Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan
In late January, barely a week into Donald Trump’s second term as U.S. president, a senior NATO official told members of the European Parliament that Russia’s intensifying use of hybrid warfare poses a major threat to the West. In the hearing, James Appathurai, NATO deputy assistant secretary-general for innovation, hybrid, and cyber, described “incidents of sabotage taking place across NATO countries over a period of the last couple of years,” including train derailments, arson, attacks on infrastructure, and even assassination plots against leading industrialists. Since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale war in Ukraine in 2022, sabotage operations linked to Russian intelligence have been recorded in 15 countries. Speaking to the press after the January hearing, Appathurai said it was time for NATO to move to a “war footing” to deal with these escalating attacks.
In the weeks since then, Trump’s dramatic overtures to Putin have pushed the sabotage campaign into the background. Instead, in aiming to quickly secure a deal with Russia to end the war in Ukraine, the Trump administration has talked of a new era of relations between Washington and Moscow. At the same time, the White House has taken steps to dismantle efforts within the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to counter cyberwarfare, disinformation, and election interference against the United States—all of which have previously been tied to Moscow. Indeed, Trump has suggested that Russia can be trusted to uphold any peace deal and that Putin is “going to be more generous than he has to be.”
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