At Lithuania’s Šiauliai International Airport, a delegation receives reports of sudden signal degradation and communications disruption across Ukraine. The news is an early indicator of spillover from an enhanced Russian jamming operation and raises serious questions about the effects on the region, including the safety of the flight they are about to board.
This was the scenario facing a group of experts convened by the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) and StrategEast to consider how the alliance might respond to a rapid expansion of electronic warfare (EW).
The participants, a group of leaders from the US and Ukraine, were asked to recommend courses of action — ranging from the strategic-diplomatic to the tactical-technical — in an all-too plausible setting given Russia’s recent history.
Advances in EW and communications developed by Ukraine and Russia are reshaping how allies and adversaries prepare for modern conflict — including how they act when its effects extend beyond the front line.
In the exercise, two groups were tasked with developing competing approaches. This quickly revealed different policy preferences and mirrored the spectrum of views on gray zone issues across the alliance.
The first group immediately turned attention to public safety concerns, treating the incident as a crisis that needed to be rapidly stabilized without triggering broader conflict. Their initial options reflected a familiar playbook: consultations under NATO’s Article 4, coordinated investigations on attribution, and calibrated diplomatic and economic pressure.
Yet even as these tools were discussed, participants wrestled with their limitations. How quickly could attribution be established to a standard that maintained political unity? And how should leaders balance the imperative to reassure the public against the risk of amplifying panic?
A further set of issues centered on agency. Smaller frontline states such as Lithuania were not viewed simply as exposed, but as potential agenda-setters capable of galvanizing a broader reaction.
At the same time, some recognized that Ukraine possesses the most relevant operational experience, raising a challenge of how best to integrate a wartime innovator into the alliance’s deliberative and consensus-driven decision-making.
The second group approached the scenario differently from the start, lamenting that this was another example of the Kremlin’s persistent shadow war against NATO members. It was not an isolated escalation, but part of a continuous campaign.
They viewed EW as a tool of persistent pressure, designed to exploit the alliance’s dependence on interconnected systems but remaining below traditional thresholds for conflict. Ukraine’s experience has shown how localized disruptions can cascade across civilian and military networks, producing outsized effects with limited risk of attribution.
Group two’s priorities reflected this framing, with an emphasis on maintaining political cohesion across NATO and the EU, assessing whether the incident signaled a deliberate expansion of the conflict, and ensuring Ukrainian forces could operate despite degraded communications.
Rather than responding immediately, they emphasized managing escalation by instituting countermeasures and preserving strategic flexibility.
The session then abruptly introduced a sharper test to both groups. They were told that, a month later, a similar disruption had contributed to a commercial air disaster, killing civilians from across NATO member states.
The shift from disruption to loss of life forced participants to confront a more difficult question: at what point would a hybrid attack trigger collective action?
Even then, there was hesitation. Many noted that such incidents align with a recognizable Kremlin pattern of limited, deniable actions followed by pauses that disrupt momentum and keep the alliance reactive.
While the threshold for NATO’s Article 5 on collective response was debated, most concluded that vagueness, precedent, and political risk would likely prevent its invocation.
Instead, work focused on expanding the toolkit of responses below the threshold of open conflict. These included selective intelligence declassification to strengthen attribution, helping Ukraine target offending systems, and employing covert or deniable capabilities.
Exploring this area of action without escalation — with the dual challenge of imposing costs while maintaining alliance cohesion — was a theme throughout as courses of action were proposed. For example, would enhancing the covert supply of NATO targeting and other information to Ukraine be discovered and result in further intensified Russian EW attacks?
Another common conclusion across groups was that control of the public narrative is critical. Assigning responsibility, credibly and quickly, is essential for deterrence and for sustaining political unity, yet it remains one of the alliance’s most persistent vulnerabilities.
Discussion also underscored an asymmetry between the two sides. While Russia operates with relative freedom in the space between peace and war, NATO remains constrained by legal thresholds, the need for political consensus, and risk aversion.
This imbalance allows the Kremlin to probe and recalibrate faster than the alliance can respond.
Electronic warfare sharpens this challenge. As one participant observed, it is a capability that “knows no geographic boundary,” allowing its effects to spill across borders while perpetrators preserve plausible deniability.
At the same time, Russia’s war has driven unprecedented investment and state-backed procurement in Ukraine’s defense sector, accelerating the development and deployment of electronic warfare countermeasures, autonomous systems, and rapid-response capabilities.
It is clear NATO must invest in resilience and credible deterrence in the gray zone and develop the appetite for political risk to employ it. This includes deeper integration with Ukraine’s prolific defense innovation system, in which battlefield experience is showing how quickly capabilities can be developed and deployed.
While several aspects of the simulation were unique to the challenges posed by electronic warfare, it exposed a more familiar problem: the difficulty of building consensus across the alliance when faced with ambiguity, speed, and risk.
EW compresses decision timelines, obscures attribution, and blurs the division between civilian disruption and military effect — making collective action harder at precisely the moment it is most needed.
The debate centered on whether Russia’s actions should be labeled “terroristic” rather than hybrid, but it did not translate into a coherent strategy. The gap between language and action risks reinforcing the ambiguity Moscow seeks to exploit, particularly in a domain where effects can cross borders instantly and without clear signatures.
The exercise also highlighted Ukraine as giving a critical, and often underutilized, advantage. Its battlefield-driven innovation, rapid iteration of electronic warfare and countermeasures, scalable production, and real-time adaptation to Russian tactics offer a model for operating in precisely the kind of contested environment examined here.
Integrating Ukraine’s experience into NATO planning and capability development could help close the gap between the pace of the threat and the speed of alliance action.
The final question raised by the exercise remains unresolved: from the Kremlin’s perspective, are these actions already part of a war against NATO? If so, the challenge is not only how the alliance responds to electronic warfare incidents, but whether it can adapt its decision-making, learn from Ukraine’s frontline experience, and act with sufficient speed and unity.
Jason Israel is the Auterion Senior Fellow for the Defense Technology Initiative at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He has twice served the White House National Security Council, most recently as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Defense Policy & Strategy. He is a Captain in the US Navy Reserve.
Anatoly Motkin is president of StrategEast Center for a New Economy, a non-profit organization with offices in the US, Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan, developing the knowledge-driven economy in the Eurasian region
Hanna Myshko is the Regional Director for Ukraine, Moldova, and the Gulf States at StrategEast Center for a New Economy. Her work focuses on developing digital economies and building strategic partnerships between technology ecosystems, including leading the US-Ukraine Tech Partnership Initiative — a program designed to deepen cooperation between Ukraine’s tech sector and the United States, foster business partnerships, attract investment, and contribute to Ukraine’s broader economic recovery.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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