Former NATO Commander Curtis Scaparrotti Warns ‘Russia Is At War With NATO Today’ As Alliance Braces For Escalating Hybrid Attacks On Critical Infrastructure

Russia is not approaching a war with NATO. It is already fighting one. That was the stark assessment delivered on Wednesday by one of the most senior military commanders the alliance has ever produced, at a moment when the West is struggling to agree on whether it is at peace or at war with the Kremlin at all.

Retired four-star general Curtis Scaparrotti, who served as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe from 2016 to 2019, warned at an Atlantic Council think-tank event in Washington that Russia is engaged in hybrid warfare against the alliance, with a long-term Kremlin plan to “break” NATO.

“When they look at warfare, they don’t have a line between peace and war. So from my perspective, if you looked at it from their spectrum, we’re at war with Russia today, within the alliance, because they’re taking actions that are intended to undermine individual countries’ capability to support warfare, undermine their civilians’ confidence in their own government or within NATO, and to break NATO,” Scaparrotti said.

You Might Be Interested In

Scaparrotti cautioned there was a long-term strategy behind the Kremlin’s “spurious activities” targeting member nations and emphasised the importance of safeguarding critical infrastructure. Among Moscow’s objectives, he stated, was to “break” NATO.

What Does ‘Russia At War With NATO’ Actually Mean?

Scaparrotti’s formulation is precise and deliberate. He is not describing a conventional military conflict between Russian and NATO forces. He is describing Russia’s doctrine of continuous warfare, a doctrine under which the boundary between peace and armed conflict does not exist in the way Western strategic thinking assumes.

Sometimes referred to as “shadow” or “grey-zone” warfare, hybrid warfare is a military strategy in which a country uses both military and non-military strategies and instruments to cause instability without declaring an all-out war. Under this doctrine, an arson attack on a European defence factory, a drone strike on an airport, a severed undersea cable and a coordinated disinformation campaign are not provocations short of war. They are acts of war conducted through means designed to keep the response threshold below the level that would trigger Article 5, NATO’s collective defence clause.

The UK’s vital undersea cables have long been seen as vulnerable to sabotage by Russian spy ships, and that vulnerability is now being actively tested. A joint operation from NATO countries confronted Russian submarines training to deploy a secret weapon to disable undersea cables, in an operation involving the US, Norway and Britain that took place in the Arctic.