Andrzej Marszewski
The most dangerous misconception about the war in Ukraine is that the frontline is far, far away and the British home front has little to worry about.
It is not. Increasingly, the frontline is everywhere.
The discovery on 5 August of an explosive-laden drone near a Ukrainian Antonov transport aircraft at Leipzig/Halle Airport should concentrate European minds. This is no ordinary airport but a major hub in the logistics keeping Ukraine in the fight.
The device, security sources told the dpa news agency, was armed with Semtex. The airport worker who discovered it had “kicked it out of the air,” according to press reports.
We should not pre-judge the perpetrators, but the strategic significance is clear. Hybrid warfare, in which we suspect who is responsible but cannot prove it, is thriving. Better still from the perpetrator’s perspective, we are meant to suspect them while they deny involvement. Germany’s Interior Minister, Alexander Dobrindt, has already offered his assessment in this instance: “a hybrid attack scenario”.
The message is simple: we can reach you; you are not safe; what is your government going to do about it?
For too long, Western Europe has thought about security geographically. Kyiv is at war. Warsaw, Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn sit on NATO’s Eastern Flank. London, protected by distance, remains safely behind them.
That comforting geography is disappearing.
Everywhere is Kyiv. Everywhere is Warsaw. Everywhere is Vilnius. Everywhere is Riga. Everywhere is Tallinn.
Not because Russian tanks are about to appear in London, but because the distinction between frontline and rear areas is dissolving.
Russia has spent years turning up the temperature: cyber-attacks, sabotage, disinformation, espionage, political manipulation and recruited proxies. The intention being to probe our defences and, above all, test our willingness to keep supporting Ukraine.
Poland provides a warning of where this leads.
In November 2025, an explosive device detonated on the Warsaw-Lublin railway, part of Ukraine’s principal supply network. Further along the line, investigators found what Polish authorities described as a second attempt at catastrophe, potentially with serious fatalities.
Why attack NATO directly when the logistics sustaining it can be disrupted at a fraction of the cost — while feeding the old Soviet narrative of a decadent, divided West, rich in rhetoric, unwilling to respond?
Yet the explosion was only half the attack.
Dr Aleksander Olech of Defence24.com has highlighted how Moscow weaponises the nationality of its proxies: Ukrainian citizens recruited not merely for sabotage but because their identity can corrode Polish-Ukrainian trust.
The explosion is only the beginning. The argument about the explosion becomes part of the attack.
Dr Olech calls this accumulation a Russian “Phase 0”: testing methods and probing vulnerabilities below the threshold of armed conflict.
“Phase 0” does not stop at the Polish border. Across Europe we have seen cyber operations, GPS interference, suspected sabotage and arson against infrastructure and logistics. Germany alone recorded 166 unauthorised airport drone incursions in the first half of this year.
There is an obvious trajectory.
Disinformation becomes cyber intrusion. Intrusion brings reconnaissance. Reconnaissance develops into sabotage by cheap, deniable, disposable proxies. Sabotage grows more ambitious and, ultimately, potentially lethal.
Hybrid escalation will not arrive with a declaration of war. Putin’s calculation is simple: would NATO really trigger Article 5 over a sabotaged railway? If not, Moscow climbs the next rung of hybrid grey-zone escalation.
A little more disruption. A little more risk. A little more fear.
Imagine a cyber incident disrupting an NHS trust as airport communications fail. A suspicious fire closes a depot. A drone appears above sensitive infrastructure. Social media erupts: the Government has lost control.
Accident or attack? Sabotage or incompetence? Hostile reconnaissance or simply someone fooling around with a drone?
Hybrid warfare flourishes in ambiguity. The adversary ultimately wants to get under our skin.
No single incident needs to cripple Britain. Together they create something strategically more valuable: uncertainty, fear and mistrust.
The ultimate target is not the hospital, railway or substation but social morale and cohesion.
Russia does not need to defeat NATO’s armies if it can weaken the political will that makes those armies credible.
This is why “Eastern Flank”, though a militarily useful definition, is psychologically gravely misleading. NATO has a geospatial eastern frontier. In hybrid conflict there is no such western sanctuary.
A train carrying military equipment to a British port belongs to the same strategic system as one crossing Poland towards Ukraine; a North Sea cable, to the same infrastructure as one beneath the Baltic.
The logistical web stretches from Kyiv through Poland and Germany, across the Channel and into Britain.
We are all on the Eastern Flank now.
Britain must therefore rethink national defence and finally have the “whole-of-society” conversation called for by the Strategic Defence Review.
Ports, railways, energy networks and data infrastructure are not stand-alone economic assets but vital components of national defence.
Britain also possesses a barely exploited reservoir of experience: our veterans. Recruiting them into critical national infrastructure is more than good employment policy; it is a continuation of service.
The port worker, police officer, cybersecurity specialist, railway operator and electricity-grid engineer can all occupy critical positions in the modern battlespace.
This is not fearmongering. It is recognising that our adversaries do not respect the comfortable boundary between military and civilian life.
There is another difference. In Britain, serious sabotage still produces shock. For Eastern European societies with lived experience of Russian warfare, occupation and coercion, it confirms something embedded in their strategic culture.
They expect the Bear to return hungry. For them, it is a case of when, not if. As a result, they are spending record levels on defence and on resilience preparations.
We are only now getting round to planning what we intend to do. It is self-evidently a case of a two-speed Europe.
That matters because deterrence depends upon an adversary believing we possess both the capability and the will to respond.
Conversely, we should not attribute every warehouse fire or broken cable to Moscow. But neither should we pretend we inhabit peace. We are, as the Chief of MI6 Blaise Metreweli put it in December, operating in “a space between peace and war”.
The next attack may not fall on a trench in Donbas. It could strike a British port, railway, electricity substation or cable beneath the North Sea.
Fundamentally though, its real target may simply be the confidence of the British public.
Everywhere is Kyiv. Everywhere is Warsaw. Everywhere is Vilnius. Everywhere is Riga. Everywhere is Tallinn.
Everywhere is the frontline.
London is no longer somewhere safely behind it.
Andrzej Marszewski is Defence Alternative’s Correspondent-at-Large
Headline image, generated by AI, is indicative of hybrid warfare assaults on national infrastructure.
