Europe is unprepared to counteract a new chapter of Russian military and intelligence activities in the Baltic and North Seas, experts have told Al Jazeera.

At the same time, they said, a growing rift between European and United States intelligence services is leaving the continent unsupported.

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Last week’s European Union summit was a case in point. Belgium obstructed a plan to use Russian money to finance Ukraine’s defence and turbocharge Europe’s defence industry. Russia’s “shadow fleet“, suspected of espionage and sabotage operations, was not mentioned in the summit conclusions.

“Europe is no more ready today to face Russia’s military advances than it was in 1939 as Nazi troops were at the door,” said Joseph Fitsanakis, assistant director at the Center for Applied Intelligence in Coastal Carolina University, one of a handful of US institutions teaching intelligence and national security.

“Front-line states like Finland, Poland and the Baltics have no illusions about what is coming,” he told Al Jazeera. “However, I fear that, plagued by internal divisions and victimised by relentless Russian disinformation operations, Western European populations are not even moderately awake to the dangers that threaten their security.”

Since 2022, Russian intelligence has been accused of sabotage and disinformation campaigns designed to disorient and divide.

“The hybrid warfare is about making us stressed, making us feel that in peacetime we are vulnerable … and, I think, in a way, exhausting us towards being more recipient towards the final goal that Russia has for Europe, which is a division again into spheres of interest,” Anna Wieslander, Northern Europe director for the Atlantic Council, a US think tank, told Al Jazeera.

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‘Period of emergency’

Those alleged Russian activities appeared in a more overt phase on September 10 when two dozen Russian Geran-2 drones strayed into NATO airspace, testing Polish air defences.

During the preceding three and a half years of war in Ukraine, only three drones had strayed into Poland.

European alarm was confirmed nine days later when three Russian MiG-31 fighter jets entered Estonian airspace over the Gulf of Finland for 12 minutes. Italian F-35s stationed in Estonia scrambled to intercept them.

Then on September 21, Germany scrambled two Eurofighters to intercept a Russian Ilyushin 20-M reconnaissance aircraft flying without a flight plan or radio contact in its Baltic Sea airspace.

Four days after that, NATO command said two Hungarian Gripen fighters took off from Siaulai in Lithuania to intercept a Su-30, a Su-35 and a MiG-31 “flying close to Latvian airspace”.

“Historically, Russia has initiated ‘special activities’ during what Russian planners refer to as the ‘special period’, also known as ‘period of emergency’. This term denotes a time of rising tensions just prior to the outbreak of an all-out war,” Fitsanakis said.

‘Russian military is actively preparing for war with NATO’

Western intelligence services have been issuing warnings since January 2024 that a NATO-Russia war could become a reality in five to eight years.

Martin Jager, head of Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service, told the Bundestag this month that this could come sooner.

“We must not sit back and assume that a possible Russian attack will not come until 2029 at the earliest,” he told lawmakers, saying Europe faced “a new quality of confrontation”.

Europeans call the “period of emergency” by another name – “phase zero” – defined as “testing responses, gathering intel and blurring civilian-military lines”, said Demetries Andrew Grimes, a decorated veteran US special forces commander.

“Like the Russian intelligence community, the Russian military is actively preparing for war with NATO,” Fitsanakis said.

In recent weeks, the Kremlin has rejected accusations that Russia is behind drone incursions while accusing Europe of stoking hysteria.

On Saturday, Rodion Miroshnik, a Russian Ministry of Foreign

Affairs official, told the Tass news agency that European countries have “unfortunately assumed a hawkish position”.

He accused European politicians of trying to “prevent direct bilateral contact between Russia and Ukraine, between Moscow and Washington, precisely for settling the issues of confrontation”.

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Piecemeal responses

As part of Russia’s alleged war preparation, everything is being weaponised, analysts said.

Russia’s shadow fleet of sanctions-busting oil tankers has been suspected of carrying equipment to spy on NATO’s communications and launching drones in the Baltic Sea.

French commandos seized the Boracay on October 2 after the Russian tanker was suspected of launching drones. It was 80km (50 miles) south of Copenhagen when a drone swarm led to the closure of the city’s airport in late September and later was sailing off Denmark’s west coast when several regional airports there reported drone swarms.

Countries that rely on Chinese equipment to detect drones could also be at risk of collusion between Moscow and Beijing, observers said. Norway’s Chinese-built drone detection system was taken offline by its manufacturer, DJI Aeroscope, on the day Oslo Airport was affected by a drone swarm on September 22.

Airports, oil and gas terminals, and other infrastructure remain at risk from drones, experts said.

NATO interceptions of Russian drones in Poland by Polish F-16s, Dutch F-35s and Italian airborne early warning and control (AWAC) planes were immediate but relied on high-cost combat aircraft alone. Ukraine has experimented with a mixture of aircraft, antidrone unmanned aerial vehicles, man-portable air defence systems and mobile fire units on pickup trucks. It is now preparing to use helicopters.

Poland is learning from Ukraine. Days after the incursion, it contracted Ukrainian combat veterans to train Polish drone pilots and has warned Russia that it will shoot down any unrecognised object over land. But Poland belongs to that set of countries on NATO’s eastern frontier that are more vocal and active about the alleged threats from Russia.

Denmark this month said it will inspect older tankers for environmental and insurance compliance, but it has yet to confiscate one.

Wieslander, who is based in Stockholm, believed Nordic and Baltic countries could act “on a much larger scale” to counter the “shadow fleet” and “that would actually hit Russia where it is vulnerable and where it would feel it.” But he laments, “There has been no coordinated policy to do this.”

“EU-wide merchant fleet inspections or bans, Baltic surveillance boosts, massive counterdrone investments matching innovations and unified sanctions are desperately needed to close gaps,” Grimes said.

Whose side is the US on?

European intelligence has relied on the US for satellite surveillance and signals intelligence eavesdropping over large distances.

US intelligence has been crucial to Ukraine’s successful campaign against Russian refineries, it was recently revealed. The US information was involved in target selection, timing and route planning to evade Russian air defences.

But the quality of that cooperation is breaking down, Fitsanakis said.

“American intelligence services are being systematically defanged by an utterly dysfunctional political elite, which is using them as political pawns while refusing to prioritise the Russian threat.”

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Dutch intelligence recently said it was limiting the information shared with US services, and it is not the only European agency doing so.

“European intelligence agencies have long stopped sharing critical intelligence with Washington,” Fitsanakis said, implying fear of exposing their networks.

The problem, he said, is political.

“At this point, the United States is so inconsistent in its approach to the war that its proclamations – which appear to vacillate depending on the day – have virtually no strategic meaning.”

In other words, no one is sure whose side the US is on.

US threats against Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory, and Canada have eroded Europeans’ trust of Washington’s commitment to its allies and the rule of law.

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine marks Russia’s “most triumphant period since the late 1940s”, Fitsanakis said, because it has “paralysed NATO by driving a wedge between Europe and the United States as well as between the United States and Ukraine”.