Two months ago, when Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin met in Alaska, the U.S. president signaled that he was willing to accept many of his Russian counterpart’s positions. Trump hoped this would prompt Moscow to make concessions and bring an end to the war in Ukraine. In recent weeks, however, Russia has stepped up its attacks on Ukraine and intensified its hybrid warfare tactics across Europe. The Kremlin appears to have decided to exploit NATO’s internal divisions in pursuit of a symbolic victory over the “collective West.” Alexander Baunov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin, examines why the response to Russian drone attacks has been mixed — and why the Kremlin is risking a repeat of the mistakes it made in 2022 by escalating the conflict with the West once again. Meduza has edited this article for length and clarity.

While the war in Ukraine has largely stalled, Russia has begun crossing new lines in Europe. We don’t know what Putin and Trump said behind closed doors in Anchorage, but after their meeting, Russia not only ramped up its strikes on Ukrainian cities, but also began targeting NATO countries in Europe, albeit without causing direct casualties.

It’s unlikely that Trump explicitly gave Putin the green light for these hybrid attacks. In the ten weeks since the summit, Trump has repeatedly voiced his frustration and disappointment with Putin, and even issued threats. Still, judging by his words and actions, Putin seems to have drawn three key conclusions from the meeting:

1. Trump isn’t willing to hand him a victory or end the war solely at Ukraine’s expense.
2. Trump is open to rebuilding ties with Russia even while the war continues — though he won’t fully restore relations until the fighting stops.
3. Trump doesn’t place much value on Ukraine; he’ll step in to save it only as a last resort, and not at any cost.

That leaves Putin a wide margin for maneuver between the current status quo and a scenario that would be a “last resort” for Trump. No wonder that at Russia’s recent Valdai Discussion Club forum, one of the first things Putin said was that he sees the new world order as a “creative space” compared to the old one.

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To strip Ukraine of the ability to resist, Moscow now aims to knock Europe out of the game. And since Anchorage, that’s exactly what Russia has been working towards. From the Kremlin’s perspective, Trump seems suspicious of Europe — he sees it as a place where his ideological allies are kept out of power, views NATO as a free rider, and considers Brussels a rival.

But finishing off Ukraine by driving away European support isn’t the only opportunity Russia sees; since Trump returned to the presidency, Moscow’s very notion of what victory could look like has shifted. It’s now probing a way to change the global order: rather than pursuing a direct victory over Ukraine to undermine the “collective West,” the Kremlin is taking aim at Europe and NATO, seeking to inflict a hybrid, military-and-propaganda defeat on the West itself and, in a roundabout way, Ukraine too.

A new reality for Europe

About a month ago, on September 10, a squadron of Russian drones was spotted and partially intercepted over Poland. Since then, similar drone sightings have been reported in Romania, Germany, Denmark, and Norway, where they may have been launched from vessels in Russia’s so-called shadow fleet. These aerial incursions have been accompanied by cyberattacks, including one that temporarily shut down Berlin Airport. With regional tensions rising, authorities in Europe may now be attributing nearly any unidentified aerial object to Russia — including balloons recently spotted over Lithuania, which could just as easily belong to smugglers or the military.

In any case, in the span of three weeks, by combining various methods and targets, Russia has created a new reality for Europe. Within Russia, blaming the West for the conflict has long been a standard narrative. At the recent Valdai Forum, a lengthy Q&A session was dedicated to inverting cause and effect — turning the consequences of the war into its supposed reasons. But with the U.S. now removed from the list of primary enemies, Europe has become the last obstacle to a “Russian victory.” It now looks both more isolated and more exposed. From the Kremlin’s perspective, Europe is vulnerable — and public anger, once sparked, can be redirected at domestic institutions and media.

Predicting the war’s next chapter

In recent months, Ukraine has made people inside Russia feel the war firsthand. Ukrainian drones have grounded airports, set refineries on fire, and even partially disabled a thermal power plant in Belgorod, not to mention attacks on military factories and depots. But for the Kremlin, threatening Ukraine with the same kind of retaliation no longer makes sense: civil aviation there has been grounded for nearly four years, and Russia already strikes any target it wishes. Its campaign against Ukrainian power plants, for example, began in earnest nearly three years ago, around New Year 2023.

Russia’s toolkit for intimidating Ukraine is largely exhausted — but Europeans, still unaccustomed to such attacks, are another matter. If airport disruptions don’t send the message, Moscow may escalate to energy infrastructure, following a crude, eye-for-an-eye logic.

Giving NATO new purpose

By sending drones into European countries, Russia has crossed an important symbolic line — but done so in a way that preserves plausible deniability. True to form, the Kremlin is cloaking its actions in denials, sarcasm, and competing narratives. The drones themselves, of course, are entirely real — and they seem to be delivering their intended message effectively.

These attacks aren’t just designed to scare Europeans away from supporting Ukraine. After four years of war, a Russian “victory” — if such a thing is still possible — would look very different than it might have early on.

Within parts of Russia’s political and military leadership, there’s growing recognition that the war is drifting toward an outcome opposite to what was originally intended. The longer it drags on, the more it reveals not Russian strength, but vulnerability. Rather than defeating NATO and the collective West on Ukrainian soil, Russia increasingly appears absent from the very fight it claimed to be waging. No level of military success in Ukraine — no barrage of strikes, not even a hypothetical Ukrainian surrender — can erase this impression of weakness.

One fact is impossible to hide: while publicly declaring NATO and the West as its true enemies, Moscow has gone out of its way to strike only Ukraine — carefully avoiding direct confrontation with the very countries it labels as its main adversaries, even when those countries are small, militarily weak, and unable to resist Russia on their own. The prolonged “special military operation” has not weakened NATO’s reputation but instead reinforced the impression that NATO remains a reliable, and indeed the only, guarantor of European security. And if Ukraine had been a member of the alliance, like Poland or the Baltic countries, this war — as the current U.S. administration likes to say — would never have started.

Far from undermining NATO, the war has underscored the alliance’s continuing relevance and deterrent power. That’s why Finland and Sweden rushed to join in 2022, prompting no real response from Moscow beyond a few angry tweets from Dmitry Medvedev and an exhibition on Finnish imperialism in central Moscow. Even Austria, neutral for over 80 years, has begun moving cautiously in the same direction.

Among Russian hardliners, there’s a growing sense that Russia picked a fight with an adversary that turned out to be too big, too strong, and too determined. Defeating Ukraine might still be seen as necessary to restore “historical justice,” but it does little to weaken NATO’s umbrella over Europe.

Back in 2022, of course, no one in Moscow seriously considered any other adversary. A swift victory in Ukraine was supposed to send a message to everyone. But that victory never came — and not even Joe Biden’s physical frailty stopped him from making clear that any infringement on NATO territory would trigger global war. At the time, Europe was far more anxious than it is today. But as the war became localized, so did Russia’s military gains — and the potential meaning of a Russian victory. Today, even that outcome would be mainly of local significance.

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Washington’s new policy of relative indifference toward Europe has emboldened those in Moscow who always doubted NATO’s Article 5 mutual defense clause. In their view, NATO consists of first- and second-tier members, and neither the U.S. nor Western Europe would sacrifice lives for the second tier — and perhaps not even for the first.

Some within the Russian elite — generals, General Staff officers, intelligence operatives, ideologues, and political strategists — now see Trump’s presidency as a rare opportunity to test this hypothesis. Early in his current term, Trump appealed to Moscow’s pragmatists, hoping they might help a cornered Putin exit the war on favorable terms.

But Trump’s rapid pivot away from Ukraine in the early months of his term has empowered a different faction — one that has since persuaded Putin that the moment has come to directly challenge Europe’s faith in NATO. This year’s Valdai Forum felt like a rhetorical companion to that effort, with Russia’s top leader using words to give shape to actions that remain deliberately ambiguous, spelling out exactly what conclusions Europe is meant to draw.

Strategic ambiguity on both sides

The problem with hybrid attacks is self-evident: they produce hybrid outcomes. They convince only those already inclined to believe, and give everyone else permission to look the other way. These provocations often skirt the red line of outright military aggression against NATO members — but do so cautiously, tentatively, and inconclusively. As a result, they fail to deliver a fully convincing outcome.

The hybrid nature of these attacks weakens their power to persuade. At the same time, they allow NATO and the EU to respond in kind: using Russian provocations to strengthen unity and build capabilities, while stopping short of labeling them acts of war that would trigger Article 5. These incursions can help the Kremlin achieve its initial objective — to punish Europeans for supporting Ukraine, disrupt their daily life, and portray the West as weak and indecisive. But they fall short of pushing European governments into openly acknowledging that weakness, or allowing it to become undeniable.

At the European security summit in Copenhagen on October 2, leaders discussed not only rearming the continent and building a “drone wall” along NATO’s eastern flank, but also Sweden’s practical proposal to delegate drone defense to national authorities. The idea is to shorten decision chains, strengthen local defense industries (Sweden has its own), and avoid treating every drone near an airport as a potential trigger for Article 5.

In other words, NATO is fully capable of raising its pain threshold in a rational way — high enough to protect its own security and credibility. In response to Russia’s ambiguous attacks, it offers a response that is just as ambiguous but still tangible — signaling not cowardice, but a strategic ability to differentiate between levels of threat.

Just as in 2021 and early 2022, when he was threatening to invade Ukraine, Putin is inching toward war — this time to save face, and this time with Europe and the West in his sights. And once again, it’s becoming clear that a threat works only as a threat, nothing more. Nuclear saber-rattling doesn’t have the same impact as an actual bomb, and hybrid attacks provoke hybrid responses — not the collapse of a military alliance, even in symbolic terms.

Just as in Ukraine, the Kremlin may find its goals unreachable with the tools it’s chosen. To avoid suffering a symbolic defeat, it may feel compelled to push closer to the point of no return to make its threats more convincing. In testing NATO’s resolve and trying to scare Europe away from Kyiv, Putin risks creating his own Franz Ferdinand moment. After all, there’s no telling where a stray drone might land.

There’s also no guarantee Russia won’t repeat its 2022 miscalculation. Back then, the Kremlin assumed Ukraine’s military, society, and “actor-president” would crumble with minimal resistance. Today, it’s NATO’s supposed weakness, its indecision, and the lack of a new De Gaulle in Europe that fuels Moscow’s fantasy — the same kind of propaganda that preceded the invasion of Ukraine.

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The risk of a vicious cycle

At this year’s Valdai Forum, Vladimir Putin’s remarks were laced with frustration that Europe is refusing to play his game. From the Kremlin’s perspective, the plan is simple: a campaign of hybrid attacks should pressure Europeans into abandoning Ukraine and admitting they are too afraid to invoke NATO’s Article 5. That, in Putin’s eyes, would be a strategic defeat for the West — making a full military victory in Ukraine unnecessary.

“Don’t you feel a bit like Alexander I at a modern-day Congress of Vienna?” asked the moderator — a loyal courtier playing host to foreign political analysts, who showed up to meet the Russian ruler in place of actual European leaders. In response, the Russian leader condescendingly remarked that his predecessor Alexander I was shortsighted in restoring absolute monarchies, instead of — as he himself is now doing — sensitively grasping and faithfully embodying the spirit of the future.

His message to Europe was unambiguous: if you don’t want drones in your skies, admit that NATO is a paper tiger — and recognize me as a new, improved Alexander I.

Hence Putin’s paradoxical mix of a peaceable tone and implicit threats, paired with another dive into history — this time accompanied by sympathy for the Nazi leadership: “Germany offered Poland a peaceful resolution of the Danzig question and the Danzig Corridor — but the Polish leadership of the time flatly refused.” And how could one not sympathize, Putin implies, when his own proposal to Poland and Europe is hardly different — only now, it’s Ukraine instead of Danzig: “If today’s high-ranking political family in Poland […] takes those past mistakes into account, that wouldn’t be a bad thing.”

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The implication is clear: similar logic may lead to similar outcomes. Back in fall 2021, Putin issued the West an ultimatum — refuse, and face war in Ukraine. Now a new ultimatum is directed at Europe itself, aimed at exposing NATO’s impotence. It’s reinforced with carefully calibrated military provocations against several NATO members and personally articulated by Putin.

But the cautious, hybrid, and deliberately ambiguous nature of Russia’s attacks has so far failed to deliver the kind of “therapeutic” victory over the West that might substitute for a stalled war in Ukraine. And the desire to make his point clearer, to force Europe to acknowledge what he sees as reality, may push the Kremlin dangerously close to a line it can’t step back from.

A vague notion of “victory,” as in Ukraine, could have been used to brand the unanswered attacks as a win over NATO — and to pivot to freezing the Russia–Ukraine war. But the hybrid nature of the attacks keeps getting in the way: they fail to force the enemy to surrender, and instead provoke another step forward.

Alexander Baunov