Putin is testing Europe. How far will he go before war?

It’s always been a cop-out to blame the sinister influence of Vladimir Putin for the failings of liberal democracy. There is no serious evidence that Putin got Donald Trump elected the first time around, although he certainly liked the idea, and he isn’t responsible for the the conditions that led America and much of the Western world to Trump and his offshoots: economic inequality, political paralysis, disastrous foreign policy blunders and rising tensions around immigration and diversity.

That said, there’s no disputing that Putin is a dangerous and unpredictable force in world affairs, who has gone a long way toward his apparent goal of disrupting or overturning the unchallenged global hegemony of the United States since the end of the Cold War. It’s possible to believe that the goal is natural or inevitable in itself and also that there must be better options than those offered by the likes of Putin and Xi Jinping.

At the moment, we’re in the middle of an international shadowplay, an arena where Putin excels. Nobody really believes he wants to start a new war in Europe, especially considering how his first one has gone. But plenty of people will tell you he’s already started one. If that seems like an impossible contradiction, welcome to the mid-2020s, where reality seems increasingly like dystopian science fiction mixed with an especially opaque John le Carré spy thriller.

This past week, the German government made an announcement that was both startling and unsurprising. (Yes, those things can go together.) An attempted drone attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport in early August was exactly what it looked like, senior ministers declared in a grim Berlin press conference. Russia was responsible, and the attack marked a dramatic escalation of Putin’s “hybrid warfare” campaign against Ukraine’s allies. 

“The means used — such as the drone configuration, components, explosives and detonation systems — are known to us from other hybrid operations by Russia and its war against Ukraine,” said Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul. (“Hybrid warfare” is the current term of art for a conflict conducted in various forms, through sabotage, espionage, social media and digital attacks, as well as military combat.)

If decoding the Leipzig affair and its actual or possible ramifications seems to require an advanced degree in international semiotics, the reported facts are straightforward enough. At least two drones armed with explosives, and possibly three, were identified at the Leipzig airport in eastern Germany on or about Aug. 4, one of them reportedly adjacent to two Ukrainian cargo planes. (Leipzig, about three hours by air from Kyiv, is a major transit hub for sending arms and supplies to Ukraine.) 

You could, if you wanted to, define that as an act of war. No one is rushing to do that, for a long list of excellent reasons. But German federal prosecutors came surprisingly close, describing the Leipzig episode as a “serious attack on Germany’s transport and logistics infrastructure,” and by extension an attack on both NATO and the European Union. 

This story has barely caused a ripple in major U.S. media, perhaps because it’s both confusing and alarming, and Americans have more than enough of that to deal with at home. Did Putin really just attack Germany? Is he starting a war with NATO? Those questions lack clear answers, and there’s the additional problem that no one in the Trump administration knows what they’re supposed to say about Russia from one day to the next. I asked the State Department for comment on whether the U.S. accepted the German finding that Russia was to blame, and did not receive a direct response.

The only American official who has said anything at all is NATO ambassador Matt Whitaker, whose statement on X was entirely free of specifics. “The United States stands in solidarity with Germany and all Allies in the face of efforts to cause harm and chaos on NATO territory,” he wrote. By the standards of the Trump regime, that’s almost grown-up diplomacy, even if no clues are offered about who may be causing “harm and chaos,” or where that may have happened.

The United States stands in solidarity with Germany and all Allies in the face of efforts to cause harm and chaos on NATO territory. We remain committed to NATO’s collective defense and clear-eyed about the need for Allies to increase their capabilities to deter all threats to…

— U.S. Ambassador to NATO (@USAmbNATO) September 2, 2026

But shock waves have spread across Europe in recent days, less because there was any serious doubt about who was responsible for the Leipzig attack than because the Germans decided to say it out loud. (See above on the nature of reality, circa 2026.) The German reputation for being cautious and meticulous in diplomatic matters is well deserved, and the three previous national governments have had relatively cordial relations with Russia. If the wobbly centrist coalition now clinging to power in Berlin decided to go with this, they must have concluded they were on solid ground. 

Leaders across the continent have issued unanimous and more or less forceful statements of mutual support, even those (like Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni) who could be described as agnostic on the Ukraine war. Russian ambassadors in Berlin, London, Paris, Brussels and other capitals have been summoned by their hosts for stern lectures. Further sanctions will no doubt be enacted against Russian businesses and oligarchs, with little noticeable effect.

Kaja Kallas, the former Estonian prime minister and noted Russia hawk who is now the E.U.’s top foreign policy official, walked right to the edge of declaring war at last week’s conference of European foreign ministers in Ireland. The Leipzig attack, she said, “had all the hallmarks of state-sponsored terrorism.” But what Kallas said next, in tones of evident frustration, was more telling: “The question is, what do we do about this?”

What indeed? It’s reasonable to conclude that Putin is posing the same question. On the other side of the phony-war coin, Russian officials have played their parts, denying that the alleged attack happened at all and accusing the Germans of planting or faking evidence. That’s to be expected, as is the army of online pro-Putin “influencers” (I didn’t call them trolls!) on X and elsewhere calling the entire affair a false-flag operation masterminded by European warmongers eager to drag NATO into an escalating confrontation. 

I’m not endorsing that point of view, but it’s worth repeating that there’s a great deal of murky political and diplomatic stagecraft below the surface of this incident. Anyone who has read a le Carré novel or watched a season of “Slow Horses” already knows that no government ever ‘fesses up to its clandestine foreign operations, unless it’s forced to years later by crusaders or whistleblowers.

But that’s actually a subset of the First Law of International Relations, or at least my first law: No one ever tells the truth. This principle, which is both stupid and profound, comes with an asterisk: Sometimes governments or their factotums tell bits of the truth, either by accident or because they think it makes them look good. (They generally regret it, and revert to the first law in its pure form.)

Bearing that in mind, I think it’s possible to decode the Leipzig incident somewhat, based on the behavior of everyone involved and hardly at all on their rhetoric. Putin wasn’t trying to start a military conflict with NATO or the E.U. Before entering Russian politics, he was a trained intelligence agent with “professional grounding in the fine art of dirty tricks,” in the words of Foreign Policy columnist Christian Caryl.

Putin may be ruthless and vindictive, but he is not irrational or suicidal. His expansionist fantasies go no further than the boundaries of the former Russian Empire. But he clearly wanted to find out what would happen if he started such a conflict, as in the war game recently described by David Ignatius of The Washington Post, in which Russia attacks Moldova and Romania while NATO dithers, negotiates, reads the polls and ultimately does nothing. 

In effect, the Leipzig attack was like a maneuver in a war game, or a feint. These were drones, not missiles or bombs. Figuring out exactly who launched them, and from where, is likely impossible. Their explosive payloads did not detonate, and it’s entirely possible they were never meant to. Furthermore, the exaggerated but ineffectual response of European leaders was also highly theatrical, and below the surface revealed deep uncertainty (as expressed by Kallas) about how to respond.

It’s not even clear that this attempted attack or pseudo-attack or whatever it was represents a serious escalation in the covert war between Russia and NATO. It might just be the moment when that conflict has finally erupted into public view. Caryl’s Aug. 26 column, published a week before the official German announcement, offers a litany of likely Russian covert actions in Europe within the last few months, most of which have received little or no attention. 

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With the war in Ukraine going badly south once again and his former ally in the White House tumbling into lame-duck entropy, Caryl writes, Putin is now focused on undermining “European support for Ukraine, whether through subversion, intimidation, or influence operations that are aimed at elevating pro-Moscow parties and politicians” and worsening the continent’s divisions on race and immigration.

Putin likes to scoff at Western liberal claims (as referenced above) that our internal cultural and political conflicts are caused or severely inflamed by Russian spies and s**tposters. For what it’s worth, I agree: Putin and the Iranians and the North Koreans and so on have exploited existing tensions within the Western democratic nations whenever they could, but their influence is marginal and they didn’t create any of those problems. In the most cynical interpretation — one Putin would no doubt embrace — the current German government is trying to outsource its failures onto Russia by identifying the Leipzig attack, in Wadephul’s words, as part of a “long series of destabilization operations.” 

To return to my original premise, several apparently contradictory things can be true at once. Putin might like to destabilize Western society, but for the most part he thinks we’re doing a fine job of that on our own and he’s just rubbing salt in the wound. Maybe he genuinely wanted to blow up Ukrainian planes on the tarmac in Germany and spark a major international crisis. But it seems more likely that he was just sending a signal: He could do it if he wanted to, and the so-called democracies were too weak to stop him.