Hangman, hangman Why Russia’s sabotage campaign in Europe is calibrated to fall short of the open attack that would unite the continent against Moscow

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Following an unannounced visit to Moscow last week by CIA Director John Ratcliffe, U.S. and European outlets filled with speculation about the trip’s purpose, much of it warning of a looming, if not imminent, confrontation between Russia and NATO. Speaking on Meduza’s daily podcast, Riddle editorial director Anton Barbashin argues that Russia’s operations inside the European Union are calculated to stay deniable — preserving political divisions that an open attack would erase — and that the escalation Moscow is actually pursuing runs through Ukraine.

“They’ll hang me”

The Economist drew perhaps the most attention with a report claiming that Putin told his inner circle he would be hanged if Russia ends the war without conquering the Donbas. Barbashin says the scenario is implausible. Picture someone in the room for a confession like that from the president, then going back to his office or home, opening Signal, and passing the scoop to a British correspondent — or meeting one in a Moscow cafe. All of it would be happening deep into the war, when only a dozen or so Western journalists are left in the city, and every one of them is under close surveillance. Either such disclosures are deliberate efforts to plant stories or send signals, he says, or the sources are more junior than they are made out to be and are relaying only what they have heard secondhand. The past few years, Barbashin says, have been littered with forgotten claims, published in respected outlets, that described specific territorial swaps Putin was said to be ready to accept — none of which materialized.

Host Vladislav Gorin offers a linguistic reason for doubting The Economist’s story: A Russian leader contemplating his own end, he says, would more likely reach for “shot” — the Stalinist reference point — than for “hanged,” which he takes to be Anglophone in origin.

Why did Ratcliffe visit Moscow?

Barbashin says the intelligence channel is the only remaining contact between Russia and the U.S. that can operate quietly and with few leaks, as it did during the Cold War. Open diplomatic engagement fizzled out months ago, and Moscow’s push to restore embassy operations and normal working contact has yielded little at the ministry level, where relations are nearly frozen. According to U.S. newspapers, Ratcliffe met FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov to correct the Kremlin’s picture of conditions at the front. Barbashin says that scenario is implausible: it would be nonsense to ask the head of the FSB — the very agency that prepared the invasion and provides the Kremlin’s intelligence on the war — to tell the president that he’s being lied to. The most the visit could plausibly achieve, he says, is a working communications channel in the near future and maybe some understanding of red lines.

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Hybrid war against the EU

Barbashin says Russian operations in the EU are a form of strategic messaging, not a prelude to full-scale war. He is confident that assurances have been passed to European leaders through Viktor Orbán and others: stop supplying weapons, and the sabotage stops. In his reading, the Europeans understand clearly that the sabotage is a response to continued support for Ukraine.

The public deniability and restraint built into these operations, Barbashin says, are designed to exploit the splits between EU governments (and within them) over how serious the Russian threat is. Southern European governments see less urgency in Russian activity than Poland and the Baltic states do, and they oppose measures such as visa restrictions on Russians. Many parties on the far right and far left consider support for Ukraine to be a mistake and want relations with Moscow normalized to head off further escalation, reasoning that Russia is fighting proxies in Ukraine rather than Europe itself. Each new incident gives those parties something to work with, since they can blame it on their own governments’ policy choices rather than on Moscow. Several are gaining real weight — for reasons largely unrelated to Ukraine — and could end up in coalition or in government.

To ensure that these divisions remain useful to the Kremlin, Barbashin says, Russia has to avoid attacking Europe outright, which would give everyone a reason to consolidate against it.

A second payoff is that limited Russian provocations in Eastern Europe make Ukraine’s staunchest allies worry about their own security, pulling resources toward domestic defense and away from Kyiv.

What would go too far?

Barbashin doubts that Moscow is poised to attack a NATO country openly. If Russia ever acknowledged strikes on European territory, it would guarantee the outcome the Kremlin least wants: ballooning military budgets across the continent, a decade spent rearming against Russia, and pariah status that would outlast Putin himself. India, China, and Brazil have worked to show that their alignment is not anti-Western, and Barbashin expects that an openly radical turn by Russia would wreck those partnerships. Beijing matters most, because Russia depends on it for high technology, and he asks how many months Russian ballistic missiles would keep flying if Chinese supplies were cut off.

He doubts, too, that Russia could win a war with Europe on the numbers. On paper, at least, the EU fields well over a million service members. Subtract Russia’s commitment in Ukraine, and what is left at Moscow’s disposal is perhaps 400,000, mostly young conscripts. None of the arithmetic favors Moscow. Barbashin notes, however, that hawks like Sergey Karaganov have for years urged preemptive strikes on Poland and Russia’s other neighbors precisely to establish that Moscow is unhinged enough that no one will challenge it over Ukraine.

So what happens next?

Barbashin says the realistic escalation ahead is more of what is already happening: strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure through the winter, continued slow pressure in the Donetsk region, and a return to talks in the spring under U.S. President Donald Trump’s mediation, with Putin holding out for the entire Donbas. The Kremlin could order another mobilization after the State Duma elections in September, but Russia continues to recruit roughly enough soldiers to offset its battlefield losses. Barbashin does not believe Russia has vast hidden reserves still waiting to be committed. Everything available, he says, apart from weapons of mass destruction, is already in use.

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