Probing with Bayonets

By Andrew Stuttaford

Wednesday, December 10, 2025

 

The administration’s new National Security Strategy is not designed to be a comprehensive document, and so, whether due to a focus on its core messages or, maybe, an unwillingness (for which it is possible to think of good reasons) to state openly what it has in mind, there is nothing written directly about the topic of the increasingly aggressive actions taken in Europe by Moscow (sometimes backed by Beijing) in the “gray zone.”

 

I have described what this shadowy area — an echo, in some ways, of Trotsky’s old phrase about a state of affairs that was “neither war nor peace”— in a number of earlier posts.

 

Writing about this phenomenon in July last year, I borrowed a definition from Clementine G. Starling, the deputy director of the Forward Defense program and a resident fellow at the Transatlantic Security Initiative:

 

The gray zone describes a set of activities that occur between peace (or cooperation) and war (or armed conflict). A multitude of activities fall into this murky in-between — from nefarious economic activities, influence operations, and cyberattacks to mercenary operations, assassinations, and disinformation campaigns. Generally, gray-zone activities are considered gradualist campaigns by state and non-state actors that combine non-military and quasi-military tools and fall below the threshold of armed conflict. They aim to thwart, destabilize, weaken, or attack an adversary, and they are often tailored toward the vulnerabilities of the target state. While gray-zone activities are nothing new, the onset of new technologies has provided states with more tools to operate and avoid clear categorization, attribution, and detection — all of which complicates the United States’ and its allies’ ability to respond.

 

I added this:

 

Two key reasons why waging a war in the gray zone is so effective for the aggressor are contained in the last part of that last sentence. The first is the question of proof, and the second, which applies even if there is proof of who was responsible, is how to respond. NATO is not (nor should it) go to war over an arson attack or even an assassination of, say, a business executive [a plot had been in the news]. But how does it hit back?

 

And so to this from Sam Jones, writing in in the Financial Times:

 

In July 2024, DHL parcels exploded in logistics centres in the UK, Poland and Germany. Each of them was powerful enough to have brought down a cargo plane had they detonated onboard. Security services would eventually trace the plot back to a group of Russian-directed saboteurs who had a further 6kg of explosive material in their possession. That was enough to give them the capability for what security officials told the Financial Times was the next stage of the plan: to attack flights to the US, and cause more disruption to the airline industry than any act of terror since the World Trade Center attacks.

 

We got lucky then, but it is worth pondering what would have been the consequence of actions that might have become a series of Sarajevos in the sky, albeit ones missing a Princip to be arrested on the spot.

 

As Jones reports, the pace of such plots has been picking up:

 

Intelligence chiefs and police forces have foiled plots to derail crowded trains, burn down shopping centres, discharge a dam and poison water supplies. And these are just the ones we know about.

 

There is speculation that this is more than just a tactical response — an exercise in counter-pressure — to Western support for Kyiv.

 

Jones:

 

Some intelligence points to longer-term planning. Although large numbers of Russian spies have been kicked out of Europe in recent years, the Kremlin’s agencies have tried to reinfiltrate European states with trained professionals, even as they bombard the continent with scattergun attacks by proxies and criminals. The head of one major European intelligence agency says his officers were now observing Russian agents surveying road bridges, he presumes with the intention to mine them. Railways all over the continent, he notes, are similarly being aggressively mapped for weak spots. His agency and others are also tracking the attempts of Russia to insert highly trained sleeper-saboteurs into European states.

 

Attacks carried out by recruits from a kind of a terrorist “gig economy” who may not even know that they are working for Moscow do not leave much of a trail for prosecutors or counterintelligence to follow, making it difficult to weigh a counter-response.

 

Unsurprisingly, a large amount of what is going on appears to borrow much from old Soviet techniques, and the FT’s Jones quotes Daniela Richterova, co-director of the King’s Centre for the Study of Intelligence in London. She believes that the current escalation aligns with a middle “prewar” phase stipulated in files discovered in the archives of the StB, the Soviet-era Czechoslovak secret police. The low-level attacks expand in a fashion designed to deliver an intimidating message about Moscow’s willingness to inflict harm. But they are also a form of reconnaissance:

 

Russian military intelligence doctrine leans heavily on the idea of razvedka boyem — reconnaissance through battle — in which information is found out about an enemy’s weaknesses by constantly probing and testing for them. And when you find a weakness, you continue to push. “Reinforce success” is an idea drummed into students at Russian military intelligence academies.

 

Lenin put it another way in a different context, but the principle is the same:

 

Probe with bayonets. If you encounter mush, proceed; if you encounter steel, withdraw.

 

And here too drones are changing the nature of war or, in this case, its (possible) preamble.

 

To believe this would all come automatically to a stop with the conclusion of a peace deal with or over Ukraine is naïve. This is why any such deal should allow room for Ukraine’s allies to continue to strengthen and replenish its defenses even as they boost their own. President Trump is right to insist that European NATO members should increase their defense spending to 5 percent of GDP. Poland is nearly there, and the Baltic states are heading rapidly in that direction. Other countries are, if more slowly, moving along the same path, and should continue to do so even if hostilities are paused (which is probably the best that can be hoped for) in Ukraine.

 

The key to understanding Putin, I was told by a Latvian official back in 2014, was to think of him as a petulant and badly behaved teenager who likes to provoke, prod, and see what he can get away with.

 

That has not changed — and it will not change.