How viable is Russia’s strategy of escalating against NATO while remaining below the Article 5 threshold?

[u/EUobs]

Hey, I'm Lucia from EUobserver and we thought this would be interessting!

Following renewed Russian threats against the UK over its support for Ukraine, we spoke with defence and security experts about what escalation against a NATO member could realistically look like.

Their assessment points less towards conventional military action and more towards continued operations in the grey zone: cyberattacks against critical infrastructure, sabotage of ports and logistics supporting Ukraine, disruption of undersea infrastructure, and potentially attacks against individuals connected to the defence industry.

This raises a broader deterrence problem. Individually, such incidents may remain below the threshold for a conventional NATO response. Cumulatively, however, they can impose significant costs while testing how far Russia can escalate without provoking collective action.

How sustainable is NATO’s current approach to this kind of incremental escalation? And is ambiguity around the threshold for a collective response strengthening deterrence — or giving Russia more room to operate?

Full article is here :)

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[u/nar_tapio_00]

I think the interesting question here is about non conventional responses. Both what is actually going on and what could be done. For example, after the Salisbury attacks by Russia on the UK no response was publicized, but there were claims that there had been or would be unpublished responses.

There are surely lots of potential things that the West can do that are either below the level of counting as a direct attack or are plausibly deniable. * provide terminal guidance to Ukrainian drones to strike against Russian Navy and shadow fleet ships in the Baltic * give missile systems to Ukraine which have not been given so far (are the Storm shadow plans a British response to Russian grey zone aggression and threats?) * Support the SBU's campaign against convicted Russian Generals by providing targeting information * sabotage and remote sabotage against machine tools * Identify illicit shipments of weapons components going into Russia and help replace them with booby traps. * use backdoors in Microsoft, Oracle and other Western created software to poison the information infrastructure of Russia's key companies.

What is clear is that, if Russia is carrying out targeted assassinations and sabotage operations in the West, the the rules which limit the freedom of action of the CIA and other Western secret services have become as outdated as the rules which used to limit Ukraine's access access to land mines.

[u/00000000000000000000]

The Russian view is basically Ukraine is a civil war and the world should aid Russia in it. On paper Russia wants to absorb some territory in Ukraine as a reduced war aim, but ultimately their desire would be some level of political control over all of Ukraine long term. Ukraine and Russia have been unable to make terms so you have a long war. Meanwhile you have concerns with respect to cooperation between Russia, Iran, and North Korea on weapons of mass destruction, war material/troops, disruption of world trade, and sanctions evasion. "Grey Zone" Hybrid Warfare can escalate eventually to direct conflict between NATO and CSTO. Direct conflict can escalate to tactical nuclear weapons. There is a risk premium with any approach. What is perhaps more clear is that the West can out-produce the Russian alliance in terms of military hardware and escalate aid levels to Ukraine of all types. Economic pressure against Russia can also be elevated.

[u/Fatalist_m]

There are people in the West who think that Russia is a long-term threat, and that the West should help Ukraine in order to weaken Russia and teach it a lesson.

Then there is a second group, who are also concerned about conflict with Russia, but who think that this conflict is caused only by Western involvement in the Ukraine war, and that the way to avoid it is to stop supporting Ukraine militarily.

Russia wants to help group #2 in the information war (I assume this because it would make logical sense, though they're not always rational). So I assume that all their hybrid-war acts - physical, informational or cyber, will be aimed at targets that are somehow connected to Ukraine: factories heavily involved in producing weapons for Ukraine, Ukrainian assets (like the Antonov planes based in Germany), and the infrastructure used for supplying goods/fuel/energy to Ukraine.

Any open attack against the Baltics or any other NATO territory seems very unlikely until the end of the war in Ukraine. I think they may even try to plant such rumors(about an imminent attack on the Baltics, etc) to discredit group #1. It's a similar trick to what they did in 2021, when they massed a large force close to Ukraine, causing fears of an invasion, then withdrew it; so when they deployed troops again in 2022, many people were convinced that it was a nothingburger too. The boy who cried wolf effect, basically.