Danish intelligence warns Russia will widen its hybrid campaign in Europe

Denmark's military intelligence service expects Russia to step up its hybrid campaign against Europe in the coming months, and to do so with heavier consequences for the countries on the receiving end.

The assessment by the Danish Defence Intelligence Service also identifies a low but growing risk that Moscow launches a limited military attack against one or more NATO members. That is a narrow scenario rather than a forecast of general war, but it marks a shift in how a Western intelligence agency is willing to describe the range of outcomes.

The warning lands after months of incidents that European officials have tied to Russia, including drone finds and sabotage against infrastructure. A passenger train was hit in Ukraine less than 2 miles from the Polish border earlier this month, a proximity that unsettled governments along NATO's eastern flank.

'Increasingly difficult to distinguish'

Ed Arnold of the Royal United Services Institute said the pattern points to a change in Moscow's risk appetite. "It just showed that Putin's risk calculations are getting more liberal," he said, adding that "everyone just got a bit freaked out by that, quite frankly."

Katja Bego of Chatham House put the problem in legal terms. "With these incidents now so frequent and so brazen, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish them from actual acts of war," she said. William Alberque, a former NATO official, read the same record as a demonstration. "I think they are trying to show Europe they can act without consequences," he said.

Poland's prime minister, Donald Tusk, has said the Kremlin is planning drone and missile activity engineered to look accidental, a design that complicates any response. Officials on the eastern flank are nonetheless careful about the ceiling. Latvian President Edgars Rinkevics said an "incursion of the type of 2022 Ukraine is not likely," and Lithuanian Defense Minister Robertas Kaunas said there is "no conventional threat at the moment" while Russian forces remain committed in Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy drew the opposite conclusion from restraint. "If you don't respond to Russians, they will go further," he said. That argument now runs into a second uncertainty in European capitals: how firm the US commitment to allied defense remains, with the Pentagon weighing a reduced military presence in Europe.

Moscow rejects the accusations. President Vladimir Putin said this month that Russia has no aggressive intentions toward Europe, a line Russian officials have repeated as the incident count has risen. Both sides are also operating against a backdrop of deep-strike exchanges, including the record drone raid on Moscow's refinery belt.

What it means: The significance of the Danish assessment is not the sabotage inventory, which European agencies have been cataloging for two years, but the willingness to name escalation as the expected direction. That creates a problem of thresholds rather than capability. Sabotage and deniable drone activity sit deliberately below the level at which NATO's collective defense obligations engage, so each incident is answered nationally, unevenly and after the fact. The eastern flank's own ministers are saying invasion is not the near-term risk, which leaves the alliance arguing over how to respond to attacks that are calibrated never to force a decision. Until that is settled, the cost of ambiguity is carried by railways, ports and airports rather than by armies, and it falls on the same Baltic and Central European corridors that Europe now depends on for trade with Asia.