stark grayness of hybrid warfare<\/a>.<\/p>\nLeipzig is a case in point. Article 5\u2019s legal force is not being rewritten by alleged Russian attacks like these. What is exposed is its deterrent certainty, an assumption that hostile action against one ally reliably summons the others.<\/p>\n
NATO\u2019s own texts say significant cyber and other hybrid attacks may amount to an \u201carmed attack,\u201d judged case by case. Its counter-hybrid policy puts primary responsibility for responding on the targeted country.<\/p>\n
At Vilnius in 2023, allies agreed that individual members may consider attributing hybrid activity and responding in coordination, \u201crecognising attribution is a sovereign national prerogative.\u201d<\/p>\n
The record bears that out. In November 2025, an explosive charge detonated under a freight train on the Warsaw\u2013Lublin line, the route carrying Western supplies into Ukraine.<\/p>\n
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk called it “an unprecedented act of sabotage,” and Polish authorities blamed two Ukrainian nationals recruited by Russian intelligence, both of whom reached Belarus.<\/p>\n
Leipzig has a precedent, too. In 2024, Western authorities accused Russian military intelligence of planting incendiary devices in air cargo, and parcels sent from Lithuania caught fire at handling depots in Germany and Britain.<\/p>\n
In July, Romania shot down drones in its airspace, summoned Moscow’s ambassador and expelled a diplomat. One tally counts at least 151 reported Russian operations in Europe since the invasion, a campaign the EU\u2019s top diplomat Kaja Kallas has called “state-sponsored terrorism.”<\/p>\n
Each incident is assessed alone, attributed alone, and mostly answered alone. That is a loophole Moscow is nibbling around the edges of.<\/p>\n
U.S. President Donald Trump, who has in recent months questioned NATO\u2019s commitment to collective defense in a fit of anger over allies\u2019 reluctance to join him in attacking Iran, has made this category problem vivid. On August 27, when asked whether Putin had agreed not to attack the alliance, he said: \u201cHe\u2019s not going to be attacking a NATO territory.\u201d<\/p>\n
That seeming reassurance was two days after CIA Director John Ratcliffe\u2019s surprise Moscow trip, reported to have carried a U.S. warning against testing NATO\u2019s resolve. Five days later, Berlin accused Russia of a hybrid attack on German soil.<\/p>\n
It reads instinctively as a contradiction, but it is more of a problem in definition.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s assurance assumes we know what an attack on NATO looks like these days. He is, in many ways, a product of the Cold War era, so he may see an attack in more traditional terms, like armor, airspace, a front.<\/p>\n
But Leipzig was a drone on a cargo apron. So where does that fit within Article 5? Does it count?<\/p>\n
It is an unresolved tension. Germany could risk calling to trigger Article 5 over Leipzig, but it remains an open question whether everyone in the alliance would rally to its defense. Most important: Does Trump view Leipzig as an Article 5 issue?<\/p>\n
Any sign that NATO allies were anything other than fully committed to each other\u2019s defense would risk destroying the institution that has underpinned European security for decades.<\/p>\n
Of course, Article 5 was never built to answer every hostile act with force. A high threshold may preserve its credibility rather than corrode it, even if things get messy below it. NATO has deliberately built a tier below collective defense\u2014resilience objectives, Counter Hybrid Support Teams, and national countermeasures\u2014so Moscow cannot force a choice between war and nothing.<\/p>\n
Mark Rutte, the alliance\u2019s secretary-general, made that case after the latest incident, calling the evidence clear, welcoming Germany\u2019s measures, and pledging that NATO would keep strengthening its ability to deter \u201cmalign actions like those seen in Leipzig.\u201d<\/p>\n
In August, the North Atlantic Council condemned Russia collectively over drone incidents and airspace violations in Poland and Romania. Absorption is not acquiescence.<\/p>\n
Article 4, which lets any ally demand urgent consultations, was invoked twice in 10 days last September. First by Poland after Russian drones crossed its border, then by Estonia after three MiG-31s spent 12 minutes in its airspace.<\/p>\n
But that mechanism has been used nine times in 77 years, and the pattern of what does not trigger it is instructive.<\/p>\n
After November\u2019s railway attack in Poland, no consultations followed. None followed the Baltic undersea cable cuts. None, so far, has followed Leipzig.<\/p>\n
Consultation appears to follow the machinery\u2014the stray aircraft\u2014not the saboteur. What summons the alliance collectively is a Russian machine crossing a border in plain sight, the kind of identifiable visibility hybrid operations are built to avoid.<\/p>\n
If Rutte is right, the emerging pattern of response should, over time, produce tightening cohesion within NATO. Things like faster attribution, more collective answers, and allies routinely invoking Article 4 consultations over sabotage instead of handling it alone.<\/p>\n
But if Putin the moth is right, each incident will be condemned, each response national, each threshold quietly reset a little higher. Each attack another new hole in the fabric of Article 5 until, eventually, there\u2019s nothing left at all.<\/p>\n
Article 5 was written to stop a catastrophic tear in NATO\u2019s fabric. Putin\u2019s Russia, however, may have found that a moth never needs to tear anything at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A clothes moth never eats a coat herself. She cannot: the adult\u2019s mouthparts are vestigial. Instead, she finds…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12880,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[45,3576,7757,7,20,437],"class_list":["post-12879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-article-5","tag-for-members","tag-hybrid-war","tag-nato","tag-russia","tag-vladimir-putin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12879"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12879\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}