Rubio warns of risk of Russia’s war in Ukraine spreading
While answering questions at the United Nations, Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned that Russia’s war in Ukraine could potentially spread.
NEW YORK – After an explosives-laden drone was discovered near a Ukrainian cargo plane at a German airport, European leaders did something they’d stopped short of doing before: publicly blame Russia.
For years they’d suspected that Russian President Vladimir Putin was behind acts of sabotage across Europe, but there was little or no evidence to prove it. But recently, Moscow is raising even more suspicions.
Russian submarines have attempted to disable critical subsea cables in the Arctic. Russian drones have repeatedly violated Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian airspace. And Polish authorities recently blamed Russia for starting a fire at a factory producing weapons for Ukraine.
The aggression has marked an escalation in the standoff between NATO leaders and Putin, as the United States, Canada and Europe seek to deter Russia and support Ukraine without being dragged directly into the war.
“We see them really increasing their attacks,” Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign policy chief, told USA TODAY. “They are testing how far they can go.”
As Russia has incurred severe losses on the battlefield, Putin has stepped up his attempts to scare Ukraine’s allies out of supporting them through so-called hybrid attacks, European officials and experts say. Hybrid warfare typically refers to unconventional attacks using unmarked soldiers, sabotage and cyberwarfare.
The attacks are aimed at intimidating NATO countries to pull back on assistance not only to Ukraine, said former U.S. Ambassador to Poland Daniel Fried, but also to Eastern European nations that Russia covets.
“I think Putin’s instinct will be to find a space where pushing back is more difficult,” Fried said, “and the Russians have the ability to smirk and deny responsibility while everybody knows it’s them.”
The attempted attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport in Germany in August was particularly dangerous and irresponsible, officials said. If the drone had exploded, it would have caused significant damage and potentially killed civilians.
German authorities said the drone components were known to them from “Russian hybrid operations and its war against Ukraine.” Intelligence also pointed to “people being involved who acted on behalf of Russian state entities,” the country’s interior minister said.
“It was very clear. I mean, the evidence was there, what happened,” Kallas said in an interview from the EU’s office near the United Nations.
Putin’s history of crossing red lines
Throughout his 26-year rule over Russia, Putin has found that he could challenge NATO with relative impunity.
Over the years, officials have also accused Russia of meddling in elections in the United States and Europe. Intelligence agencies in Europe have blamed Russia for assassinating Putin’s enemies in countries such as the United Kingdom and Germany.
Putin, who once called the collapse of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” has long wanted to restore Russian control over former Soviet republics such as Ukraine.
Months after the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, where the alliance committed to future membership for Georgia and Ukraine, Russia launched a war against Georgia and occupied its Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions.
Shortly after a democratic uprising in Kyiv led to the ouster of Ukraine’s pro-Kremlin president in 2014, Russian forces without insignia – dubbed little green men – invaded the Crimean Peninsula. Weeks later, Putin illegally annexed Crimea and supported armed separatists groups in eastern Ukraine.
“Time and again, our fear of escalation has dominated, and we have therefore undermined our own deterrent,” said Ivo Daalder, who served as U.S. ambassador to NATO in the Obama administration. “As a result, Putin has just moved further and further.”
The insufficient response from the United States and Europe to the aggression laid the groundwork for Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, current and former U.S. and European officials have said.
Putin believed that he would capture Kyiv within days, according to U.S. intelligence, but Russian forces have only managed to capture 12% of Ukrainian territory since the start of the full-scale invasion more than four years ago.
“He totally underestimated Ukraine and also the western part of the world,” Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna told USA TODAY. “We don’t want Putin to do this kind of miscalculation again against NATO.”
U.S. concerned sabotage will lead to wider war
The escalation of Russian hybrid attacks and other acts of sabotage against NATO countries comes as the Pentagon is weighing whether to significantly reduce its military presence in Europe.
Meanwhile, some European countries are increasingly concerned, based on intelligence, that Russia could launch a military operation against a NATO country in an attempt to test Article 5 of the alliance’s treaty. Article 5 requires all NATO members to treat an attack against one ally as an attack against them all.
The Danish government’s defense intelligence service said on Sept. 24, for instance, that “there is a low but growing risk that Russia will launch a limited military attack against one or several NATO countries bordering Russia.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters during a Sept. 23 news conference that the United States is worried Russia’s war in Ukraine will spread into neighboring European countries.
“Be it through a hybrid attack, be it through a sabotage attack, be it through a misunderstanding,” Rubio said, “some pilot went the wrong way, and all of a sudden we’ve got active combat.”
A Russian drone struck a train on the Ukraine-Poland border earlier this month, narrowly missing a train carrying European politicians and diplomats.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz denounced the Russian hybrid attacks during a Security Council briefing on Sept. 23.
“We have violations of neighboring airspace, including NATO airspace, that create risks that no one in this room takes lightly,” Waltz said. “And I want to be clear that we condemn, in the strongest terms, any attempts to broaden the war.”
Matthew Whitaker, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, told USA TODAY in an interview last month that allies should be clear-eyed and ready to confront the threat posed by Russia.
Tsahkna said that NATO countries should publicly and forcefully call out the Russian acts of sabotage but added that he has seen no evidence of Moscow preparing for a large-scale military attack against Estonia or any other NATO ally while the Russian military is taking a battering in Ukraine.
“We may see larger scale provocations or something more serious, but it is not about full-scale aggression. We don’t see it coming,” he said. “We cannot allow Putin to play with our fears.”
Kallas said that whether Europe gets pulled into a wider war with Russia “very much depends on” the alliance’s response.
If the Americans are saying very clearly that Article 5 stands, she said, then the Russians know what they are risking: full-scale war with Europe.
That is why it is important that Europe continues to build up its military capabilities, Kallas said.
“All the member states are investing more in defense, and at the same time, keeping the transatlantic alliance alive and sending clear messages to Russia that we will stand together in response if it goes over the threshold.”
How far will Putin go?
NATO nations, including the United States, have emphasized the necessity of deterrence, while declining to say what would be a triggering event.
After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, former President Joe Biden repeatedly warned that a direct conflict between NATO and Russia would be World War III and must be avoided at all costs.
But NATO’s determination to avoid escalation is why Putin has continued to test the alliance’s limits, according to Daalder. He said that the question NATO leaders should be asking is not whether a Russian act of aggression crosses the Article 5 threshold, but how NATO will respond.
“No matter what the provocation, we have been more worried that this will lead to a war than we are in sending Putin the message that we have serious red lines that we keep,” Daalder said.
After Germany officially blamed Russia for the attempted drone attack, many NATO leaders issued statements of solidarity with Berlin.
President Donald Trump said that “Putin is not looking to attack NATO territory.” On Sept. 18, Trump said that Russia has been “attacking Ukrainian allies for approximately five years.”
Trump has sent mixed signals on Russia in just the last week. He signed into law a bill authorizing new Russian sanctions and called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a capable leader at the United Nations, then invited Putin to join him in Miami for a Group of 20 summit.
The lack of a firm commitment from the United States to allies in Canada and Europe has only further emboldened Putin, says Roland Freudenstein, co-founder of the Brussels Freedom Hub.
“Every hateful tweet by Trump on social media against the Europeans is poison for our deterrence posture vis-a-vis Putin,” Freudenstein said.
For now, Tsahkna said that the European strategy to Russian hybrid attacks should be: “attribute, put more sanctions, respond.”
“We are not terrorist countries,” he said. “We are not going to organize terrorist attacks in Russia as a response for these attacks or hybrid attacks, but there must be public attribution.”
Francesca Chambers is a White House correspondent for USA TODAY covering foreign policy and presidential elections. You can follow her on X @fran_chambers.
Miles J. Herszenhorn covers the Pentagon and world affairs for USA TODAY. You can follow him on X @mherszenhorn.