In the final years of the Second World War, as the Allied governments anticipated the defeat of Nazi Germany, Lancaster House was the seat of the European Advisory Commission, which was charged with recommending solutions to the political problems in a post-war Europe. This week, Lancaster House will host the Nato Cyber Defence Conference, where the alliance will discuss a very different set of problems in what looks disconcertingly like a pre-war Europe.

One of these problems is the growing likelihood of cyber attacks launched by Russia on Nato countries. Yesterday, The Sunday Telegraph published excerpts of a speech that is to be made later today by Pat McFadden, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, addressing this threat. McFadden will reportedly warn that “Russia is exceptionally aggressive and reckless in the cyber realm”, and would be able to “turn the lights off for millions of people. It can shut down the grid. This is the hidden war Russia is waging with Ukraine.”

In addition to being a testing ground for new weaponry such as AI-assisted drones and hypersonic missiles, the war in Ukraine has become an arena for large-scale cyber warfare. Russia’s cyber attacks on Ukraine began in 2015, long before the 2022 invasion, in the first confirmed cyber operation on a national energy grid — which actually did turn the lights off for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians. Similar attacks have been repeated throughout the war, most notably in the first months of the invasion, in concert with kinetic attacks on the grid.

However — and with some irony — as a legacy of the Soviet Union, Ukraine’s energy grid is state-owned, and therefore has significant reserve capacity, making it resilient to such attacks. By contrast, many of Europe’s energy grids are controlled by the market, which maximises for efficiency, but leaves them vulnerable. One of the main topics at this week’s conference will be how to build similar resilience into European and Nato countries’ grids.

Cyber, however, is only one piece of Russia’s hybrid-warfare model — the integration of numerous non-military means of conflict and proxy wars, backed by the threat of military force, to achieve strategic goals. The origins of the doctrine were conceived by General Valery Gerasimov in an article published in 2013, in which he wrote that “the role of non-military means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness.”

With the war taking up so much attention in the media, it is easy to miss the escalating string of these “non-military means” of destabilisation which have been deployed against European countries since it began. These have included instances of sabotage and arson, GPS-signal jamming, disinformation campaigns, weaponised people-smuggling, and phone-hacking — much of it variously connected to Russia. This is hybrid warfare in action, deployed to disrupt, confuse, and blur the lines between peace and wartime.

Due to this ambiguity, many of these tactics are difficult to effectively respond to, or prevent. Nato was originally conceived — and essentially still exists — to deter against an invasion or nuclear attack on Europe. Strategically, the alliance hasn’t adapted for this new era of hybrid warfare, whose low-threshold, non-military and plausibly deniable tactics do not clearly fall within the purview of Nato’s Article 5. This means that, so far, the hybrid war being fought is effectively an asymmetric one.

This asymmetry, however, isn’t sustainable. If Donald Trump reaches a settlement in Ukraine across the current lines of control, Washington will begin shifting attention and resources to the Indo-Pacific for more pressing matters. Russia can then be expected to continue its campaign of harassment as a means of bullying Europe into accepting an expanding sphere of influence. As Europe prepares to take primary responsibility for its own security, this new order must include a coherent strategy to deal with Moscow’s hybrid threats, including how and when to respond. As critical as this week’s Cyber Defence Conference is, it shouldn’t miss the wood for the trees.