Russia Is Going to Do Something Really Stupid and Dangerous

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, September 24, 2026

 

Why would the Trump administration invite Vladimir Putin back onto American soil? “We think it’s an opportunity for him to engage not just with the president, but with other world leaders,” Marco Rubio said of the White House’s offer to host Putin in Miami for this year’s G-20 summit. For its part, the Kremlin remains noncommittal.

 

The offer comes as the administration, at least when it comes to the war in Europe, is once again giving appeasement a try. The president is dispatching his all-purpose negotiating duo, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, to Moscow to cajole Putin while its principals, including Trump himself, scold the Ukrainians for so effectively imposing pain and pressure on their invaders’ homeland. If only Ukraine would give up the highly defensible Donbas, Kushner muses publicly. Then we’d have peace in our time.

 

The last time the president welcomed the Russian despot to America, it went about as well as almost all bilateral summitry with Moscow’s representatives typically goes. Which is to say, poorly. Putin presented his unacceptable terms to the president — surely, his final territorial demands in Europe. But Europeans with some historical education, along with Trump’s more sensible advisers, persuaded the president to walk. And to Trump’s credit, he did. But “the spirit of Anchorage” has been invoked by the Russians ever since, mostly to hector America and the West for failing to live down to the Kremlin’s expectations.

 

More curiously, the invitation comes against the backdrop of Russian “grey zone” attacks on NATO members. Indications suggest that Moscow plans to do something even stupider and more reckless in the near future.

 

An alarming report published this week in the Spanish daily newspaper El Mundo revealed that, according to what the CIA conveyed to Lithuanian intelligence, Moscow is preparing an ambitious attack on Western Europe. The U.S. has reportedly observed unusual container ship traffic emanating from Russia, and some suspect those containers could be loaded with small explosive suicide drones that would be deployed against targets in Spain, France, or Italy. Russia’s goal would be to destabilize these countries ahead of their respective elections next year, potentially activating indigenous “radical forces” in these countries that would pressure their government to abandon Kyiv.

 

This threat was reportedly relayed to Europe around the time CIA director John Ratcliffe made an unannounced visit to Moscow, and the Continent is taking it seriously. “The nature of Russian aggression and threats in Europe is changing,” French President Emmanuel Macron said last week after he convened an emergency meeting of his Defense Council. “No one is safe.” The E.U.’s chief military adviser, General Seán Clancy, warned that Moscow’s “activity is now becoming almost ever-present” in Europe. “There is a low but growing risk that Russia will launch a limited military attack against one or several NATO countries bordering Russia,” the head of Danish intelligence, Thomas Ahrenkiel, said this week. Indeed, even though the threat from Russia probably doesn’t rise to the level of a ground operation inside NATO territory, the prospect cannot be ruled out.

 

That’s the sequence of events that you talk yourself into when little is going your way, and you need to radically revise the status quo, even at the risk of inviting unpredictable consequences. Russia is heedless of the potential for miscalculation — for one of its attacks to require a response from the NATO alliance, hazarding a cascading cycle of violence. Indeed, the Kremlin’s appetite for risk is only growing.

 

Russian forces are executing strikes on passenger trains near the Polish border with the aim of intimidating the high-ranking Western officials who transit into Ukraine via Poland. Acts of sabotage in Europe believed to be directed by Russia have become a near-daily occurrence. Russian assets have penetrated deep into European airspace, likely to test the Atlantic Alliance’s response to a coordinated incursion. The German government believes the Kremlin was behind an attempted explosive drone attack on the Leipzig/Halle Airport last month — an operation nearly as brazen as the 2024 plot in which Russian operatives allegedly attempted to plant explosive devices on U.S.-bound cargo planes designed to explode over the Atlantic Ocean. This month, the Justice Department implicated Russians with connections to Moscow’s domestic and military security services in a scheme to recruit Americans to conduct acts of sabotage and even assassinations on the Kremlin’s behalf.

 

In response to all this, the White House is extending a hand of friendship in Putin’s direction. Clearly, the Trump administration is as bereft of innovative solutions to the crisis in Europe as Putin seems to be. But Moscow is likely to interpret the administration’s overture as a signal that its pressure campaign is working. That will only embolden the Kremlin, which should be the opposite of the West’s intentions.

 

Perhaps the administration wants to talk while the time for talking isn’t yet behind us. It seems, however, that they’re mostly talking to themselves. Vladimir Putin isn’t listening.