Contraband balloons disrupting the work of Lithuanian airports, the increasing number of drone incursions, and intelligence activities in NATO airspace are part of a deliberate and well-coordinated Russian campaign against NATO, George Barros, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), told LRT.lt in an exclusive interview.
He describes this campaign as Phase 0 – a stage focused on creating informational, psychological, and political conditions in preparation for a possible war against NATO member states.
The analyst criticises Western European countries for still hesitating to identify the growing number of provocations as deliberate Kremlin actions.
Barros heads ISW’s Russia and Geospatial Intelligence (GEOINT) team, which analyses Russia’s war against Ukraine. He studies Russian information operations, the planning and execution of the Kremlin’s military campaigns in Ukraine and Belarus, and advises senior officials on the lessons of modern warfare.
You previously said that the Russian drone incursion into Poland in September was not a hybrid operation but an act of war, or Phase 0 of a potential Russian war against Europe. What is Phase 0? And do you consider these recent actions, lets say Belarusian smuggling balloons in Lithuania, part of it?
Let me start by answering the second part of the question – absolutely. All of this activity that we're seeing is part of Russia's Phase 0 campaign in our assessment.
Now, let me go ahead and define what the Phase 0 campaign is. So in military doctrine, including Russian and Soviet military doctrine, before you actually begin a war, there is preparation of the battlefield that occurs well ahead of the actual shooting..
And that is Phase 0 – the informational, political, and psychological condition setting for the preparation for a larger war that Russia might wage against Europe and NATO.
When I'm speaking to other colleagues, either Americans or Western Europeans, I often have to make the argument that Russia has geopolitical and territorial ambitions on the Baltic states, which it defines as part of the historical Russian land, the Russian Empire, the Russky Mir, all of these things. And the Russians also seek to completely renegotiate the security architecture for Europe.
It doesn't mean that Putin has given the order or has yet made the decision that he's committed to conducting war against NATO, but he and his forces are preparing, and they are setting the conditions so that when Putin does give the order, the conditions are ready, and they don't have to start spending the time to get ready.
It is somewhat disappointing when drones appear in Germany or saboteurs destroy a factory or do something in a different European country, or you even get drones in Belgium or Denmark that, oftentimes, elected officials, experts, and the media talk about these things as being hybrid war or grey zone or asymmetric activities, because these are terms that are not well defined.
It's a scapegoat term that allows people not to treat these as seriously as they must be – these are concerted, connected, highly organised acts that must be studied as a series, not as a series of individual hybrid events. It is not a mistake and it is not a coincidence that all of these patterns have begun starting in September of this year, and have only since escalated.
Why is it not a coincidence?
Somewhere in the presidential office or the Russian General Staff, there is a document where there is a named operation for what this is. Maybe it will be declassified or leaked one day, but there is an operation that is underway.
It is highly organised, and these activities simply did not start manifesting themselves accidentally. Somebody in the Kremlin or in the Russian General Staff gave an order that they are to begin conducting a series of events, a reconnaissance, provocations, experimenting with how to do airport closures across multiple different countries, reconnoitring military sites.
Our argument is that we don't know when the order was given, but they began conducting, executing, and implementing the campaign in early September.
We consider this to be September, because that was when we saw the first large-scale Russian incursion into Poland in early September, on the eve of the Yalta European Security Forum in Kyiv. That was unambiguously a reconnaissance mission and an act of war against Poland.
There had been, of course, other instances of airspace violations, missiles violating airspace, different sort of things, these had happened before. But the frequency and intensity, if you look at the histogram of how frequent these things have become, there's a clear inflection point.
There was an old norm, which was that these things happen sporadically. There was then the big drone incursion in Poland on September 8, and then everything else happening in Western Europe and all across the Baltics and everything since then. And looking at the data, there's a tremendous discrepancy in the old norms and the new norms. And this is where we assess the campaign began.
How do you assess NATO's response to these actions?
NATO has not responded particularly well as an entity to these attacks. In fact, we have seen that some responses from some member states have been quite weak and quite unsatisfactory.
For example, there are some statements of German officials and politicians who have said that, well, if Russian manned aircraft penetrate into NATO airspace, we can't shoot them down because that would be a provocation and would invite war.
And that's a mistake, actually, because what if you draw that out to its logical conclusion, the logical conclusion is we must allow Russian manned aircraft to violate NATO airspace. And if we don't, then that's an act of war.
You must be treating every one of these events as a NATO Article 4 event [that calls for urgent consultations], because if you don't treat it as an Article 4 event, we will boil the frog, we will become denatured and insensitive to these Russian acts.
And when the Russians actually do conduct their first [strike] with manned aircraft, and we don't shoot it down because this would have been normalised for who knows how many months, the Russians will then actually have a decisive tactical advantage when they want to conduct a first strike or do something with manned aircraft.
This is the political, psychological, and informational condition-setting that we must deny the Russians.
You regularly advise high-ranking military and political decision-makers. If you had to give NATO advice, what would be the appropriate response to Russia's actions?
Number one, we need to start calling a spade a spade. We need to start calling out Russian acts of war against NATO member states as exactly that. These are acts of war.
[...] These are not the one-off hybrid acts that have happened sporadically over the last two decades – we have clearly entered into a new phase.
And when we know that there's an organised campaign, we have to ask ourselves the question, what is the objective of that campaign? The Russians did not sign an order to conduct intensified activities for no reason. There has to be a purpose for the campaign.
We need to talk about this in terms of a campaign. We call it Phase 0, and I think that's a good place to start. The purpose is to collect information about us, how we respond to these attacks, but then also normalise these attacks so that the Russians can have an advantage one day.
If Phase 0 is the informational and psychological setting stage, what‘s Phase 1?
Phase 1 would be the kinetic phase, where the shooting starts. Alternatively, it could be intensified informational efforts where they make an official demand. Kind of like how the Kremlin made official demands of Ukraine in November-December 2021. But they might skip that and just go straight to war.
In terms of the war, it can manifest itself in different ways. But this would be the actual shooting war where the Russians would get involved. And let me be very clear, the active fighting combat phase of the war in our assessment is very unlikely to happen while there is still an active war in Ukraine.
We assess that the Russian military does not have the capability to be able to engage in two large-scale, ambitious military operations simultaneously. So this will require the tempo and the fighting in Ukraine to die down drastically.
We also assess that NATO must be prepared to deter and, if necessary, defeat a Russian attack against NATO no later than 12 months after the end of high-intensity combat in Ukraine.
We actually think the Russians can be ready for an act of war much more rapidly and much more quickly than many of the current assessments of 2030 or 2029. We think it's actually closer to 12 months.
What would be the main Russian objectives in such war?
The objectives would be to break Article 5. The objective would not be to seize all of Eastern Europe up to Germany. It might not even be to seize all of Lithuania or seize all of the Baltic states or an entire Baltic state.
It might simply be seize Narva, violate the territorial integrity of Baltic states, threaten massive retaliation against NATO, and fight a limited war against members of a coalition of the willing of some member states, but not trigger Article 5. And in doing so, effectively destroy NATO as a credible organisation. And then the Russians will then have effectively achieved their objectives. That's one version of what this war can look like.
And then it simply becomes a strategic question of how the Russian Federation, in the centuries to come, will properly scope its efforts and shape the political thinking of Western states, so that Moscow can wage limited wars on its periphery to make territorial gains without invoking decisive action from all NATO members.
And what is the message for Lithuania?
For NATO,and for Lithuanians, it's incredibly important that we actually study the Russian operating concepts or how they're fighting their war in Ukraine.
There is a lack of preparedness on NATO's behalf to actually respond to a conventional Russian attack against NATO's Eastern flank.
And I know that sounds like an absurd claim, but I'm prepared to defend it on the basis that the Russian military has evolved, the tactics have evolved, and the organisational structures of the armed forces over the last three years have evolved.
The Russians' operations have evolved, and they have successfully transformed into a military that is capable of withstanding and sustaining extremely high tempo operations for a protracted period.
The Russians, for example, know how to deny the use of tanks and armoured personnel carriers and mechanised vehicles at scale. They know how to achieve the effects of battlefield air interdiction without the use of aircraft to isolate geographic sectors of the battlefield with drones, which is incredible.
The reason why Pokrovsk failed was not because the Russians overwhelmed it with infantry. Pokrovsk will ultimately fall, sadly, because the Russians figured out how to interdict supply lines and highways 30–60 kilometres in the rear using drones. That's important for the fight against NATO.
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