persuade them of any particular fact.
In response, European governments are beginning to coordinate more, but they rarely speak with one voice. Their intelligence services, however, work closely together — often secretly, bilaterally, or within the so-called Bern Club, a forum bringing together the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Norway and EU member states except Austria. A senior French intelligence official told Le Monde that it is “the only multilateral forum that really matters for the continent’s collective security.” The club meets regularly in different European capitals, sometimes in plenary sessions, sometimes in smaller groups, depending on the issue. In a rare example of joint public action, France, the European Union and the United Kingdom imposed sanctions on nine Russian nationals and four entities linked to the FSB on July 13, with Britain adding 24 more names, including leaders of the GRU and members of Rybar LLC, a Russian disinformation network that has orchestrated election interference across Europe. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas warned that “today’s wars are not only fought with tanks and drones, but also with lies and algorithms,” noting that artificial intelligence tools are now fully embedded in Russian and Chinese information manipulation operations. According to French intelligence, the central coordinator of these destabilization campaigns is Sergei Kiriyenko, deputy chief of staff of Russia’s presidential administration, operating under what Moscow calls directives against “enemy countries.” As one French intelligence source explained, there is a general mandate, and each Russian intelligence structure then carries out possible actions based on the access, information, or opportunities it has. The cumulative effect of all these operations is difficult to measure, but the pattern is unmistakable. European officials, intelligence officers and defense experts are no longer asking whether Russia is trying to interfere; they are asking whether their own societies are as ready as they should be. The fear is not that a single election will be overturned, but that every election will be accompanied by a steady stream of lies, provocations and small acts of sabotage that erode public trust in democracy itself. As Camille Grand suggests, the slow, frog-boiling escalation is the real danger — because by the time a country realizes how far it has gone, it may already be too late to jump out of the pot. The challenge for Europe, then, is not merely to detect and punish specific acts of interference, but to find the collective will and resilience to confront a threat that is now woven into the fabric of daily life.