World
Where Does Provocation End and an Attack Begin?
— 5 mins read
The question is not whether Putin intends to attack NATO. It is whether NATO has a definition of attack that covers what is currently happening.
On a February morning in the Øresund strait, a Swedish patrol boat watched a drone rise from a Russian surveillance vessel sitting inside Swedish waters. The French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle was moored six miles away, in Malmö for a NATO exercise. The Swedish navy jammed the drone and it vanished from radar. Sweden's defence minister said technical data confirmed it had launched from the Russian ship. Moscow's spokesman called the suggestion absurd. Nothing further happened.
Nothing further happened is the pattern, and it is the reason the question is difficult.
The tally
Take Romania, which keeps the most detailed public count. By 17 August this year, Romanian authorities had recorded 23 airspace violations by Russian drones, found 27 drones or fragments of them on Romanian soil, and shot four down. Russia had attacked targets near the Romanian border 54 times in 2026, against 28 in the whole of 2025. NATO had flown 42 air-policing missions over the country.
Elsewhere the incidents are smaller and stranger. A drone carrying explosives was found at Leipzig/Halle Airport this month, and Berlin attributed it to Russia. A similar device turned up at another German airport in August, close to a Ukrainian cargo aircraft. A Russian drone struck a passenger train around two kilometres from the Polish border. NATO shot down a drone over Lithuania. A Russian warship fired flares at a Danish helicopter over the Baltic. Last November, an explosion damaged the railway between Warsaw and Lublin, on a route used to supply Ukraine, which Polish officials called an unprecedented act of sabotage linked to Russian intelligence.
In August, NATO's members met and issued a statement saying Russia bears full responsibility for airspace violations that were dangerous and unacceptable. The language that mattered was quieter. The alliance described the incidents as evidence of Russia's increasing tolerance for risk.
The language that mattered was quieter. The alliance described the incidents as evidence of Russia's increasing tolerance for risk.
What the people paid to know actually think
They do not agree, and the disagreement is the most useful thing in the public record.
Michal Koudelka, who runs Czech intelligence, has warned of Russian operations in months, not years, meaning limited incursions, false-flag provocations, drone activity and influence campaigns rather than an invasion. Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, has cited assessments pointing to possible drone or missile attacks on NATO territory in the coming months, designed to test whether Article 5 means anything. French services are reported to have moved their estimate for major Russian attacks on power grids, railways, telecommunications and water systems forward from 2030 to the autumn of 2027. Germany's assessment points to 2029.
French services are reported to have moved their estimate for major Russian attacks on power grids, railways, telecommunications and water systems forward from 2030 to the autumn of 2027.
Against them: Normunds Mežviets, head of Latvia's state security service, says his agency sees no indications of an imminent attack. Estonia's foreign ministry has urged against panic. And Western intelligence agencies broadly agree that nothing resembling the visible build-up that preceded the 2022 invasion of Ukraine is currently detectable, while conceding that limited operations would not require one.
Finland's president has told his citizens to prepare mentally for something to happen. Emmanuel Macron says the Russian hybrid threat has intensified in recent weeks. Neither has said what.
The case that this is a substitute rather than a prelude
There is a serious argument, made by people who are not sanguine about Russia, that the drones and the sabotage are evidence of weakness rather than of a plan.
Analysts at the Royal United Services Institute set it out at the end of last year. Russian oil revenues had fallen by around a third year on year. Interest rates were above 16 per cent. Military spending was approaching 9 per cent of GDP. On the front line, Russian forces were advancing at roughly fifty metres a day at a cost measured in casualties that no European state would tolerate, and Soviet-era equipment reserves were projected to run down by late 2026 or early 2027.
A country in that position, the argument runs, escalates in the ways that are cheap. Sabotage, subversion and coercion cost little, are hard to attribute, and impose real costs on the other side. They are what you do instead of a war you cannot afford, not the overture to one.
The threshold
Which points at the actual question, and it is not the one the headlines ask.
Every incident described here was designed to sit just underneath the line at which a response becomes obligatory. A drone that crosses a border and turns back. A device that is found before it detonates. A ship that fires flares rather than shells. In each case the answer to "was that an attack" is arguable, and arguable is the point. An alliance of 32 countries cannot invoke its mutual defence clause over something it cannot agree happened.
So the meaningful question is not whether Vladimir Putin intends to attack NATO. It is whether NATO has a definition of attack that covers what is already occurring, and what it proposes to do on the day it decides the answer is no.
The question is not whether Vladimir Putin intends to attack NATO. It is whether NATO has a definition of attack that covers what is occurring, and what it proposes to do on the day it decides the answer is no.
The other variable
There is one more thing, and it complicates every assessment above. On 5 September, two American envoys spent more than three hours with Putin in Moscow discussing a proposal to end the war in Ukraine, and travelled on to Kyiv the following day. The Kremlin described a series of ideas for a settlement. A previous truce, over Easter, lasted 32 hours.
