Former MI6 director Sir Richard Dearlove says Russia will not launch a conventional military attack on NATO but warns of escalating gray zone provocations designed to test alliance resolve without triggering Article 5.
What Dearlove Actually Said
Dearlove was responding directly to a recent US intelligence assessment suggesting Russia could test NATO with a limited military incursion into the Baltic states. He pushed back on that framing.
Speaking on the One Decision podcast, he said: “I don’t think that’s going to happen. Nothing is likely to happen that would trigger Article 5 of NATO. What you’ll get, and what you’re getting already, are incidents, drone incursions, missiles landing in Poland quote unquote accidentally. One can expect more provocative gray war incidents of greater seriousness. Putin’s purpose will be to see what sort of reaction he gets, not just from the individual country, but from NATO as a whole.”
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What Are Gray Zone Tactics
Gray zone tactics are actions taken by a state to weaken, pressure or destabilize an adversary without crossing into open warfare. They live in the space between diplomacy and military conflict, deliberately designed to stay below the threshold that would legally or politically justify a military response.
The tools are varied: disinformation campaigns, cyber attacks, economic pressure, proxy forces, staged accidents, and plausible deniability operations. The goal is never to win a battle. It is to confuse, exhaust and divide the enemy over time, while the aggressor maintains the ability to say, with a straight face, that they did nothing wrong.
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Our Take
Putin has never wanted to invade NATO territory. That has never been the objective. He is not reckless enough to trigger a war with the world’s most powerful military alliance, and he knows it.
What he wants is simpler and more achievable. With the alliance fractured since Trump’s return to power and US support for Ukraine quietly shrinking, Putin sees an opening to test how united NATO actually is. Gray zone tactics are his instrument. Every drone, every accidental missile, every staged incident is a question he is asking: how much will you tolerate before you crack?
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The danger is misreading him. If NATO responds as though a conventional invasion is the threat, it will prepare for the wrong war. Putin’s actual goal is to make NATO members nervous enough to pull back support for Ukraine. His real goal is to make NATO countries so anxious about their own security that they quietly step back from supporting Ukraine rather than risk a direct confrontation with Russia.
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