Russia is already campaigning against NATO. ISW says Europe should say so

The Institute for the Study of War’s 16 September paper, The Russian Military Campaign Against Europe: Defining the Threat, is an argument about language as much as force. Its central claim is that the Kremlin is not merely “probing,” “provoking,” or waging a vague “hybrid” contest with the West. It is running coordinated kinetic campaigns against NATO states themselves – alongside the war in Ukraine – and Europe still lacks a shared description of that campaign, which is why it also lacks a shared response.

ISW places the current phase inside a longer Russian project: keep Putin’s regime intact; restore Russia as a great power by subordinating Ukraine and Belarus; regain control over former Soviet space, including the Baltic states; and shape an order in which American influence shrinks and NATO unity breaks. The think tank has long held that Moscow already regards itself as in open conflict with Europe and the United States. What has changed, it argues, is intensity. After years of irregular operations, military posturing and nuclear signalling, kinetic activity sharpened from summer 2025 – marked by the 9–10 September drone incursion into Polish airspace – and became more brazen in summer 2026.

The paper treats Germany’s 1 September attribution of the 5 August Leipzig/Halle Airport drone incident as a political turning point. German authorities found an explosives-laden drone near a Ukrainian Antonov cargo aircraft; a second drone struck another cargo plane aborting its landing. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt and Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said Russia’s involvement had been established and that the methods matched known Russian practice. Allies endorsed the finding. ISW’s point is that attribution without consequence still leaves the campaign intact.

German investigators link Leipzig airport drone attack to Russian military intelligence

The catalogue of activity is deliberately wide: persistent attempts to sabotage Polish railways; arson against defence firms supplying both Ukraine and European armies; reported plots to kill defence executives; cyberattacks on government and civilian targets; near-daily airspace probes; naval and intelligence pressure on sea lanes and undersea cables; and the “shadow fleet” of falsely flagged tankers used for sanctions evasion and, ISW suggests, possibly as platforms for other operations. A Russian drone struck a Romanian apartment building on 29 May and injured two people. ISW now judges that some airspace violations tied to strikes on Ukraine are intentional, not spillover, and that both kinds of violation test NATO air defences and cheapen Article 5. It also assesses that a 13 September drone strike was very likely meant to hit a train carrying current and former European officials leaving a Kyiv conference.

Russian drone hits Kyiv–Warsaw train two kilometres from Poland

These actions, the paper says, form mutually supporting kinetic and cognitive campaigns. Their purposes include disrupting NATO aid to Ukraine; intimidating governments into holding back equipment for home defence; mapping NATO responses; “boiling the frog” so that attacks become routine; widening European political splits; showing Russian audiences that NATO can be hit; and preparing the ground for a later conventional operation.

ISW is especially sharp on vocabulary. Calling airspace violations and infrastructure attacks “provocations” frames any reply as being “provoked.” Calling them “sub-threshold” or “sub-Article 5” pre-emptively rules out collective defence. “Hybrid” is the most common label and, in this reading, the most damaging: it implies that kinetic attacks on NATO territory are not part of a coherent military campaign and therefore do not require a military answer. Frontline officials, notably Poland’s Radosław Sikorski, have begun to speak of actions that have “turned kinetic.” ISW wants that plainness to spread. It does not yet prescribe a full lexicon, only the description it considers accurate: coordinated, state-directed kinetic attacks on European targets.

The second half of the paper looks forward. NATO, it argues, must prepare for a limited conventional attack on a shorter timetable than the 2028–2030 window often cited in Western planning. The threat ISW has in mind is not a march on Berlin. It is a politically existential test: limited air, missile or drone strikes, or a shallow ground incursion in the Baltics, designed to seize a sliver of territory and dare the alliance to evict Russian forces while the war in Ukraine continues. Russian reconstitution need not restore a Soviet-scale army; “good enough” forces, using Ukraine-honed drones, dispersal and infiltration, could suffice. Estimates already diverge: some German planning still looks to 2029; Dutch officials have warned of a possible attack within a year of a pause in Ukraine; Estonian commanders have spoken of 2027 readiness.

Rearmament announcements, ISW says, still lag the diagnosis. Europe should take Ukraine’s lessons without turning them into slogans. Drones do not make armour, artillery and airpower obsolete; Ukraine’s own mix is high and low. Frontline NATO states also lack Ukraine’s combat experience and dense drone ecosystem. Production surge, hardened infrastructure, better air defence and the ability to fight the first days without assuming instant, unified high-end reinforcement matter as much as new concepts.

The paper ends with three tasks. Name the current campaign clearly and answer it without treating every shoot-down of a drone as escalation. Compress planning for a limited conventional attack. Study the whole of the Ukraine war, not only its latest gadgets. ISW’s claim is not that NATO cannot prevail. It is that delay, euphemism and the comfort of a 2030 horizon are now part of the threat.

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) is a Washington-based nonprofit research organisation founded in 2007 by military historian Kimberly Kagan. It produces open-source analysis of active conflicts for policymakers, journalists, and the public, and is best known for its daily assessments and maps of Russia’s war against Ukraine. ISW describes a dual mission: real-time intelligence to inform decisions in conflict zones, and the training of younger national security specialists. It grew out of work on the Iraq war and later covered Afghanistan, Syria, and other theatres; its board is chaired by retired U.S. Army general Jack Keane. The institute presents itself as independent and non-partisan; its work is widely cited and is also often read as Atlanticist in outlook, with a consistent focus on Russian and Iranian military campaigns.

Caption: A police car parked near a Ukrainian ‘Antonov’ cargo plane at the Airport Leipzig-Halle, in Schkeuditz, Germany, 6 August 2026. German police issued an alert at the airport after a drone loaded with explosives was found near a Ukrainian cargo plane, and another aircraft had collided with an unidentified flying object nearby shortly before landing safely. The airport in eastern Germany plays a key role in the transport of military supplies by the German Armed Forces and NATO allies. It also serves as a base for the Ukrainian airline Antonov Airlines. EPA/FILIP SINGER