A foiled drone attack targeting a German airport has prompted defence officials to warn that Europe is failing to deter Russia's hybrid war. Hybrid war is the term for military pressure applied through means that deliberately stay below the threshold of a conventional attack: sabotage, infrastructure disruption, and targeted operations designed to cause damage without triggering the kind of response that open warfare would. Those officials warn that NATO's answer has been too weak, and that Moscow has taken note.
What the German incident reveals
The airport attack was foiled, meaning it did not result in harm. Defence officials are not reading that as reassurance. Their argument is that the foiled plot is a sign of Moscow's impunity. By that term, they mean Russia can probe and test without facing a response carrying enough cost to make it stop.
That is the core of what officials are warning about. Hybrid operations are built to exploit a gap that conventional alliances find hard to close. When an incident looks like a criminal act rather than an act of war, member states disagree about how to respond. The political and legal machinery of collective defence was designed around armies crossing borders, not airports being targeted by drones.
NATO was formed as a collective defence pact: if one member is attacked, the others respond. The practical problem is defining what counts as an attack. A foiled drone strike at a civilian airport sits in contested territory. It is neither minor enough to ignore nor clear enough to trigger the alliance's collective defence mechanisms. Russia, officials argue, has learned to operate precisely in that space.
Deterrence, in plain terms, is the credible threat of a cost that an adversary decides is not worth paying. The warning from defence officials is that Europe has not made that cost credible. Stopping a single drone operation at one airport does not touch the broader campaign of hybrid pressure, officials say. Moscow, by their account, still sees more to gain from continuing than from stopping.