Russia’s Gray Zone Warfare: Provocation or Retaliation? – Correspondents at The Wall Street Journal warn that Russia is conducting an offensive consisting of so-called “gray zone” attacks against NATO members in Eastern Europe. Historically, gray zone measures refer to damaging or highly provocative actions that still fall short of outright, sizable military attacks. Sabotage, cyber disruptions, airspace violations, economic harassment, and the sharing of sensitive intelligence data with adversaries of the target country are classic examples.
An August 29, 2026, article by Daniel Michaels and Thomas Grove asserts that “Vladimir Putin’s regime has turned up the heat on Kyiv’s allies in Europe, with a string of gray zone activities aimed at sowing fear, as it struggles to advance on the ground in Ukraine and faces increasingly damaging Ukrainian drone and missile attacks at home.” They add that European authorities have linked Russia to a spate of drone incursions, acts of sabotage, cyberattacks and other hostile actions across the continent over recent months.
Michaels and Grove, along with a host of Russia’s other usual critics, cite several incidents in recent weeks, including the discovery of 3 explosive drones in or near the Leipzig airport in Germany, one of them beneath a Ukrainian cargo plane. Other supposed gray zone grievances NATO officials cited were that Russian drones had repeatedly entered NATO airspace, including one that was shot down over Romania. An article in the September 21, 2026, issue of the Economist similarly contended that the Kremlin’s gray-zone actions were becoming more brazen and that the Europeans “would have to start fighting back.”
However, many of the allegations lacked credible evidence that Moscow was the perpetrator. Michaels and Grove even include the following gem of an innuendo, contending that “recent explosions and fires at munitions facilities in Italy, Bulgaria and Finland have drawn suspicion of Russian involvement, even though authorities haven’t said they see evidence of that.” Other allegations of gray zone actions put forth by Western officials and hostile journalists arbitrarily rule out even the possibility that an incident (e.g., Russian drones entering the airspace of a NATO country) was inadvertent, not a deliberate provocation.
Ravi Agrawal, the editor-in-chief at Foreign Policy, takes the allegations of covert Russian aggression against NATO to a new level. In his September 14, 2026, article in that journal, he exceeds even the typical tone of alarm:
“On Sunday morning, Russia launched a drone attack on a train that was about to cross Ukraine’s border into Poland. The drone met its target and exploded on impact. Nobody was hurt because Ukrainian security had detected the incoming projectile and emptied out the train, as has now become common protocol in the country. But the attack made global headlines when Carl Bildt and Boris Johnson, the former prime ministers of Sweden and Britain, respectively, revealed on social media that they had passed that same border crossing just minutes earlier on a specially chartered train. It’s difficult not to interpret the incident, so far out west and so near the border of a NATO member state, as a message from Putin to Europe: Get out and stay out—or else.”
Although critics typically cite Ukraine and Eastern Europe as the principal arenas for Moscow’s gray zone warfare, Western hawks also see similar actions elsewhere. An April 20, 2026, report from the hawkish Foundation for the Defense of Democracies focused on Russian activities in the Arctic. The authors asserted that “the Kremlin has been waging an increasingly aggressive gray-zone campaign against NATO countries in or near the Arctic since approximately 2014. It’s a campaign that has largely slipped under the radar. These subversive and malign operations aim to sow division in Europe, degrade NATO’s intelligence and response capabilities, and generate chaos and fear.”
There is little doubt that gray zone warfare is occurring across multiple regions and among multiple adversaries. Such maneuvers are especially taking place between NATO countries and Russia. (There also is growing evidence of similar tit-for-tat behavior between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan.) But the assertion in the Economist that Moscow is the sole perpetrator of such provocations in Europe is nonsense. Both Ukraine and its NATO backers have pursued gray zone warfare initiatives for many years. Indeed, one could argue that they did so earlier and on a larger scale than their opponent.
Unless one chooses to accept the improbable original cover story that NATO governments and their news media allies put out that Russia was responsible for the bombing of its own Nord Stream gas pipeline, the Western powers initiated the current phase of gray zone warfare. Indeed, the revised cover story—that rogue, Ukrainian operatives with no connection whatsoever to the Kyiv government used a civilian yacht to execute the sabotage—is scarcely more credible than the initial “blame Russia” campaign. Neither version credibly exonerates NATO.
In addition to the Nord Stream provocation, NATO and several of its members have actively assisted Ukraine in its missile and drone attacks on Russian targets. Their assistance has even included providing targeting data from intelligence technology far beyond Kyiv’s capabilities. Such aid dangerously erodes the argument that the NATO countries involved are not outright belligerents in the Ukraine-Russia conflict. For several years now, the Kremlin could have made an extremely credible case that those NATO countries—and hence the Alliance itself—have committed an act of aggressive war against the Russian Federation.
To the extent that Moscow is engaged in gray warfare against NATO, it appears to be an act of retaliation rather than an act of initiation. Nevertheless, regardless of which side is the principal culprit, gray zone warfare is inherently reckless. Such incidents can easily get out of hand, leading to a cycle of escalation that culminates in full-scale warfare. When such a geostrategic game of “chicken” is being played by participants that possess nuclear weapons, the peril of continuing the maneuvers is especially acute.
Russia and its European neighbors should call an immediate truce in their gray zone warfare duel. They urgently need to take a step back from the cliff of confrontation before they tumble into an abyss.
About the Author: Ted Galen Carpenter
Ted Galen Carpenter is a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute and a contributing editor at The National Security Journal and The American Conservative. He is the author of 13 books and more than 1,500 articles on national security, international affairs, and civil liberties. His latest book is Unreliable Watchdog: The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy (2022).
