Ukraine Military History Institute
Germany stopped pretending
Germany shut the Russian consulate in Bonn and closed Russia House in Berlin. The trigger was explosive-carrying drones at German airports, attributed to Russia. In German terms that is a strong move, and Sam Cook's framing of it is the right one: it is getting hard for European politicians to deny the obvious.
The obvious being that Russia is running a low-grade hybrid war against Europe that is steadily intensifying and becoming more lethal. Drone and weapons manufacturers across Europe have been experiencing fires. Sabotage keeps happening. Each individual incident is deniable. The pattern is not.
Cook calls it boiling the frog, and the phrase earns its place. No single event forces a response. The cumulative direction of travel plainly should.
Why Russia does this while losing in Ukraine
The standard Western read is that it makes no sense. Putin is struggling in Ukraine, so why would he widen the war? Rob Lee's answer is more interesting than either reassurance or alarm, and it starts by taking Russia's position seriously.
Strategically, Russia does not want NATO in this war as a full combatant. Lee is unambiguous about why, and the reasoning is physical rather than rhetorical. The forces Russia would need are not where they would be needed. The Baltic Fleet and the Kaliningrad forces are in Ukraine. What remains along the rest of the border is largely conscripts. The combat power is committed.
A conventional conflict with NATO would therefore go badly for Russia, and Russia knows it. If NATO air forces became involved, Lee says, it would pose a serious challenge Russia is not currently postured to meet.
So the sabotage campaign is not a prelude to invasion. It is a calculation that the stakes can be raised incrementally without ever crossing the line that produces a threshold response.
The restraint that used to exist was economic, and it is gone
This is the part most worth understanding, because it explains why the escalation is happening now rather than in 2016.
Russia used to behave better because it had something to lose. Economic links with Europe were real, valuable, and worth protecting. That was the brake.
Lee traces the brake failing in two stages. The 2014 invasion of Ukraine brought sanctions, and some of those links were frozen or reduced. Having lost part of what restrained it, Russia became correspondingly less worried about escalating further. The full-scale invasion in 2022 took most of the rest. At each step, the cost of misbehaving fell, because there was less left to confiscate.
The conclusion is uncomfortable. Russia is escalating more freely precisely because it has less left to lose. Sanctions worked as intended and also removed the leverage that had been quietly keeping the peace in a domain nobody was watching.
Drones then supply the final ingredient: plausible deniability. Assassinations and sabotage become attributable only with effort, and often not at all. Many European countries have not formally attributed incidents to Russia. Germany just did. Lee is careful to add the honest caveat that some things attributed to Russia may not have been Russia. The campaign is real. Any given incident may not be.
What NATO is actually being punished for
Lee reframes the motive in a way that clarifies the whole picture, and he does not soften it.
Russia is frustrated with NATO members because NATO support is preventing Russia from achieving what matters most to Putin. Material support and intelligence support are what keep Ukraine in the fight.
"If we're being honest, NATO support is killing soldiers." Intelligence is used to find air defence systems and infrastructure. That is not a side effect of support, it is the function of it.
Which means the hybrid campaign is not random spite. It is a targeted response to the specific thing Russia most wants stopped.
The genuine danger Lee identifies is not invasion but perception. There is a risk that inside the Kremlin the distinction blurs between supporting a war and fighting one, and that the threshold Russia is carefully staying beneath starts to look, from Moscow, like it has already been crossed.
The answer is to do more of what caused it
The policy conclusion sounds paradoxical and is not.
If Russia's sabotage campaign is designed to make supporting Ukraine feel expensive, then reducing support rewards it. Lee's position is that the response to sabotage should be to increase support, visibly and without equivocation, precisely because that is the thing Russia is trying to stop.
Alongside that, unity. Every European country holds elections every few years, and every election brings the question of whether the next leader will be less committed. Lee's observation on that is more encouraging than most coverage suggests: across four and a half years, European countries have remained remarkably consistent in supporting Ukraine.
Dialogue still matters. But dialogue paired with visible reduction in support reads, from Moscow, as the campaign working.
What to watch
- Attribution, not incidents. The incidents will continue. The meaningful change is how many governments are willing to name Russia publicly, as Germany just did, and what follows when they do.
- Whether support wobbles after any European election. That is the variable Russia is playing for.
- Whether the Kremlin's own read of the threshold shifts. The risk in this whole picture is not deliberate escalation. It is miscalculation by a state that has already convinced itself NATO is a participant.