Photograph Source: МВС України – CC BY 4.0

European leaders are now fretting about Vladimir Putin in much the same way that everyone worries these days about artificial intelligence.

Until recently, AI agents remained within the virtual spaces where they’d been developed. Rather than free range, they were confined to their “sandboxes.” But there have been a number of cases of these AI agents lying, cheating, and hacking their way out of their designated spaces. Now, even AI experts are talking about the not-insignificant odds that the technology they designed will run amok and kill all of humanity.

Putin, too, was at the beginning of his reign confined to his Russian sandbox. Then he intervened in Georgia. He lied and cheated his way into Crimea and the Donbas. In 2022, he expanded Russian operations significantly when he tried to take over all of Ukraine.

Still, from the European point of view, Russia was flexing its muscles within the post-Soviet space. Now, Russian agents are increasingly operating outside this sandbox as well to launch attacks elsewhere in Europe. They have hired single-use operatives to commit arson, which would likely include such recent attacks as the one on WB Electronics, a Polish manufacturer of drones for Ukraine. An attack drone, which failed to detonate, was found last month at the Leipzig airport near a Ukrainian transport plane. There have been an estimated 150 Russian-linked cases of sabotage throughout Europe between 2022 and 2026, and the pace of the attacks is accelerating.

Russia is already involved in what NATO calls “out-of-area operations.” So far, however, these operations remain within a grey zone of sort-of plausible deniability. But European leaders are concerned that Putin, too, has the capacity to run amok and trigger a world war, if not a nuclear apocalypse.

The most recent cause for concern was the military exercise that Belarus conducted last week near its borders with Poland and Lithuania. This is the infamous Suwalki Gap, the narrow wedge of territory that separates Belarus from the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad and that connects the Baltic countries to the rest of NATO. During the Cold War, NATO ran various war games in anticipation of a Soviet attack on Poland through this 65-mile gap. Now, NATO leaders worry that Russia, perhaps alongside Belarus, will manufacture some excuse to “defend” Kaliningrad by occupying part of Lithuania or Poland.

After that, as former presidential envoy Brett McGurk imagines the scenario, “Russia would also claim through non-official channels that a NATO response risked nuclear war. The purpose is less about the Gap and........

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