NextFin News - Europe's defence planners fear the continent could not sustain a prolonged war of attrition with Russia, and senior officials now warn the West is losing the hybrid war that would precede it. At a forum convened by the Munich Security Conference this week, defence officials working with NATO said European publics are not ready for a long conflict, leaving ministers locked in the task of persuading unprepared voters to cut welfare spending to fund defence. "The level of the debate has been at that of a kindergarten," one UK diplomat admitted.
The warning lands as Germany formally blamed Russia for an attempted drone attack on Leipzig/Halle airport in early August, and as NATO allies push defence spending toward a new 5% of GDP target by 2035. The central tension: Europe is spending more on defence than at any point since the Cold War, yet its officials say deterrence is failing precisely because the war they must deter is not a conventional one.
The Hybrid War Europe Cannot See, Let Alone Deter
Russia's campaign is designed to stay below the threshold of Article 5. The Munich Security Conference's 2026 report documents a growing list of suspected Russian hybrid incidents across EU and NATO countries - sabotage, vandalism, cyberattacks and arson - with a sharp rise in airspace violations in the fall of 2025. In September alone, around 20 Russian drones intruded into Polish airspace while three Russian MiG-31 fighter jets violated Estonian airspace for 12 minutes, prompting both governments to invoke NATO consultations under Article 4.
The pattern is deliberate ambiguity. Many incidents are designed to remain deniable, enabling Moscow to exert psychological pressure and induce political paralysis while analysts view them as probes of Europe's defences and efforts to weaken support for Ukraine by diverting attention to domestic security. Anne Keast-Butler, director of GCHQ, put it plainly in her annual lecture at Bletchley Park in May: "Where Russia is scaling up its daily hybrid activity against the UK and Europe, stretching from the seabed to cyberspace - relentlessly targeting critical infrastructure, democratic processes, supply chains and public trust."
The seabed is not a metaphor. Since October 2023, Russia's so-called shadow fleet has severed or damaged at least eleven subsea cables in the Baltic region, according to defence-industry tracking cited in security research. On New Year's Eve 2025, Finnish special forces boarded a cargo vessel in the Baltic Sea suspected of dragging its anchor across submarine cables linking Finland and Estonia. In response, the European Commission in February 2026 introduced a 347 million euro subsea infrastructure initiative with a new Cable Security Toolbox - the largest EU-level investment to date in protecting the cables that carry the continent's data and power.
The Leipzig attack illustrates the kinetic edge of the same campaign. On August 4, an explosives-laden drone was discovered in the security area of Leipzig/Halle airport, a cargo and military logistics hub used by NATO and Ukraine's Antonov Airlines, positioned between Ukrainian cargo aircraft. German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said the attack fits a "well-established pattern of Russian hybrid operations in Europe" and warned Germany should expect to be targeted again. One suspect has been identified as a Belarusian citizen carrying a Russian passport who entered Europe on an Italian tourist visa; a second is described as a Russian-born Latvian passport holder with alleged Russian intelligence links.
Cyber pressure runs alongside the physical. Romanian Defence Minister Radu Miruta said in March that Romanian state institutions face more than 10,000 cyberattacks a day, while the defence ministry has reported nearly daily attempts to jam GPS signals in the Black Sea. Romania shares a 650 km border with Ukraine and has had Russian drone fragments repeatedly fall on its territory.
The strategic consequence is that NATO war planners see their options narrowing. If Europe cannot absorb a long war - because the public lacks the appetite, because populist parties sympathetic to Moscow are rising in Poland, France, Italy and Germany - then deterrence loses credibility. A deterrence threat only works if the adversary believes you will carry it out. Europe's own officials are now saying, quietly, that they are not sure they could.
Why Deterrence Fails When the Threat Is Gray-Zone
Classical deterrence rests on three pillars: capability, credibility, and communication. Europe is rebuilding the first and failing at the other two.
On capability, the numbers show real movement. European NATO members plus Canada are expected to spend around $634 billion on defence in 2026, or 2.53% of their combined GDP - up from 30.3% of NATO's total spending in 2021 to a projected 42.7% this year. The International Institute for Strategic Studies notes that European allies allocated 36.2% of defence budgets to investment in 2026, compared with 24.8% in 2020, a structural shift toward procurement and R&D. NATO's new target is 5% of GDP by 2035 - 3.5% for core defence and 1.5% for defence-related projects such as civil preparedness and critical-infrastructure protection.
But capability does not automatically produce deterrence. Deterrence is a psychological relationship with the adversary's calculus, and hybrid warfare exploits the gap between spending and resolve. Russia does not need to match NATO tank-for-tank; it needs only to convince European electorates that the cost of resisting exceeds the cost of accommodation. Every drone overflight, every severed undersea cable, every cyber intrusion against an energy grid is a vote in that referendum - and it is conducted in European living rooms, not on a battlefield.
This is the transmission channel that defence spending alone cannot close. Money buys missiles; it does not buy the public consent required to use them, or to endure retaliation. The MSC officials' complaint is not about procurement shortfalls - it is that "the level of the debate has been at that of a kindergarten." One recent British cabinet member said the West had been "crap" at educating its public about the scale of the hybrid conflict. Successive British prime ministers, a UK diplomat claimed, had done nothing to explain the threat.
The political constraint is tightening just as the security situation worsens. Populist parties across Europe's main military states - including Germany's Alternative für Deutschland - are sympathetic to Russia and want an end to the Ukraine conflict. The MSC discussion flagged elections next year in Poland, France and Italy as the "elephant in the room." One proposal under consideration: the EU should publish a collective statement on the Russian threat that populist forces would be challenged to accept or decline. It is a tell that the battle is now framed as one of domestic political legitimacy, not military balance.
"Europe is stagnating at a time when the external threats were assuming a dimension which is really very serious. These are really huge and existential challenges requiring greater integration in defence," said Wolfgang Ischinger, chair of the Munich Security Conference.
The E5 Gamble and the American Question
Europe's institutional answer is the E5 - France, Germany, Italy, Poland and the United Kingdom, with the European Union at the table. The group met in Krakow in February 2026 and announced joint development of low-cost air-defence effectors to counter drones, and it is at early stages of agreeing how to jointly procure integrated air and missile defence, deep precision strike, and space-based early warning - capabilities currently provided mostly by the United States.
The logic is to build a European pillar inside NATO that can hold if Washington withdraws. But the same officials promoting it admit the flaw: "The US are better at talking about burden shifting than power sharing," one diplomat said. Decisions on US troop deployments that could leave Europe in charge of its own conventional defence are expected within months. If the United States blocks a stronger European pillar while simultaneously reducing its own commitment, Europe faces the worst of both worlds - strategic autonomy in name, vulnerability in fact.
Ischinger argues the E5 could later incorporate Ukraine, noting Kyiv now has the largest and strongest army in Europe. That framing - a Europe rearmed around the continent's most battle-hardened military, outside the EU - captures both the opportunity and the dislocation of the moment.
Cyclical Pressure or Structural Shift?
The question that determines the investment case is whether this is a cyclical spike in threat perception or a structural regime change. The evidence points to structural.
Cyclical threats revert: a leadership dispute cools, a budget cycle ends, an election replaces a hawk with a dove. Russia's hybrid campaign shows none of those properties. It is institutionalised - a standing capability spanning sabotage, cyber, disinformation, migration weaponisation, and critical-infrastructure attack, run continuously rather than episodically. GCHQ describes it as "daily" activity. The Munich Security Report frames it as a widening of the battlefield, not a temporary escalation. And the driver is durable: a Russia locked into long-term confrontation with the West has structural incentives to keep probing below the Article 5 threshold, because that is where it holds the advantage.
The corollary is that European defence spending is not a stimulus-style surge that will fade. The 5% target to 2035, the shift of procurement share from 24.8% to 36.2% of defence budgets, and the E5 joint-procurement push are responses to a regime change, and they should be underwritten as such. What is cyclical is the political pain - elections, coalition arithmetic, welfare-versus-guns trade-offs. Those will produce volatility in individual national budgets and procurement timelines. The direction of travel is not cyclical.
There is one important caveat to the structural call. Not every incident is a state-directed shot across the bow. Finnish intelligence, in its National Security Overview published in March 2026, offered a more cautious reading of Baltic Sea cable damage, challenging the assumption that all such incidents amount to clear-cut Russian sabotage. That nuance matters: it means some fraction of the "hybrid war" narrative rests on attribution that is contested even among allies. But the caveat cuts both ways - ambiguity is itself the weapon. Whether a cable cut is sabotage or accident, the effect on European risk premia and political debate is the same, and Moscow has little incentive to clarify.
The Counter-Thesis: Europe Is Doing More Than Officials Admit
The strongest case against the pessimists is that the MSC officials are measuring deterrence against an impossible standard. Deterrence of gray-zone activity was never going to be clean, and by the one metric that matters - no Article 5 incursion, no sustained conventional attack on NATO soil - the alliance has held. European spending is rising faster than at any time since rearmament before the Second World War; the 2% floor that was once controversial is now met by all members; and the E5 is producing concrete joint capability rather than declarations.
There is force in that view. But it answers a different question. Nobody claims NATO's conventional deterrent has collapsed. The officials' point is narrower and more damaging: that the war Russia is actually fighting - the hybrid one - is not being deterred, and that this is eroding the foundation on which conventional deterrence rests. If publics will not endure a long war, then the conventional threat is less credible, and the adversary's incentive to keep probing increases. The falsifying signal is specific: if, over the next two years, suspected Russian hybrid incidents against European targets fall materially while political support for Ukraine and defence spending holds above current levels, the "deterrence is failing" thesis is wrong. If incidents rise or hold steady and populist, Russia-sympathetic parties gain ground in the 2027 election cycle, the thesis stands.
What Comes Next
Short term, watch three signals. First, the German investigation into Leipzig - whether Berlin produces evidence it deems public, and whether it triggers coordinated EU expulsions or sanctions. Second, US decisions on troop deployments in Europe, expected within months, which will either force European hand or relieve pressure. Third, the EU's proposed collective statement on the Russian threat - whether populist parties accept or decline it will reveal how much political room European capitals actually have.
Medium term, the E5 procurement pipeline is the real test. Joint air-defence effectors are a start; integrated air and missile defence, deep precision strike, and space-based early warning are the capabilities that would make a European pillar meaningful. Delivery timelines and budget commitments there will matter more than summit communiqués.
Long term, the structural call implies a re-rating of European defence as a multi-year investment theme - but with a political risk premium that will not disappear. The beneficiaries are clear: European defence primes, air-defence and drone-countermeasure specialists, and cyber-security firms positioned on critical-infrastructure protection. The exposed are the welfare states asked to fund the shift, and the populist parties whose Russia-sympathetic positioning becomes a liability if the hybrid campaign escalates into an overt attack.
Europe is spending its way toward a conventional deterrent while losing the war that is actually being fought. The uncomfortable truth defence officials will not say in public is that no amount of hardware deters an adversary whose strategy is to make you doubt your own willingness to use it.
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