Anna Linford On 12 August, Ukraine sent naval drones against Novorossiysk, Russia's main Black Sea oil-export port — the latest in a campaign of strikes on Russian port infrastructure that Elisabeth Braw discussed with Al Jazeera. The same week, Turkish officials voiced growing unease about Black Sea shipping security, per the New Voice of Ukraine, Red Sea carriers absorbed fresh Houthi attacks near the Bab el-Mandeb strait, as Devdiscourse reported, and Germany's government was still working out its response to a drone incursion over Leipzig as part of a wider strategy against hybrid threats from the air, according to Il Foglio. None of these events share a chain of command. Together they read as the same test: whether the system that has kept the world's sea lanes open since 1945 can survive being probed, sabotaged and coerced without anyone declaring war on anyone.
The Baltic: cables as the new border
NATO's longest-running maritime scare has been under the Baltic, where vessels linked to Russia's so-called research fleet have been tied to a string of incidents around undersea cables and pipelines — a pattern researcher Nurlan Aliyev has tracked since 2025. Asked to revisit his warnings a year on, Aliyev told War on the Rocks that NATO and EU members have since strengthened coordination to protect critical undersea infrastructure across the Baltic, Barents and Arctic — without saying the gaps he originally identified have closed.
The Black Sea: strikes answered by strikes
Ukraine's drone campaign against Novorossiysk, the port that keeps Russian oil exports flowing, is a wartime tactic rather than ambiguous coercion — but it sits in the same sea where Turkey, NATO's other major Black Sea power, is now openly nervous about the safety of shipping lanes it depends on, per the New Voice of Ukraine. Two years into a war fought partly through its own port infrastructure, Ankara is watching a sea it shares with Russia turn into contested space it cannot fully police.
The Red Sea: coercion becomes routine
Further south, Houthi attacks continue to reverberate through Bab el-Mandeb, the strait linking the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, disrupting shipping lanes well beyond Yemen's coastline, according to Devdiscourse. The response is coalition-building rather than confrontation: the Maldives has joined the Saudi-led maritime coalition set up to protect Red Sea shipping, per reports — the same logic of pooled, partner-state response now taking shape around the Baltic's undersea infrastructure.
Why nobody calls it an attack
The common thread, argues Peter Dickinson at the Atlantic Council, is that Moscow's hybrid war against NATO keeps escalating precisely because the alliance has been reluctant to impose additional costs on the Kremlin — a pattern Dickinson says feeds Russian perceptions of Western weakness and invites further probing. Bulgaria's BGNES outlet frames the same dynamic continent-wide, cataloguing cyberattacks, sabotage, drone incursions and strikes on critical infrastructure across the continent as facets of one hybrid campaign.
Watch whether NATO or the EU imposes any concrete cost — sanctions, seizures, naval escorts with teeth — the next time a Baltic cable is severed. Watch also whether Ankara moves from voicing concern to hardening its own Black Sea posture, and whether the Red Sea coalition that just gained the Maldives becomes a template partners elsewhere start copying.
