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Welcome to The World in 10. In an increasingly uncertain world, this is The Times' daily podcast dedicated to global security. I'm Tom Noonan, today joined by Toby Gillis. Is Russia planning an attack on NATO members? The head of the Kremlin's spy agency has certainly hinted at it, claiming they are preparing to take...
Now, Sergei Naryshkin has offered no evidence for that claim.
Our guest today is Philip Ingram, a former NATO planner, British military intelligence officer, and now the new regular host of Frontline, the Times Radio interview series on Ukraine, which The World in Ten is partnered with. Philip, do you think that it's likely that NATO members are increasing activity near the border with Russia and Belarus?
Yes, of course, there's an increased activity as we're seeing the negotiations for this coalition of the willing. And there's an awful lot more military activity happening on the NATO borders with Russia, with Belarus and elsewhere as the threat from Russia increases.
But it's not being done in an offensive or a preparation for offensive way. It is purely defensive. And we also have to remember that some of the Russian drone attacks that there have been in Ukraine, the drones are straight across NATO's borders. So there will be an increasing air defence bubble that's there just to make sure that we are staying safe.
ahead of any potential threat. The Russians have got a doctrine called maskarovka. I love that word. And it's all about masking. It's all about trying to spin things in a way, as we see in our politics day to day in this country. But it is, it's spinning something for an effect. And they use that all of the time. And this is almost certainly what this is.
So these pre-emptive measures in response by Russia then, let's cut to the chase, Philip. Is Vladimir Putin plotting an attack on European NATO members?
There'll be nothing overt military. They'll increase their number of against NATO countries. They'll increase the number of attacks against Ukraine. So the Ukrainians will suffer. But what they'll do is what they've been doing the whole way through this and before this conflict is in the gray zone, as we describe it. So they'll be continuing the cyber activity. They'll be looking for opportunities to disrupt in that area.
in particular, increasing their activity in the information domain, especially if you've got elections coming up, but also to try and create division between the United States and Europe, the United States and UK, UK and Europe and within Europe. They'll influence other things around the world. They'll influence what's going on inside Gaza, what's happening in Israel. They'll influence what's happening in Southeast Asia. They'll influence what's happening in Africa. Anything to try and distract our governmental capability from focusing on Russia. Yeah.
That feels a bit like the answer is sort of. I mean, if they escalate these sorts of attacks, as you mentioned, albeit not military, might NATO members feel forced onto the attack as a form of defence? Might this be an opportunity for an escalation?
It will be, but the Russians know where that escalation will come from. The previous Secretary General of NATO turned around and said that a massive cyber attack could constitute an Article 5 attack. The Russians know that. They came out with another threat whenever that happened in the same way. So they know what to do. They'll just ramp up what's
and many commentators describe as below the threshold. So it's something that will not automatically trigger a national or a multinational response, but it will still cause massive disruption. We're getting better at spotting it, we're getting better at mitigating it, and we're getting better at doing exactly the same back to them. Can we dig into that below the threshold strategy by Putin then? I mean, Article 5 doesn't specify that an attack must be military, so...
Two questions in one, I guess. First, how does Putin know where that threshold is? And then would that threshold ever move up or down? Who decides where it is? The threshold is in the eye of the beholder. So it's the political beholder. It's the NAC. It's the different contributing countries to NATO. So you've got the formal definition, but it's up to a country that has been attacked.
to examine that attack and decide whether it's gone over the threshold and call an Article 5 response. It's only happened once in NATO's history, and that was the 9-11 attack on the United States, and the Americans called for an Article 5 response, and there was an Article 5 response when NATO came together to support the United States. Now, that was a physical attack by a terrorist organisation, but you could have similar sorts of casualties caused by...
cyber attacks on a critical national infrastructure or other things like that. How does Putin know he's been doing this for years? This is ramped up through the Cold War. He understands NATO. He understands the political decision-making. And actually, he's got an open goal at the moment because of the diversiveness that there is between different countries as they're working around. We've got...
a president of the United States who's very unpredictable. We've got France, who is in a very difficult political position at the moment, so can't really do anything. We've got Germany that's still trying to form a government. We've got the UK that has...
come out of the EU and is still trying to work out where it sits between the United States, Europe with Brexit and has got its focus on lots of other different areas. We've got different conflicts around the world. So Putin's going, I'll stir a little bit here and I'll stir a little bit there and I'll do a little bit of this. And all of it is so low, but you add it all together. It's a good old Chinese proverb of a death by a thousand cuts. No one is going to cause any real harm, but add them all together and it's causing you real difficulties.
That's interesting, Philip, because one think tank has suggested recently the number of attacks on NATO members nearly tripled between 2023 and 2024, having quadrupled the year before that. I just wonder how much room there is now for it to continue with these increases. To quote you, could a thousand cuts become a million cuts, say?
Well, it's Russia ramping it up with its own internal capability. And it's got more capacity to do that. It's very, very good in the particular cyber domains and in the information domain. And it subcontracts a lot of stuff out into cyber criminal groups that are out there. But it's also bringing this
coalition, the CRINC group together, so China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. And it can subcontract work out into North Korea to attack bits and pieces, the Chinese to help, the Iranians to help. So
They're looking at opportunities of increasing the volume of what they're doing. Of course, technology helps as well. So we'll see much more generated by AI and generative AI. And that gives an additional capacity that even back in 22, 23 didn't exist. And that's growing exponentially. So the sky's the limit at the moment.
You've been quite explicit about Putin's intentions with these attacks. You know, don't force an Article 5 and also cause as much division as possible. Philip, you are a man who still speaks to people working within NATO. Is it working within that body or is this just about the man on the street, really, across Europe and the US? Yeah.
It's about both. NATO is an alliance of different nations. Each nation has got its own sovereign political path that it's going down. Those paths change every time there's an election. And therefore, there are always divisions in NATO. But that's one of the strengths of NATO, that you get so many different views about.
And NATO as an organisation tries to work with those divisions, build on the strengths and make sure the weaknesses don't come in to try and disable NATO from a collective perspective. So we use those differences to our strength. We recognise where things are being influenced and then it's educating not just the military forces, but the military is an arm of politics now.
Your warfare is diplomacy by other means. And therefore, we identify these threats from a military perspective. We get them in and hopefully educate the different politicians that are coming through. And yes, NATO is frustrating at times to work with. But it's probably one of the best coalitions that there's ever been when it comes to providing a collective defense.
And just finally, is Putin, with these increasing anti-NATO threats, taking a risk with Donald Trump, do you think? I mean, it's one thing to have a go at Ukraine, which Trump seems not to mind too much about. But even with his own issues about NATO, surely threatening allies like France and Germany and the UK might rile Donald Trump up in a way that we've not yet seen.
It could do. But what they could do is reinforce what Trump is trying to achieve and reinforce some of Trump's negative messaging against Ukraine, negative messaging against EU capability to support Ukraine and all the rest of it. That is directly attacking the democracy inside the United States by spinning what Trump's doing and magnifying it out to different audiences without Trump necessarily seeing it as an attack on the United States and coming from Russia. So a lot of this is
very, very subtle. And it's designed to create division. And that's, again, exceptionally difficult. Even cyber attacks, they're exceptionally difficult to actually physically pin the blame on someone and takes an awful lot of effort to do that. So it's almost considered...
as noise in the background, but it's very costly noise. OK, Philip, thank you. That is Philip Ingram, former NATO planner. Now, Philip spoke a lot there about cyber attacks on the West, an area we covered in our Trump Cyber Purge, a priceless gift to US enemies episode. That was last Friday, the 11th of April. It is well worth listening back to. For now, though, thank you for taking 10 minutes to stay on top of the world with the help of The Times. We'll see you tomorrow.
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