European leaders are now fretting about Vladimir Putin in much the same way that everyone worries these days about artificial intelligence.
Until recently, AI agents remained within the virtual spaces where they’d been developed. Rather than free range, they were confined to their “sandboxes.” But there have been a number of cases of these AI agents lying, cheating, and hacking their way out of their designated spaces. Now, even AI experts are talking about the not-insignificant odds that the technology they designed will run amok and kill all of humanity.
Putin, too, was at the beginning of his reign confined to his Russian sandbox. Then he intervened in Georgia. He lied and cheated his way into Crimea and the Donbas. In 2022, he expanded Russian operations significantly when he tried to take over all of Ukraine.
Still, from the European point of view, Russia was flexing its muscles within the post-Soviet space. Now, Russian agents are increasingly operating outside this sandbox as well to launch attacks elsewhere in Europe. They have hired single-use operatives to commit arson, which would likely include such recent attacks as
the one on WB Electronics, a Polish manufacturer of drones for Ukraine. An attack drone, which failed to detonate, was
found last month at the Leipzig airport near a Ukrainian transport plane. There have been
an estimated 150 Russian-linked cases of sabotage throughout Europe between 2022 and 2026, and the pace of the attacks is accelerating.
Russia is already involved in what NATO calls “out-of-area operations.” So far, however, these operations remain within a grey zone of sort-of plausible deniability. But European leaders are concerned that Putin, too, has the capacity to run amok and trigger a world war, if not a nuclear apocalypse.
The most recent cause for concern was the military exercise that Belarus conducted last week near its borders with Poland and Lithuania. This is the infamous Suwalki Gap, the narrow wedge of territory that separates Belarus from the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad and that connects the Baltic countries to the rest of NATO. During the Cold War, NATO ran various war games in anticipation of a Soviet attack on Poland through this 65-mile gap. Now, NATO leaders worry that Russia, perhaps alongside Belarus, will manufacture some excuse to “defend” Kaliningrad by occupying part of Lithuania or Poland.
After that, as former presidential envoy Brett McGurk
imagines the scenario, “Russia would also claim through non-official channels that a NATO response risked nuclear war. The purpose is less about the Gap and severing NATO’s Baltic flank, than undermining NATO and its mutual defense commitments altogether.”
European leaders are freaking out. Polish leader Donald Tusk
has reported on intelligence assessments that Russia is planning an attack on NATO in the next months. Emmanuel Macron recently brought together all French party leaders and prospective presidential candidates to discuss this threat. Finland has tested its civil defense shelters
for the first time in 30 years (though the Finnish prime minister has
also cautioned his European colleagues not to overreact to Russian actions).
Even the otherwise Russia-friendly Trump administration is getting a little worried.
Though Trump has
threatened to pull U.S. troops out of European countries for their failure to support his various military ventures—and removed 5,000 troops from Germany in the spring—he is moving forward with
establishing a new U.S. military base in Poland, which the Poles tout as vital for countering Russia. One reason for the dispatch of CIA chief John Ratcliffe to Moscow last month
was reportedly to warn the Kremlin not to attack NATO members. And the Justice Department
has charged five Russian intelligence operatives with belonging to a network that “paid and attempted to pay individuals within the United States and elsewhere to conduct pre-operational surveillance and carry out targeted killings, and commissioned associates to commit and attempt to commit acts of terrorism against civilian and military infrastructure in European countries that are aligned, or perceived to be aligned, with Ukraine.”
Putin’s Plans
At a certain level, none of this makes sense.
To date, Russia has scrupulously avoided any engagement with NATO forces for fear that the latter, if they intervened directly in the conflict, would tip the war in favor of Ukraine. Now more than ever, Russia can’t afford such a confrontation. The war inside Ukraine is not going well for Russian forces. So far in 2026, Ukraine has clawed back
375 square miles, which includes 60 settlements. Ukrainian attacks on Russian energy infrastructure is having a serious impact on the Russian economy, with refining capacity
cut nearly in half, billions of dollars in lost export revenues, and gas prices soaring at home. The war is now having a direct impact on Russian wallets, and that could mean political problems (at some point) for Putin.
The Russian president doesn’t harbor ambitions to take over Europe. Nor does he want to reconstitute the old Soviet Union. Even reestablishing control over the relatively small Baltic states—Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia—would pose enormous challenges either in the form of a NATO response or guerrilla resistance to Russian military rule.
Instead, what Putin wants is to control the fates of the regions surrounding Russia. In the Kremlin’s best-case scenario, Russian incorporates the predominantly Russian-speaking areas of the “near abroad,” like parts of eastern Ukraine and eastern Latvia. Putin has also drawn together semi-autonomous regions like Transnistria in Moldova and Abkhazia in Georgia into a League of Unrecognized Territories. He has locked down the allegiances of fully independent governments—Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, and the current government in Georgia—that look to Russia for trade and protection. The Kremlin invested a lot of money and time into backing a pro-Russian party in Moldova that, if it had won in the election this year, could have dragged the country in that same direction.
But Putin would also be content with dividing, politically paralyzing, and economically devastating the recalcitrant states on its borders to make sure that they aren’t cohesive enough to join NATO or, more importantly, the European Union. Putin is currently pursuing that fall-back option in Ukraine.
Ukraine hasn’t yet knuckled under. So, Putin is simultaneously pursuing another option. If Ukraine can’t be divided and conquered then perhaps pressure can be brought to bear on the other side of the equation. And so, Putin is testing the cohesion of both NATO and the EU. The grey-zone attacks against NATO targets is one way of testing how resolute the alliance really is, especially now, when the Trump administration has expressed doubts about the Article 5 collective defense mechanism.
The recent victories of the Alternative for Deutschland
in the Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern regional elections—and the party’s
commanding lead in national polling—point to another way for Putin to compromise the EU now that his finger puppet Viktor Orban is no longer in charge in Hungary. The AfD has not been shy in touting its pro-Russian policies. It is already
preparing for talks with the Russian government in early 2027 to lay the groundwork for restarting German imports of natural gas.
Putin, meanwhile, has consolidated his power on the home front. In elections this month, Putin’s United Russia party won a record number of seats in the Duma. Putin has sidelined—silenced, arrested, exiled, killed—all serious political opposition. Like Stalin, he has gone after critics on the left and the right. He has also rejected all ceasefire proposals and appears to be on the verge of calling up another
several hundred thousand new recruits for the war in Ukraine.
Despite Ukrainian successes on the battlefield and its drone war against Russian infrastructure, Putin feels fully in control. At least until 2027, he is likely to continue to wage war in Ukraine to secure all of the Donbas, and he will also continue to pursue grey-zone operations in Europe.
International condemnation of Russia hasn’t been even a speed bump for Putin. Military assistance to Ukraine has leveled the battlefield, to an extent, but it also hasn’t stopped the Russian leader. Sanctions have wreaked havoc on the Russian economy, but they haven’t brought down the country’s military industrial complex.
Trump, meanwhile, has tried maximum appeasement, from the red-carpet treatment in Alaska extended to Putin to the incorporation of Russian talking points in the peace plan presented by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Ukraine has refused to go along with this strategy.
That leaves three options.
Western Options
The West could maintain its current policy of refusing to provide Ukraine with a significant military advantage. The war will continue to take its terrible toll without either side able to declare definitive victory. Maybe that will produce an armistice, along the Korean War model. Maybe it will just produce a forever war along with an uptick in mysterious attacks on European targets.
Or the Trump administration could put maximum pressure on Ukraine to buckle diplomatically and accept Russian terms in an unequal peace deal. This would not be a just solution and, given Ukrainian obstinance to date, it probably wouldn’t work either.
The last option is not very palatable. In response to grey-zone attacks, NATO could present Putin with an ultimatum backed by a credible threat of force (for instance, a no-fly zone over Ukraine). I’m no fan of NATO, and I worry about escalation to the nuclear level. But given that Putin seems to understand only the language of power, some show of force by the West could make the Russian leader think twice about further expanding his war. It might also push Russia to the negotiating table.
Putin thinks that he has time on his side. He has near-absolute control over his country and can sacrifice pretty much everything to the war effort. If he waits long enough—and continues to
use his asymmetric advantage to bomb Ukrainian infrastructure—the West might succumb to its many divisions and lose both the will and capacity to support Ukraine. Or Putin’s out-of-sandbox operations, like the recent misdemeanors of AI agents, has the potential to unite the world against the rising threat.
The super-intelligence of AI, the middling intelligence of Putin, and the sub-intelligence of Trump: the world now faces an unholy trinity of supervillains.
