Poland Warns NATO of Deadly Russian Hybrid Attacks

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Arson, blown-up railway tracks, drones over airports: So far, Russia’s sabotage campaign in Europe has mostly caused property damage, but Poland expects that people will soon be killed. NATO members should prepare a robust response to a possible deadly Russian hybrid attack, Radosław Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, told the Financial Times. Damage to property is one thing, he said. If people died, it would force a “very serious discussion” within NATO.

Assassination Plots Against Defense Executives

Mr. Sikorski did not say what that response should look like. But the concern is real. Intelligence officials from five European countries told The FT that Russian operatives have targeted senior executives at European defense companies for assassination. German authorities have also blamed Moscow for a failed drone attack on Leipzig/Halle airport in August, which, according to German intelligence, was aimed at a Ukrainian cargo plane. Danish intelligence also recently warned that Russia could soon attack NATO territory.

Mr. Sikorski is therefore calling for tougher measures:

• Consulates: The remaining Russian consulates in the E.U. should close, as Poland has already done.
• Diplomats: The number of Russian diplomats should be reduced and their freedom of movement restricted.
• Entry: Russians should only be allowed to enter the E.U. with biometric passports, and tourist visas should be sharply reduced.
• Attribution: Governments should publicly blame Moscow for hybrid attacks once the evidence is sufficient.

E.U. foreign ministers are meeting in Luxembourg to discuss bloc-wide restrictions on Russian diplomats and possible curbs on tourist visas.

What Hybrid Attacks Are

Hybrid attacks are those that stay below the threshold of open war. They include sabotage, arson, cyberattacks, disinformation, election interference and airspace violations by drones or fighter jets. Often, petty criminals recruited via messaging apps carry them out, making it hard to trace the attacks back to whoever ordered them. That is precisely the point: Hybrid strategies are deliberately ambiguous to hinder detection and attribution, the political scientist Guillem Colom Piella writes in an analysis for the CIDOB think tank.

Poland knows these tactics firsthand. The government has since attributed the fire that destroyed the Marywilska shopping center in Warsaw in May 2024 to Russian intelligence services. In November 2025, an explosive charge damaged the railway line between Warsaw and Lublin, which is also used to supply Ukraine, and Polish authorities again identified Russian intelligence as the culprit. In July, a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile crashed into a field in eastern Poland and exploded.

What This Has to Do With Article 5

Article 5 is at the heart of NATO: An armed attack on one member is considered an attack on all. It has been invoked only once, after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Below it is Article 4, which provides only for consultations. Poland and Estonia recently invoked it after Russian drones and fighter jets violated their airspace.

Since its 2016 summit in Warsaw, NATO has said that a hybrid attack could also trigger the alliance’s collective defense clause. At the 2023 summit in Vilnius, leaders reaffirmed that this could apply to cyberattacks “on a case-by-case basis.” But the alliance has never defined where exactly the threshold lies. That is the clarity Mr. Sikorski is now demanding: NATO should define when an attack warrants a much stronger response.

Clear Red Lines or Deliberate Ambiguity

Whether that would work is disputed. Eitvydas Bajarūnas, a Lithuanian diplomat, argues in an analysis for the think tank CEPA that responses to Russian sabotage so far have been too weak and that clearer triggers for Article 5 would deter adversaries. Mr. Colom Piella, by contrast, points to practical hurdles: The affected country must first clearly attribute the attack, and invoking the collective defense clause requires the consent of all members, which is difficult to achieve when the evidence is contested. NATO also lacks nonmilitary tools for a graduated response to attacks that deliberately stay below the threshold, according to Mr. Colom Piella.