Germany woke up this week to another reminder that the war in Ukraine never really stayed in Ukraine. Overnight in Munich, two people threw incendiary devices over a fence onto a construction site next to the headquarters of Rohde & Schwarz, a defense technology firm that’s been quietly helping arm Ukraine’s drone program. One device ignited near some construction trailers; a second, unexploded one had to be defused by bomb specialists. Police arrested a 28-year-old woman and a 38-year-old man, both Bulgarian nationals, at a gas station shortly after. German investigators are treating it as a possible politically motivated attack, though officials have been careful to say they haven’t yet proven the company itself was the intended target.

It’s the kind of story that would have sounded like fearmongering five years ago. Now it’s just Tuesday in Germany.

A Pattern That’s Getting Hard to Ignore

The Munich fire didn’t happen in a vacuum. Just days earlier, the German government formally accused Russia of being behind a drone attack loaded with military-grade explosives at Leipzig/Halle Airport, one of Europe’s busiest cargo hubs and a key waypoint for weapons and supplies headed to Ukraine’s front lines. Berlin was serious enough about it to expel diplomats and shut down a Russian consulate and a Russian cultural center — a rare and pointed escalation for a country that’s spent a generation avoiding confrontation with Moscow.

Add to that a string of suspicious incidents at electrical substations in Brandenburg and North Rhine-Westphalia, and German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt’s own warning that foreign powers — Russia chief among them — appear to be recruiting cheap, disposable local operatives to carry out sabotage on their behalf, and you have a country that is, by its own officials’ admission, under low-grade attack. Security analysts call it “hybrid warfare”: no invading army, no declared war, just enough disruption to rattle public confidence and stretch a nation’s defenses thin — because you don’t need elite spies when a couple of untrained proxies with a Molotov cocktail can do almost as much damage to the headlines.

This Is the Bill Coming Due

Here’s the part nobody in Berlin wants to say out loud: this is largely the cost of decades of European governments underfunding their own defense, growing dependent on Russian energy, and assuming an ocean and an American security blanket would keep the consequences of that at arm’s length forever. President Trump spent years getting mocked in the press for saying, bluntly, that NATO members needed to pay their fair share and that Europe’s addiction to Russian gas was a strategic time bomb. He was right. The alliance is only now, under real pressure, moving toward the defense spending targets he pushed for back in his first term — and it took actual drones landing near cargo planes and Molotov cocktails outside defense contractors to get there.

That’s also the case for American energy dominance. Every barrel of U.S. oil and every cargo of American LNG that displaces Russian gas in a European boiler room is a small dent in the Kremlin’s ability to fund exactly this kind of sabotage campaign. It’s not an abstract policy talking point — it’s a direct line from American drilling permits to fewer rubles in Moscow’s covert-action budget.

None of that means Washington should be looking for a bigger fight. If anything, the argument for a negotiated end to the Ukraine war gets stronger, not weaker, every time a proxy attack shows up on European soil. Every month the war drags on is another month Russia has motive and opportunity to keep testing NATO’s nerves through exactly this kind of gray-zone pressure. A durable peace removes the pretext for it.

What Comes Next

For ordinary Germans, the practical fallout is showing up in oddly domestic ways — government advisories to keep backup batteries and emergency food on hand, the kind of civil-defense advice nobody in Western Europe has needed to hear in decades. With regional elections coming up, that unease is bound to shape the ballot box. Voters who spent years being told the war was a distant, faraway concern are now being told to stock up on flashlights.

The lesson here isn’t complicated. Strength deters. Weakness and dependency invite exactly this kind of test. Germany, and Europe more broadly, is now paying to relearn a lesson the current American administration has been arguing for years.