Europe has felt strangely quiet lately. Not calm. Not stable. Just quiet in the way a room gets before a pane of glass shatters. And in that quiet, small disturbances keep appearing.
A drone where no drone should be.
A fire inside a defence plant.
A border sealed with a bureaucratic notice that feels more like a warning than a policy.
On their own, each incident is forgettable. But when they line up together, they start to take the shape of intention. Not the intention of a rising power, but of one trying to conceal how far it has already fallen.
The spate of Russian asymmetrical disruptions across Europe looks at first like a strategy built on cunning. It is not. It is a strategy built on constraint. Russia is not escalating because it wants to. It is escalating because everything above the grey zone has become too dangerous for it to touch.
The drone incursions over Belgium are the clearest example. They appeared when Europe was arguing over whether to unlock an enormous loan for Ukraine using interest from frozen Russian central bank assets. Belgium, which holds the overwhelming majority of those assets at Euroclear, suddenly found drones drifting over military bases and airports in patterns too persistent to ignore. Even officials in Germany hinted that the timing was no coincidence, a diplomatic way of admitting that the message was visible in plain sight.
Belgium had already warned that moving ahead with the loan risked retaliation. When the drones arrived, the warning became the response. The pressure was calibrated in the language of critical infrastructure disruption.
Coercive enough to unsettle decision makers.
Deniable enough to avoid a collective response.
This pattern repeats across the continent. Fires in German defence facilities, including the Diehl plant that produces IRIS T missile systems. Arson plots inside Poland aimed at logistical hubs. Covert actors slipping into research institutions in Norway under decades long covers. A manufactured migration squeeze against Finland that arrived with all the subtlety of a lever pulled just far enough to rattle but not break.
None of these actions signal strength. They signal the opposite.
They are the outer edges of a state whose conventional options have narrowed to the point of vanishing.
Russia’s military today is a system caught between two realities. On paper, it still claims global significance. In practice, it behaves like a force trapped by its own limitations. Years of attrition have thinned its professional core. Mobilisation flooded its ranks with low quality reservists whose presence diluted unit effectiveness. A rigid, Soviet style command structure suppresses initiative and slows adaptation.
The result is a military that no longer manoeuvres. It digs in.
Russia has adapted to this failure not by fixing it, but by accepting it. Its force structure is now built for positional warfare, not modern manoeuvre. Its operations favour grinding attrition, not mobility. It fights in a way that reveals the limits of what it can sustain, not the reach of what it can project.
This is where the comparison to its Soviet predecessor becomes stark.
The Soviet military could fight on multiple continents simultaneously. It had foreign bases from Cuba to Vietnam. It held millions of personnel in active service. It could impose its will through sheer quantity, even when quality failed.
Modern Russia has two meaningful foreign bases, both in Syria.
It has no functional aircraft carriers.
It has a refuelling fleet that barely qualifies as regional.
Its expeditionary capacity exists more in rhetoric than in reality.
Hybrid warfare, often romanticised as a sophisticated tool, is in this case simply the only space where Russia can act without revealing the severity of its conventional decline.
It is power exercised within the margins, precisely because the centre has weakened.
This is why the sabotage of critical national infrastructure is no longer an accessory to Russian doctrine but an integrated element of it. Russia has accepted that it cannot win conventional contests with the West, so it has chosen a battlefield where victory does not depend on tanks or aircraft, but on ambiguity and disruption.
You see that logic in its targeting of European defence industries. You see it in the sudden appearance of deep cover operatives like Mikhail Mikushin, embedded for years to ensure the continuity of long term intelligence penetration. You see it in its attempts to fracture political unity inside NATO by making every hybrid incident difficult to attribute and therefore difficult to respond to.
And you see it in the way Russia has reconfigured its understanding of the war it is in. Appointing an economist, Andrei Belousov, as Defence Minister was not a gesture of innovation. It was an admission that the war Russia is preparing for is a war of endurance, not manoeuvre. A war defined by industrial output, not doctrinal brilliance. A war in which the cheapest disruptions become the most effective tools.
Some argue that Russia’s wartime industrial surge shows resilience. That the country has adapted to sanctions and built capacity for a long conflict. That it can continue grinding forward in Ukraine despite losses that would cripple other militaries.
But endurance and power are not the same thing.
Surviving is not the same as shaping outcomes.
Russia escalates in the grey zone because it cannot escalate anywhere else.
A state with a degraded conventional force and a nuclear arsenal that cannot be used becomes an actor that pushes outward only in the shadows, never in the open.
Its operations grow bolder, not because it gains strength, but because the grey zone becomes the only theatre where weakness cannot be directly tested.
This is the real risk for Europe.
Not that Russia is growing more capable, but that it is becoming more dependent on a form of conflict where deniability allows constant pressure with minimal consequence.
The quieter nights become, the more likely it is that something is happening beneath them.
Drones over Belgian airports. Fires in German industrial districts. Assassination plots intercepted in Poland. Border games along Finland’s frontier. These are not warnings. They are the new shape of a conflict that never quite declares itself but never stops expanding.
Once a state learns that disruption is safer than confrontation and more effective than negotiation, it rarely gives the habit up.
And Russia has learned that lesson more thoroughly than any state in modern Europe.
The shadow war will not end soon.
It is not a prelude to something larger.
It is the something larger, drawn out over years, spread across borders, delivered through actors who never quite appear and incidents that never quite confirm themselves.
If you want to understand where Russia’s power now resides, look not at what it can destroy, but at what it can disturb.
That is the battlefield it has chosen.
And the one it is unlikely to leave.