What is Russia Up To?

All across Europe and North America, no Western government will say it outright, but Vladimir Putin and his inner circle are up to something. It's hard to put a finger on what the exact plan might be. It's Vladimir Putin, after all, and even after all this time.

The man's cunning and the ruthlessness of his allies can make them unpredictable. But there's a whole lot that's changing right now, across Russia, Ukraine, and the wider region, and it seems to be laying the groundwork for something bigger.

Russian drones are probing deeper into European air defenses, as NATO warns of a new wave of sabotage across the continent.

Russian hybrid attacks are growing more frequent, migration is increasingly being weaponized on the eastern borders, and tunnels now stretch from Belarus, underneath Poland, and the Baltic states.

Ukraine is fresh off its latest political crisis, there's no end in sight to its air defense shortages, and Russia needs an excuse to conduct a nationwide mass mobilization. The NATO alliance is leaking its war plans to the German papers.

The director of the CIA is flying to Moscow, and NATO warplanes are doing something, hard to know just what, over the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. Experts and intelligence agencies across the Western world have been sounding the alarms for months. Russia is laying the foundation for a direct attack on the NATO alliance.

Now it appears that attack may be very close at hand, so let's get into it.

Shifting Winds Now at the start of today's episode, we'd like to make it clear that this conversation is going to include lots of speculation. at Warfronts, we don't have any special tips, we don't have any secret insights, and we haven't had any Kremlin officials hit us up on Telegram to fill us in on the deeper story here.

Sometimes we get to come to you with lots and lots of data and draw strong conclusions from the data directly, but every once in a while we have a day like today where it certainly seems as if something major is on the horizon, but we aren't quite able to say what.

All across the defense and open source intelligence world, there's something in the air right now, so the best we could do is try and explain why that is and what we suspect might be happening behind the scenes. We'll start in the city of Leipzig, where overnight on the 4th or 5th of August, the Leipzig-Hala airport discovered an attempted act of sabotage.

The airport is a key NATO asset, a hub for its strategic international airlift mission, and it's the largest freight airport in the EU.

During the overnight hours that day, a quadcopter drone flew into the airport fitted with a Semtex explosive. it was eventually found, it was lying next to a massive Ukrainian aircraft known as the Antonov An-124, the largest flyable military transport aircraft in the world.

The drone had been controlled from a long range, and although it failed to detonate, the airport was closed down fully for about two hours. Leipzig incident made international news at the time, with Russian hybrid intelligence operations suspected of being responsible. that failed drone attack was just the start of the trouble.

On the same day, another aircraft struck an unidentified object of 400 meters in altitude, Probably a second drone, carrying a camera, intended to record the results of the first drones attack. A week later, investigators found another drone at Leipzig, also fitted with explosives.

They also located an antenna attached to a tree, probably as a way to help control all the drones.

As of now, Germany's chancellor has indicated that the government will soon disclose who was behind it all, unveiling the culprit for a plot that was significantly more complicated and more sustained than other suspected Russian hybrid attacks. But according to a recent report by The Telegraph, Leipzig may be only the start.

According to the outlet, Western intelligence sources have assessed that a new wave of Russian sabotage is only beginning, primarily targeting European arms factories.

Those attacks are carried out using local criminal gangs who happily sign on to a deal where they accept a fat check from the Kremlin in exchange for whatever low-grade sabotage the Kremlin requests.

As those intelligence sources admit, the attacks are meant to avoid triggering NATO's Article 5 to try and see just how much NATO is willing to take before it starts defending itself.

Already this month, authorities have reported or intercepted apparent attacks in Germany, Estonia, and Bulgaria, with all nations in agreement that there's probably more coming.

And then there's a wave of Russian aerial attacks and sea drone threats against NATO airspace, predominantly concentrating against Romania. It's not unusual these days for Russia to allow drones to wander into NATO airspace ever since that 2025 incident where roughly 20 Russian drones violated Polish airspace a single night.

But this time around, the wave of infiltrations is a different, it's more sustained, and the threat is quite easy to interpret.

Since late July, Romanian drones well inside Romanian airspace, as opposed to the majority of earlier infiltrations, which were either detected on radar before crashing a bit over the border, or were only discovered after they'd crashed.

Worse yet, Romania also had to destroy a naval drone in mid-August when it was discovered just few hundred meters away from a major natural gas extraction project called Neptune Deep.

Taken together, this new round of Russian provocations would seem to represent an active, continuous probing effort trying to figure out the limitations of Romanian air defenses and identifying significant vulnerabilities in NATO's drone detection technology.

Meanwhile, in Moldova, Russian forces are escalating attacks against Moldova-Ukraine border crossings, stepping up strikes against bridges near the crossings, and against the Ukrainian side of the border checkpoint facilities. This week, Russia intensified its campaign, hitting three checkpoints in the span of just a few days.

According to the Institute for the Study of War, Russia's likely objectives include "creating an environment of insecurity dissuade Moldova, Romania, and international shippers from using these crossings." Russia is especially interested in dissuading Moldova from its efforts to join the EU, trying to present the accession attempt as an endeavor that's

Likely to harm Moldova in the end.

A bit further away in the Baltic Sea, the Russian Baltic Fleet has also been causing a bit of trouble, making a highly unusual deployment of an advanced warship, the hypersonic missile-equipped Admiral Kasatanov, and another large warship, the Admiral Levchenko.

Both ships are typically assigned to Russia's much larger northern fleet, And it's unusual for two ships of that size to be going all the way down to the Baltic in such a short time span. onshore in Lithuania and Latvia, Russia and its close ally Belarus appeared to be finding new ways to weaponize the flow of migrants westward into the nations of NATO.

Start of August, Lithuania's border guard announced that they'd found no fewer than 12 underground border tunnels this year, reaching up to 25 meters into Lithuania at some locations. the commander of the state border guard service, they wouldn't be able to go through with this without logistical support from the Belarusian authorities. quote. 11th of

August, Latvia found its first tunnel reaching across its own border with Belarus. then, the country has found two more, including one that was uncovered just days ago on the 25th of August. now, there's no direct, publicly known evidence that the tunnels were used by anybody other than migrants.

But to understand the deeper issues, we'll quote the outlet Malcontent News on X. they're migrants getting Russian and Belarusian assistance.

But if they can tunnel undetected, Russian troops can do more. quote. the last month or two, Russia's clearly been stepping up its infiltration and hybrid warfare operations, whether by using drones, saboteurs, migrant tunnels, or anything else. just as important as pointing out what Russia's doing is pointing out what seems to be NATO's response.

The example here that you've almost certainly heard about would be this week's flight to Moscow by the director of the American Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe. Days ago, Ratcliffe went to Russia for meetings that, according to the Kremlin, he held with his direct counterparts at the head of Russian intelligence.

But that kind of direct meeting is extremely rare these days.

Quoting Ukrainian journalist Ilya Ponomeranko, writing on X, "Over the past five years, CIA directors have made urgent trips either to Russia or to meet personally with Kremlin representatives for two reasons: one, to try to dissuade Moscow from launching its insane full-scale invasion of Ukraine; two, to try and dissuade Moscow from using nuclear weapons

Against Ukraine." According to the most recent reporting by the Wall Street Journal, Ratcliffe was actually trying to accomplish a third task: "to deliver a warning to Russia not to attack NATO countries, according to people briefed on the visit." But like those other two options, it's worth noting that this isn't a message that a CIA director would visit

Moscow to convey personally unless the situation was urgent.

Perhaps even more telling was a leak published in a prominent German outlet called Built just over a week ago.

That article included a detailed report on what was, according to Built, NATO's new three-step plan to defeat Russia in the event that it launched a limited attack on the Baltics. On the merits, the plan is actually rather interesting.

NATO would supposedly respond with a wave of direct attacks to suppress Russian missile launch systems, using drones, long-range missiles, and fighter jets to hit those targets directly, with a special focus on the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.

Simultaneously, NATO would create what it called an autonomous zone, according to Built, where drones and unmanned ground vehicles would operate in a semi-abandoned no-man's land against invading Russian forces. with NATO troops present in the zone, but not permanently stationed there. finally, NATO would retaliate with direct strikes against Russian

Military infrastructure, both using long-range missiles, drones, and aircraft, and using NATO special forces.

Targets would include airfields, bridges, factories, and rail lines, while NATO intelligence would coordinate to aid anti-Putin partisans within Russia and create a, quote, air bridge to bring drones and robotic weapons into Russia, with the implication being that NATO would capture and hold at least some Russian territory during the counteroffensive.

Per the report, NATO wouldn't be trying to occupy or conquer Russia, instead to force Russia to back down and retreat to within its own borders.

Now, as we mentioned, the plan itself is rather compelling. But in this case, the more interesting question is why the world knows about it. NATO didn't publish this plan, Bilt published it.

But the plan was leaked at a level of comprehensive detail that would suggest a very well-placed source. Or as likely, it may well have been an intentional leak, with the intention of allowing the message to travel naturally back to Moscow.

The intent, of course, would be to try and deter Russia from launching an attack at all, convincing Putin and his war planners that an attack would cause far more trouble for the Russians than it's worth.

And finally, there was the strange, unexpected affair that took place over NATO territory last week, surrounding the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.

These were aerial operations involving stealthy F-35s to provide combat capability, multiple aerial refuelers to keep those planes in the air for an extended period, and several surveillance aircraft orbiting in the vicinity.

The operations also involved a new American weapon, the EA-37B Compass Call, an aircraft designed to disrupt communications, radar, GPS, and other key capabilities for an adversarial force.

According to estimates by European defense analysts, appeared to have upwards of 50 aircraft in the sky at a given time. There was, of course, an official explanation for all of this, bog-standard military exercises, according to sources in several NATO member states.

But, even if that were true, which, in all honesty, it doesn't seem to be, then it would take one hell of an oblivious NATO exercise commander not to anticipate that exercises of that scale around Kaliningrad would be taken as an act of escalation by Russia. enough, Russia actually didn't react to the reports with fire and brimstone, but, in most cases,

That's a pretty good sign that Russia's taking an issue extremely seriously.

Instead of accusing NATO of warmongering, Putin and his allies went quiet, only to hold their own military exercises in the area a few days later. we'd imagine that by now you see the point, that on both sides of the Russia-NATO divide, there seems to be common consensus that things are ramping up. cooker. we mentioned at the outset of this episode, we're

Not going to be able to present a clear case and lay out exactly where all of this escalation is going to lead.

But what we can do is explain some of the larger forces at play here, starting with a question that we just know some of our viewers are wondering. Why would Russia attack NATO at all?

In short, Russia hopes to fracture the NATO alliance, and in fairness to Putin and his allies, the timing is rather decent.

Today, Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby will be in Brussels to meet with NATO ambassadors as part of a force posture review as the U.S. looks to withdraw some of its troops that it's deployed to Europe for many decades, some 80,000 at the time of writing. we speak, U.S. defense engagement with Europe is on the decline U.S. President Donald Trump makes

Destabilizing geopolitical decisions and threatens to revoke U.S. support for its allies on a wide variety of possible grounds.

NATO's other members have made clear through their actions, if not their words, that they don't trust that the U.S. would show up for them in a moment of crisis, meaning that America's nuclear umbrella, its massive logistical and intelligence support, and even its troops might simply be erased from NATO's war plans without warning.

Putin has long suspected that in a moment of crisis, the nations of NATO would fail to honor Article 5, the alliance's commitment to treat an attack on one nation as an attack on all and respond as a single unit against an act of aggression.

Break the NATO alliance apart by forcing it to reckon with the fact that its ultimate pledge means nothing, and Putin can act against individual alliance members as he sees fit.

So by attacking a NATO member state, like one of the Baltics, or high Arctic zones in Finland or Norway, or by chopping off other territory that's close to Russia, far from the bulk of NATO's forces and relatively easy to lose, Putin seems to hope that he can create the perfect conditions for NATO to just give up.

If Putin captures, say, 50 square kilometers of empty Arctic Norway and insists that the territory is Russian now, NATO might not actually care all that much about losing the territory.

But if it does allow Russia to take the territory unchallenged, then clearly the alliance's willingness to respond to a threat is much more of a gray area than Article 5 would allow, meaning that any of the alliance's obligations could simply be forgotten.

So NATO would have to make a choice: sacrifice lives and enter a war with Russia over practically irrelevant territory, or admit that Article 5 in the modern day is little more than a sham.

And Putin doesn't just have to take territory. He can use a drone to strike just the right target, he can launch a hybrid attack on western soil, or he can use one of the many other options at his disposal.

But his goal would be to create an edge case, a scenario where NATO would have to think long and hard about how it would react and where some or all NATO members might choose to take the easy way out.

So that would explain Putin's recent escalations: probing to get a better understanding of NATO's response time, its willingness to fight, and the signals it sends when it's being provoked.

It would also explain some of NATO's recent actions: the likely leak of a retaliatory plan to the outlet built, and the decision to have the director of the CIA travel over to Moscow to express his suspicions. As for whether the gambit by Putin would work, that's an open question.

Maybe NATO, including the US, would respond to a Russian attack. Maybe the rest of NATO would stand strong and respond even without the US. Or maybe the whole thing would just fall apart.

Either way, Putin's objective is almost certainly not to conquer a NATO country outright, at least not yet, although if NATO makes it easy, then they shouldn't be surprised if Putin goes all the way.

Instead, more likely that he would want to destroy the alliance's unity that has led it to support ukraine so profoundly keeping kiev in the fight when it might otherwise show signs of collapse and in ukraine there are reasons for putin to believe that now is the time to act recently ukrainian president vladimir zelensky has dealt with calls for a wartime

Election most prominently from former defense minister michael fedorov while fedorov's overtures were largely rejected by the ukrainian public they were still enough to seize on discontent with zelensky and harness frustration in some corners of ukraine about a lack of any election plan before the war's over ukrainian skies meanwhile are largely undefended

From ballistic missiles after stockpiles of patriot interceptors ran out and haven't been replenished those stocks are empty at the moment when ukraine's facing down wintertime and when russia will probably target power and water infrastructure relentlessly to try and break the will of the ukrainian people even in moscow putin could use a bit of escalation

With nato both to justify an expected mass mobilization of hundreds of thousands of new recruits this autumn and to help ease putin's way during elections to the russian duma the legislature currently scheduled to run between the 18th and the 20th of december so there's more than enough rationale for putin to convince himself that an attack on nato could

Boost his domestic prospects there's more than enough going wrong on the ukrainian side to suggest that this is a moment for moscow to capitalize the member states of nato have done enough to indicate that they may still be prone to a breakup and all these recent probing attacks from russia may have resulted in posturing and deterrent threats from the

Alliance but they haven't yet resulted in substantive action for ukraine and for the nations of nato that should be concerning because today russia is certainly up to something we'll just have to wait to find out what that something really is thank you for watching