Interview with Peter Rough: Europe in the middle and in the grey zone

_{Photo: Kaspars Dobrovoļskis}

• Peter Rough is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Europe and Eurasia at Hudson Institute, which he launched in December 2022. Mr Rough served as Associate Director in the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives, as a Policy Analyst at the US Agency for International Development, and as an Advisor to US Army Special Operations Command. Mr Rough began his career at the Republican National Committee specialising in political research. He holds an MA in law and diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where he was a Cabot Corporation scholar.
• He is a member of the board of the Bastion Institute and the American Main Street Initiative. He previously served as a commissioner of the Radio in the American Sector (RIAS) Commission in Berlin, and has been named a next-generation leader at several think tanks, including the Munich Security Conference. Previously, as Director of Research in the Office of George W. Bush, Mr Rough assisted the former president with his memoir, Decision Points. In 2014, his highly acclaimed collaboration with Leila Fawaz on the social history of World War I in the Middle East, A Land of Aching Hearts, was published by Harvard University Press.

From conventional deterrence to the hybrid domain, you wrote that, at current costs, Russia can continue its hybrid operations in perpetuity and argued that NATO may want to consider certain steps. What are those steps, and what should we prepare for?

The defence economics don’t line up well for the west in this grey zone campaign. First, the Russians decide where to go on offence, while we have to defend the entire Alliance. Second, they can probe with relatively cheap systems, and we are scrambling very expensive counters — from high-end missiles to airborne early warning aircraft to some of the best fighters and platforms in the world — all to take on a wood-and-styrofoam drone crossing into our airspace in the case of the major incursion into Poland. The Allies are beginning to learn from the Ukrainians how to, at much less cost, take on some of these Russian drone airspace infiltrations.

Other categories include sabotage, arson, and cyberattacks. Perennially remaining on defence will do little to dampen this level of Russian grey zone campaigning. We might want to consider offensive measures to achieve some sort of almost mutually assured destruction — to borrow a phrase from the nuclear weapons domain — to the grey zone.

This could mean that if there’s a cyberattack against a NATO ally, then perhaps NATO should consider turning off the lights in the Moscow metro for a few hours. These are horizontal response options that need not be symmetric. Every time a drone crosses into Romanian or Polish airspace, perhaps there is a munition, maybe even a Taurus cruise missile, that’s transferred to the Ukrainians. Perhaps the US should make known to the Russians that it will logistically facilitate and encourage Ukrainian special operators in sub-Saharan Africa and the Sahel, where they have hunted down Wagner Group, GRU and other Russian assets that are extracting a lot of resources out of Africa to fund the war in Ukraine and their own economy. An economic campaign is a key part of pushing back on Russia.

There are a number of options. This is, however, challenging for two reasons. First, small countries like Latvia will be hesitant or loath to engage in a counter-campaign that earns the Kremlin’s ire to the point where Moscow might make a rash decision, so there has to be Alliance backing. Second, the Europeans are working at speed — or at least what European officials often describe as such — to build up their defences. Europe is now in the middle zone: no longer as weak and dependent on the Americans as it was, but not yet prepared to handle the defence on its own in all these key categories of modern warfare. Whether to engage in a back-and-forth, tit-for-tat with the Russians, while not yet ready to defend themselves, is a calculation the Europeans have to make that depends in part on whether they believe Washington will back them.

Another calculation is that the Russians aren’t 10 feet tall right now either. They are emptying out many of their bases and capabilities and pushing them into Ukraine: skeleton bases surround the Baltics and aren’t filled to the brim at the moment. Kaliningrad is still relatively weak. The Russians aren’t really in a position to go up the escalation ladder at the conventional level.

Some argue Russia may try something in the coming months to test the eastern flank, though opinions diverge on where. We tend to focus on our own region, but the Black Sea — Romania and Moldova — is also mentioned, in part because it is less prepared and less defended. Which is the likelier target?

There is a basic respect for Article 5 in the Kremlin. This is part of why the Russians have moved so aggressively in the south in recent years. One can trace the arc of the Putin presidency from the operations in Chechnya and the levelling of Grozny to opening up and securing his flank by cutting across to Crimea. That base allowed the Russians to move into the Middle East through the Bosporus, which in turn created an option for Libya. In 2022, they wanted to close off the Black Sea coastline altogether by cutting to Odesa. One could argue that the Russian aggression has focused on those areas in the south where there is no NATO commitment. After the 2014 intervention in the Donbas and in Crimea, the Allies moved quickly to shore up the northeastern flank through the enhanced forward presence. The Russian response then simply came in the south.

Among the non-NATO countries vulnerable to Russian aggression, Moldova stands out. Originally, Russia’s war plan must have been to push through Mykolaiv and Odesa and link up with Transnistria, potentially spurring a population panic in Chișinău. Who’s to say how the Romanians would have reacted to that instance? Romania is within NATO. Moldova is not, but it’s logistically hard for the Russians to get to. Moldova has so few air defences — potentially a couple of radars — and could become a target for a drone or missile. This is not a prediction, but only a scenario.

There already is substantial activity in the south. In the Black Sea, near the Neptun gas field and the drilling platforms, Russian sea-borne unmanned vehicles have been spotted. Whether they were surveilling, provoking, or up to something, an F-16 was launched to respond. With the Black Sea corridor for grain shipments shut down, Ukrainians are forced to go overland via the Danube to Constanța. We’ve seen the Russians time and again push into Romanian airspace, through airspace violations and other means, with drones landing on Romanian territory. Romania does have MK Air Base. It performed well during Operation Epic Fury as a partner of the United States and is in the good graces of the Pentagon. Bulgaria’s Exclusive Economic Zone is now targeted as well.

In the north, the Baltic states have been experiencing regular intrusions: classic espionage operations, cyberattacks, etc. Just recently, Norwegian forces discovered some deep-sea observation operations by the Russians near Svalbard — a Norwegian archipelago in the high north where the Russians have a settlement because of the 1920 Svalbard Treaty. They’re probing everywhere. They just look at targets of opportunity.

But the Russians are so committed to Ukraine that it is their real operational and strategic focus. Their strategic goal is to isolate Ukraine in a one-on-one matchup where Russia’s superior size can be brought to bear. Russia would not want to draw NATO into a broader war, but it is also weakening along its periphery: Finland and Sweden are now in the Alliance, so the Baltic Sea complexion has changed entirely. The Russian position in Ukraine is dramatically different from what it was 10 years ago.

The Russians are frustrated with Armenia’s political direction and annoyed with Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, who just won an election. Azerbaijan and Armenia mediated their conflict via the Americans, in a traditional Russian sphere of influence. Kazakhstan is pursuing a multi-vector foreign policy. Chinese money is overwhelming much of Russia’s historical influence, while the demographic imbalance between China and Russia in the Far East is enormous. The only two areas on its immediate periphery where it might have strengthened its grip are Belarus and the DPRK, to whom it has given an option to play the Chinese and Russians off of one another.

A year ago, you and Can Kasapoğlu questioned whether an EU drone wall was the right answer to the now frequent incursions. A year on, multiple initiatives exist, but the incursions continue, and we still respond with disproportionately expensive means, scrambling fighter jets or firing expensive interceptors. Who and what stands in the way?

I don’t think that the drone wall concept will be fielded in its entirety, or the way that it’s being conceived, for some time yet. First, the European Union is not a military alliance. NATO is. Any multinational military deterrence or defence initiative is probably best routed through NATO as a natural vehicle. Second, NATO offers natural command hierarchies, which the EU does not. This is a problem that, traditionally, the position of SACEUR and SHAPE headquarters have solved: namely, that no European power is prepared to cede Europe’s leadership to another.

Ukrainians are on the cutting edge in capabilities: from sensors and acoustic pickups to connecting those to defensive means. They aren’t using Mirage jets and expensive missiles to shoot down drones. In extremis, they might be tempted to use their precious air force assets for low-level incursions. They have utilised F-16s en masse against new types of Russian drones. But by and large, there are all sorts of creative, relatively inexpensive means to counter these drones. It starts with a sensor network Ukraine has devised. Sometimes, the defensive means are as simple as mounted machine guns on the back of pickup trucks. I’m not suggesting that should be NATO’s defence architecture, but we have to drive down costs.

One can criticise the results of NATO exercises by saying they’re only at the small battalion level, and that it’s really combined-arms campaigning where the Ukrainians come up short. In these local-unit exercises, the Ukrainians managed to defeat NATO forces at a regular level, including in relatively recent exercises in Estonia and Portugal. It’s remarkable, and we need to learn from that.

In your testimony to the Helsinki Commission, you argued that no discussion of Eastern European security is complete without a reference to Ukraine, and in December you called for a course correction. That advice rested on the realities on the front line at the time, and on being honest about what Europeans can provide to Ukraine. Since then, reality has changed dramatically in ways few predicted. Does this new reality warrant a new course correction? How do we shape the policy towards Russia?

There is a fundamental disconnect between Russia’s political demands in the negotiations and what they’ve managed to achieve on the battlefield. The opinion — to the extent it was held by some administration officials in Washington — that in the end Russia will win has been whittled down by these dramatic successes that Ukraine has had in developing mid-range and long-range strikes, going after petrochemical facilities, refineries, even warehouses that produce dual-use items, and crimping the Russian economy, also through perhaps even more than 40 000 Russian soldiers per month that the Ukrainians have managed to kill or wound on the front lines. The one person who may think it’s more important to shut down this war – and is seemingly prepared to put greater pressure on Ukraine to accomplish that goal – is President Trump. He has swung back in this direction in recent days.

The number of killed is astounding: traditionally, there tend to be more wounded than killed. In Russia’s case, it is the opposite, which also has an economic cost because these are contract soldiers who have to be recruited from the provinces. At a time when Russia is facing significant economic headwinds, that is not easy.

The Ukrainians have an argument to make. They are prepared to go to line-of-contact negotiations, but they won’t concede to the Russians something on the battlefield that the Russians haven’t managed to take. This effort to enter negotiations, with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner going to Moscow and Kyiv as well, is a noble humanitarian effort, but I think it also risks creating the illusion in Russia that Americans are prepared to go quite far to reach a political settlement.

The administration needs to be careful about this, not to create the impression that on the pathway to peace — in an attempt to freeze the conflict — Americans will, first, put unnecessary pressure on the Ukrainians. Ukrainians are pretty firm on their bottom lines, so pressure is unlikely to yield much. Second, Americans would have to break with our European partners and Allies on some of these key questions. This would only embolden the Russians to stay in the fight and keep pushing, because they think they’re close to achieving political effects at the negotiating table that include not only Ukraine but also NATO.

The presence of Günter Sautter, Jonathan Powell, and Emmanuel Bonne, the national security advisors of Germany, the United Kingdom, and France, at the negotiations in Kyiv, at the invitation of the United States, is encouraging. It suggests some sort of front between Europe and the US, even if it’s not eye-to-eye, direct overlap between the Trump administration’s thinking and some of the Europeans on Ukraine. We’ll see if it lasts.

Soon, however, we will be in a different reality: winter is projected to be a very difficult period for Ukraine. What will the state of play be then?

This would be an argument for why the Witkoff–Kushner visits are taking place — because the Ukrainians themselves have sought to impose enough pain on Russia to force Moscow by winter to get into some sort of negotiation. But the general consensus is that Russia’s demands have only hardened, if nothing else, and that whatever small concessions they were indicating in Anchorage are more or less off the table, if one follows Russian rhetoric on these issues.

There is a pattern to the war in Ukraine: spring and summer bring some optimism; fall grows a little dourer, and winter is outright pessimistic. The state of Ukraine’s air-defence interceptors is wretched. I’m not sure there will be many more PAC-3s flowing, especially from the United States, via the PURL mechanism. Even in Europe, there’s been real hesitation and resistance to dipping into stockpiles available. Others, however, have been very open: German foreign minister Boris Pistorius announced a PAC-2 tranche heading to Ukraine.

Other steps are being discussed to address the winter issue. One is the Ukrainians’ ask that the Americans greenlight Starlink for strikes into Russia to hit launchers rather than just intercept missiles as they land or make their way towards Ukraine. Instead, there are new reports of Starlink being cut for Ukrainian operations. The issue is ballistic missiles and even cruise missiles, less so drones. Now, jet-powered drones are beginning to wreak havoc as well. Ukraine has developed some drone-interception capabilities: even as the number of drones increases, interception rates remain relatively high.

There is a live discussion about distributing solar panels and generators so cities are better prepared, so there isn’t a central grid where hitting one critical infrastructure knocks out power to the entire city. We don’t know what the temperatures will be like, whether it will be as cold as last winter, but some people are making preparations to leave Ukraine. That is worrisome, because depopulating Ukraine is definitely a Russian war aim. There are plenty of small technical steps we could take to help Ukrainians – if we have the political will to carry them out.