The sheer audacity and scale of Israel’s attacks on the Hezbollah militant group are unprecedented. They have not only done very serious damage to the organization, but they have also achieved a staggeringly successful penetration — whether through human agents or signals intelligence — of an instinctively secretive group.
The whole world has taken notice, Russia included. And it’s anxious.
The September attacks on members of the Iran-backed militant group in Lebanon killed at least 62 people and left at least 1,500 fighters maimed and blinded, a Hezbollah official told Reuters. Soon afterward, Israel launched a long series of decapitation strikes aimed at destroying Hezbollah’s senior command structure, with considerable success.
Russia’s military is now discussing whether it, too, is vulnerable and how best to protect itself.
Russian propaganda sites, especially the most conservative, drew parallels between Hezbollah (which the US and the UK have branded a terrorist group) and Russia, warning that Moscow must draw lessons from what has happened.
Russia now has a pre-primed choir of extreme nationalists who respond to almost any development with proposals for acts of aggression and, sometimes, acts of war. They are prominent, noisy, and have access to mass media. And while their talk sometimes seems mildly deranged, it is sanctioned by the regime.
The self-described philosopher and ultra-nationalist Aleksandr Dugin, who is close to the Kremlin, said the attack, and the subsequent death of Hezbollah leader Sayid Hassan Nasrallah, was a “colossal blow against the entire structure of Middle Eastern ‘Resistance’” and “the beginning of the end of the world.”
His colleagues seconded Dugin’s argument that Russia should use its most dangerous (i.e., nuclear) weapons to avoid a similar fate. Such outspoken radicals were joined by military analysts echoing his words.
On the Military Review website, which is also close to Vladimir Putin’s regime, several articles suggested a range of “preventive strikes” to avoid the grisly fate of Nasrallah and his lieutenants.
Yevgeniy Fedorov, a regular contributor to the site, declared that “Israel’s acts of terror in Lebanon raise questions about the safety of Russians” and warned that imported technology may be life-threatening.
Russia has no formal alliance with Middle Eastern terrorist groups, but it has a long association with them, just like the Soviet Union, which trained and armed militants. The Putin regime has expressed solidarity with the world’s outcasts, including a burgeoning alliance with Iran, and growing anti-Semitism has contributed to the perception of Israel as an enemy. Even if this anti-Semitism is not officially proclaimed by officials, it slips into their public statements.
The conspiracy theory that Jews unleashed the Russo-Ukrainian war to cleanse the land of Slavs and settle there themselves is also popular in radical patriotic circles. The spread of such sentiments may have influenced the anti-Semitic pogroms in Dagestan last fall.
Another contributor to Military Review, Mikhail Nikolayevskiy, claimed the West is deliberately “pushing” Russia and Iran “into the most severe scenario: Russia to use nuclear weapons, Iran to enter full-scale hostilities with Israel.”
He argued the two countries should jointly develop an “unexpected and non-trivial solution” in response.
His colleague, Andrey Mitrofanov, came up with options for such “non-trivial solutions,” including a massive missile strike on government buildings in Kyiv or attacks on some NATO countries — albeit under a foreign flag.
He proposed using drones “without identification marks or with Ukrainian identification marks” to strike the American Globus-3 and Globus-2 radar sites in Norway. One option could be to strike from Finland, he said.
Mitrofanov also suggested oil and gas production facilities in Norway and the Finnish satellite company ICEYE as possible targets. Romania, too, could be hit, he wrote, as it is “a country hostile to Russia.” The targets there would be the radars and launchers stationed there as part of the American Aegis Ashore missile defense system.
He also suggested strikes on Baltic states which “create problems,” writing that “the proximity and limited territory of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia allows for the large-scale use of small kamikaze UAVs, including FPV drones, including those with incendiary munitions. The targets are ammunition depots, fuel, and other similar objects.”
In a further provocation, he suggested that British ships should be sunk under the pretense that “Russia has nothing to do with it.”
Such proposals have been repeated across the pro-Kremlin media. Writers at the business newspaper Vzglyad devoted an article to justifying why “Russia’s small neighbors would be dangerous in a big war.”
The Baltic countries have a trained and organized armed forces reserve, complementary units, and armored vehicles, as well as “excess port and airfield infrastructure that permit them to receive large NATO contingents,” they wrote. All of these war plans are accompanied by articles about the strategic disadvantage for Russia of any peace talks on Ukraine.
The question is how seriously such plans should be taken. On the one hand, the war in Ukraine has demonstrated that Putin’s Russia is unable to defeat even a smaller neighbor and defend its own territory, and therefore lacks the resources for a full-scale war with NATO.
On the other hand, however, acts of sabotage under false flags or no flags should be taken seriously. Western intelligence services have detected an increase in the number of Russian sabotage attacks in Europe aimed at disrupting arms supplies to Kyiv, including arson and explosions at military factories.
Judging by the plans proposed by Russian military analysts, such activities will continue with renewed vigor.
Kseniya Kirillova is an analyst focused on Russian society, mentality, propaganda, and foreign policy. The author of numerous articles for CEPA and the Jamestown Foundation, she has also written for the Atlantic Council, Stratfor, and others.
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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