The Geopolitical Mismatch Driving Russia to Threaten the West

Russia faces a fundamental asymmetry as it seeks to beat Ukraine into submission with intensifying airstrikes on shopping malls, power stations, ports and other infrastructure. Kyiv can rely on a secure hinterland beyond its borders—its European neighbors—for economic resilience and for military logistics.

The Kremlin, whose refineries, ports and defense industries are also under attack by Ukrainian missiles and drones, has no such backup. Hits to Russia’s militarized economy translate more directly into damage to the country’s ability to keep the war going.

This lopsided geopolitical setup offsets, to a significant degree, Russia’s advantage in firepower. It has also become the key reason driving what Western officials say is a widening Russian campaign of sabotage, hacking and other hybrid operations aimed at intimidating European leaders and voters.

Warning Russia against taking hostilities to North Atlantic Treaty Organization members in Europe was a key message delivered by Central Intelligence Agency director John Ratcliffe on his recent trip to Moscow, according to people familiar with the matter.

Russian officials have long described their war as one against the “collective West,” and not just Ukraine. Russian threats have become increasingly strident this summer, including warnings of military strikes against the Baltic states and even the U.K.

Ukraine’s economy and military effort were funded by $105 billion in new European assistance approved this year, money that came on top of vast amounts of aid and arms received from the U.S. and other NATO members since the 2022 full-scale invasion. European officials are already talking about another package of comparable size, perhaps to be funded with frozen Russian assets.

Russia, however, has to pay for its own war at a time when its economy is under pressure from Ukrainian strikes and Western sanctions. Two of Moscow’s closest allies, Iran and North Korea, are broke. China is taking advantage of Russia’s predicament to negotiate lower oil and gas prices, and is facing its own economic headwinds.

Russian leaders believe that they need to reverse this imbalance, fast, said Sergey Lagodinsky, a German member of the European Parliament and a Russian native. “They see that Ukraine can survive and can continue to fight because it has access to outside resources and outside solidarity, and that is what they want to cut or damage,” he said.

Much of Russia, up to the middle of Siberia, is now within range of Ukrainian drones, and Ukrainian attacks on energy installations and logistics warehouses occur nightly—as do Russian strikes on Ukraine.

In one illustration of the disparity in consequences, Russia is struggling with a full-blown fuel crisis because Ukrainian drones have disabled more than one-third of the nation’s refining capacity. By contrast, gas stations are functioning normally in Ukraine because of fuel imports from Europe—even though Ukraine’s own refineries were heavily bombed as far back as 2022.

Ukraine’s military uses logistics hubs in countries like Poland, Germany and Romania, while Ukrainian defense companies have established production lines across Europe, including a plant making ballistic-missile fuel that is under construction in Denmark.

With the exception of Belarus and North Korea, none of Russia’s neighbors, including its formal defense allies in Central Asia, are openly helping its war effort. Even Belarus is careful these days not to provoke more sanctions from the West or a military response from Ukraine.

Seen from the Kremlin, the situation is intolerable: NATO countries are inflicting strategic blows on Russia’s economy and military capacity, including its space program, ballistic-missile industry and strategic bomber fleet, with Ukrainian hands—and without paying much of a price.

“There is an asymmetry in terms of the ability to inflict pain and extract costs by Russia from the West for its support of Ukraine,” said Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin. Ukraine, he said, has eagerly taken “the war to enemy territory—and it gets a lot of training, advice and material support for these operations behind enemy lines.”

Russia, meanwhile, is constrained by the fact that Moscow doesn’t have a Ukraine of its own, an ally that could strike NATO and absorb the retaliatory blows, Gabuev said. Iran and Yemen’s Houthis are the closest approximations—but they have their own priorities focused on the Middle East that are only partially aligned with Moscow’s, and they possess little capacity to affect European calculations.

This has left Moscow with hybrid warfare—a loose term that includes a recent drone incident involving a Ukrainian cargo plane at Germany’s Leipzig/Halle airport, cyberattacks that disrupted Polish rail services and a series of explosions that struck European defense plants—as a key lever to reshape European attitudes.

“What we see is that, even as the Russians are facing very substantial resistance from Ukraine, they are stepping up hybrid acts in Europe—and their risk appetite is going up,” warned a senior NATO official.

The notion that Russia must hit military and logistics targets in European nations to win the war is gaining currency in Moscow, said Hanna Notte, Eurasia director at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies and author of a recent book on Russia’s foreign and security policy, “We Shall Outlast Them.”

“There are hawks on the Russian side who have been saying for a long time that Russia is fighting with one hand behind its back. These voices are becoming louder and will become louder,” she said. “The key question is: How far will Russia go? How much will they step up the game to deal with this problem?”

Moscow’s next step on the escalation ladder could be a limited one-off attack—possibly using captured Ukrainian drones, but also missiles—on one or two logistics targets involved in assisting Ukraine on European territory, some officials warn. Semiofficial commentators on Russian TV have been clamoring for just that for months.

“I am increasingly worried that we may see one single strike somewhere, as messaging to see what the populations will be doing, at the time when European societies are growing very tired of the war,” said Daniel Szeligowski, head of the Eastern Europe program at the Polish Institute of International Affairs. “In that situation, I would be much more worried about the social response. To what extent are our populations prepared for this psychologically, I do not know.”

Such a gamble, of course, could also massively backfire, increasing European determination against Russia just at the time when parties favorable to Moscow are gaining ground ahead of elections in France, Germany and Italy.

In Germany’s case, the intensification of Russia’s hybrid warfare has already shown itself to be counterproductive, said Norbert Röttgen, a prominent lawmaker from the governing CDU party. “It is becoming increasingly clear to Germans that Russia is also a threat to them, and thus strengthening German political resolve,” he said. “Admittedly, a third of the population is against strong support for Ukraine. However, the other two thirds are reinforced in their support.”

Ukraine’s Western supporters, and Ukraine itself, have ways of inflicting more pain on Russia if the conflict escalates. The U.S. could dramatically increase Ukraine’s ability to target Russian ballistic missile batteries by allowing the use of the Starlink satellite network to guide drones over Russian territory. Kyiv, meanwhile, has so far refrained from targeting Russian airports—even though Ukraine’s own civil aviation has been grounded since 2022.

“Ukraine has already started to strike in a way that ordinary Russians can see that the war is real, it is in their homes and not something on television,” said Hanna Shelest, security studies director at the Ukrainian Prism think tank in Kyiv. “Yet, Ukraine is still showing a fair bit of restraint. The question is, ‘how much longer for?”’

Despite the mounting problems of the Russian economy—industrial production flatlined in the first half of 2026, with zero growth despite huge spending on new weapons—few Western officials expect that Vladimir Putin will seek peace because of the pain inflicted by Ukrainian attacks.

“One way or another, the Russians will expand the war because in their grand strategy, Ukraine is an obstacle and not the prize. Their goal is greater influence over Europe and beyond. NATO has failed in deterring Russian aggression against Ukraine, and the question arising now is whether NATO can really deter Russian aggression against NATO,” argued Oleksandr V. Danylyuk, chairman of the Center for Defense Reforms in Kyiv and a former military and intelligence official.

By stepping up the destruction of Ukrainian cities, Moscow is signaling to the rest of Europe that any defiance is so painful that it would be preferable to accommodate the Kremlin’s will, Danylyuk added: “A fortress that resists must be razed as a warning to others—this is an old principle, from the Assyrians and from the Mongols, and one that Russia follows today. The message is that if NATO cannot protect you and if you don’t want to be destroyed like Ukraine, then your only source of security guarantees is Russia.”

Marko Mihkelson, the chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Estonian parliament, said he agreed that Moscow’s strategic goal remains unchanged: conquest of Ukraine and the destruction of European collective security. Yet, he added, there has been no change of Russian military posture along borders from Finland to the Baltic states to Poland—and no indication of preparations for an invasion.

“The picture behind our borders is that all their focus is on Ukraine,” he said. “I don’t think that militarily they are right now both ready and willing to do something here.”

But some worry that could change. Poland’s Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, in a recent essay published by the Economist, warned that Russia’s hybrid attacks on European nations represent a “razvedka boyem”—reconnaissance by combat that tests reactions and precedes a larger offensive.

To deter that offensive, he added, Europe must convince Russia “that we are willing to sacrifice more than money to stand up for ourselves.”