Across Europe in the summer of 2026, a pattern emerged that history will likely recognise as a threshold moment: Russia, unsatisfied with the grinding war in Ukraine, extended its reach into the continent's industrial and military heartland through a coordinated wave of fires, explosions, and sabotage at defence facilities. From Leipzig to Tallinn, from Rome to Warsaw, the attacks were too numerous and too precise to be coincidence, yet carefully calibrated to remain beneath the threshold of open war. What is unfolding is an old strategy in a new intensity — the deliberate erosion of the bound