Russian hybrid attacks against Europe intensifying, says Macron

By Aoife Gallagher · Reporting from Dublin · September 18, 2026

For those of us raised on the Atlantic edge, we know that the sea doesn’t just bring trade; it brings the weather, and the weather tells you exactly what is coming before the storm actually hits.

For those of us raised on the Atlantic edge, we know that the sea doesn’t just bring trade; it brings the weather, and the weather tells you exactly what is coming before the storm actually hits. Right now, the air in Europe is thick with a very specific kind of chill. It is the chill of a shadow war, one where the lines between peace and conflict have been blurred into a grey zone of "hybrid" aggression.

President Emmanuel Macron has finally said the quiet part out loud. As reported by France 24, the French President has ordered his government to prepare a plan to protect critical infrastructure and the "most sensitive" defence industry and technology sites against cyber-attacks and drones. He isn't just talking about theoretical risks; he is responding to a surge in Russian "shadow operations" that have already touched French soil. This is not a series of unfortunate coincidences. It is a coordinated campaign of intimidation designed to make the cost of supporting Ukraine feel too high for the European public to bear.

The Art of the Deniable Strike

The mechanism here is as old as the Cold War. During that era, the superpowers avoided a direct, high-intensity military clash—which would have meant nuclear annihilation—by engaging in asymmetric warfare, espionage, and proxy conflicts to destabilize the opponent from within. Russia is playing the same game today, using the same playbook of non-direct aggression to exert leverage without triggering a full-scale war.

The evidence is scattered across the map like breadcrumbs of malice. The BBC reports a drone attack at Leipzig airport in Germany last month, blamed on Russia, and a more chilling incident last Sunday where a Russian drone hit a passenger train's engine at Yahodyn near the Ukraine-Poland border. The timing was surgical; passengers were evacuated minutes before the strike, and the train line had been used by European security officials and former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson shortly before.

This is the essence of the hybrid threat: it is designed to be just visible enough to terrify, but just ambiguous enough to deny. Vladimir Putin claims Russia does not plan to attack Europe, and Sergey Lavrov warns that sending troops to Ukraine would be a "declaration of war." This is the classic Cold War dance—threatening the "big war" to justify the "small" atrocities of the shadow war. They want us to believe that the drones in Leipzig and the sabotage in Poland are anomalies, while simultaneously reminding us that the alternative is a "very short" war with Europe.

Testing the Fences of the Periphery

If you look at the long record, Russia has always tested the fences of the periphery before attempting to tear down the gate. This is a pattern of behavior, not a sudden shift in policy. We saw it during the Cyberattacks on Estonia in 2007, where state-sponsored digital warfare was used to pressure a small nation over a Soviet-era monument. We saw it again during the Russo-Georgian War in 2008, where military pressure and hybrid tactics were deployed to keep a neighbor out of NATO. And we saw the blueprint perfected during the Annexation of Crimea in 2014, where "little green men" and disinformation allowed Moscow to steal land while officially denying they were even there.

The current attacks on France, Germany, and Poland are simply the next chapter of this same relationship. Russia is betting that the European center is too soft, too divided, and too frightened of energy instability to hold the line. Macron knows this. His plan to call a G7 meeting to discuss energy and strategic gas reserves is a direct attempt to remove the leverage Russia thinks it still holds over our heating bills. He understands that our security today and tomorrow is at stake in Ukraine, because the periphery is where the fire starts. If we allow the "hybrid" attacks to go unanswered, we are essentially telling Moscow that the rules of sovereignty are optional for the big powers.

The Cost of a Fragmented Shield

The most capable advocate for the Russian position would argue that Moscow is merely reacting to an aggressive West that has expanded NATO to its very doorstep, and that these "hybrid attacks" are either fabrications of Western intelligence or the actions of rogue elements. They would say that the West is the one escalating by providing long-range weapons and flirting with troop deployments.

This argument fails because it ignores the fundamental asymmetry of the situation. Europe is not invading Russian territory; it is defending a sovereign neighbor from a full-scale invasion that began in February 2022. The "deniability" of a drone in Leipzig or a cyber-attack on a French defense site is not a shield for Russia—it is a weapon. By operating below the threshold of "armed aggression," Russia is exploiting a gap in our institutional architecture.

This is why Ursula von der Leyen’s call for an EU response mechanism for hybrid attacks—one similar to NATO’s Article 5—is the only logical path forward. For too long, the EU has treated these incidents as national police matters. But when sabotage surges in the UK, Spain, and Poland simultaneously, it is not a police matter; it is a security crisis. We need a consensus on how to respond to threats that fall below the level of war but clearly threaten national security.

We are moving toward a future of tighter legislation on foreign interference and increased surveillance of our industrial bases. This is a bitter pill, but a necessary one. If we do not build a collective shield, we will continue to be picked off one by one, from the Baltic to the Atlantic.

The era of pretending that "hybrid" means "harmless" is over. Russia is not trying to start a war with Europe; it is trying to win a war of nerves without ever having to fight one. If we mistake this calculated intimidation for a lack of intent, we are not being peaceful—we are being naive. The only way to stop a shadow war is to bring the costs of it into the light.

Russian hybrid attacks against Europe intensifying, says Macron

The Art of the Deniable Strike

Testing the Fences of the Periphery

The Cost of a Fragmented Shield

Sources