Cheap warfare?

There seems to be increasingly frequent reports in the press of what are called hybrid attacks on the infrastructure of UK and other European countries, like the one below which was widely covered, and came initially from the UK government.

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(April 2026): "The British military exposed a covert, month-long operation where three Russian submarines—including an Akula-class attack submarine acting as a decoy and two specialized GUGI (Main Directorate of Deep-Sea Research) spy submarines equipped with robotic arms—operated near critical underwater cables north of the UK. The Royal Navy tracked the vessels using the HMS St Albans frigate and maritime patrols, forcing them to retreat without reported damage.Shadow Fleets and Trawlers: European intelligence reports note that Russia increasingly uses civilian-fronted "shadow" vessels, research ships, and fishing trawlers for espionage, mapping subsea internet cables, and potential sabotage while maintaining plausible deniability.Broader Hybrid Campaign: Since 2022, kinetic and sub-threshold hybrid actions targeting European transport, energy grids, and undersea installations have multiplied significantly as a tactic to disrupt Western supply chains and penalize European support for Ukraine".

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You will have read too of Russian interference in elections, and of more direct attacks on individuals like the Salisbury poisonings.  All of these things require planning and money.  Why then, if your mission in life was to disrupt the west, would you not take advantage of the extremely hot and dry conditions this summer to cause yet more problems?

Throughout Europe, the US, Canada and other northern countries there have been record numbers of wildfires this summer. Okay, some have been caused by idiot picnickers casually discarding disposable barbecues in stupid places, or BT natural phenomena such as lightning strikes, but news reports also state that many have been deliberately lit, and that numbers of fires have been started around the same time within the same geographical area.

Food prices are already due to be affected by poor harvests resulting from the hot weather, now thousands of acres of productive land are being destroyed by fire too.

All it would take to have brought at least some of this additional hassle to the West are a fer agents with a form of transport and a box of matches.  Surely that must have been too good and opportunity to miss for Putin?