Former U.S. Ambassador Gordon Sondland is arguing that NATO and the European Union should treat the Kremlin as responsible for acts of sabotage and hybrid aggression by default, then let Moscow prove otherwise. Writing in Fox News Opinion, Sondland frames Western democracies' habit of demanding courtroom-grade proof before responding as a strategic liability that Russia has spent decades deliberately cultivating.
The attribution trap
The argument turns on a single structural observation: Russia designs its operations to ensure that conclusive public evidence will rarely exist, or cannot be disclosed without burning intelligence sources. Drones crossing into Eastern European airspace, severed Baltic Sea cables, crippled government networks, exploding weapons factories, disrupted rail systems, disinformation campaigns benefiting targeted political figures. Each event, Sondland writes, gets treated as a fresh mystery. Governments investigate. Months pass. Allies argue over whether evidence clears some arbitrary threshold. The matter fades. By then, he contends, the Kremlin has already moved to its next operation.
Russia, in Sondland's telling, operates deliberately inside the gray zone between peace and open warfare. It deploys anonymous hackers, commercial vessels, intelligence operatives, fabricated local movements, and nominally independent criminal organizations. The tools obscure the hand. The West's insistence on innocence-until-proven-guilty then does Moscow's work for it, converting a democratic value into a geopolitical subsidy.
Sondland's proposed fix borrows from Don Vito Corleone's logic in "The Godfather": if serious misfortune befalls a country in Putin's sights through a drone, a cyberattack, a mysterious explosion, or a damaged pipeline, presume Russian responsibility. Putin can then disprove it. The presumption, Sondland specifies, should be strong rather than mindless. Intelligence still matters. The standard drops from mathematical certainty to pattern of conduct, capability, and motive. National security decisions have always been made on those grounds, he argues. Demanding otherwise simply gives the aggressor a veto over the response.
Response formula
The companion piece of the argument is asymmetric retaliation. Symmetrical responses allow Putin to calculate the price in advance and treat it as a cost of doing business. The alternative is to respond in an area Putin values, at a time of Western choosing, and at a cost exceeding the original benefit. Options Sondland names: quietly disabling a Russian military capability, compromising an intelligence network, obstructing a revenue stream, exposing hidden assets, disrupting sanctions evasion, or increasing the effectiveness of Ukrainian operations.
He is equally emphatic that the West should not announce what it has done. Russia holds no press conferences after its cyberattacks. Uncertainty, Sondland argues, has been one of Putin's most effective weapons. The prescription: use it back.