The Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) report titled ‘War Without End: Russia’s Shadow Warfare,’ authored by Sam Greene, Andrei Soldatov, and Irina Borogan, outlines Russia’s adoption of Soviet-era practices combined with modern covert tactics—including sabotage, cyber attacks, assassination, and political manipulation—as part of a persistent shadow warfare strategy. This approach aims to disrupt adversaries without provoking full-scale war, driven by a neo-Stalinist ideological framework that fuses internal repression with external aggression. The Russian intelligence agencies (FSB, GRU, SVR) operate centrally from the Kremlin and use layered deniability via proxies and criminal networks to impose multi-vector pressure on Europe and the wider West. The report highlights that this shadow warfare is a systemic machine where escalation is inherent due to absence of empirical success metrics, prioritization of loyalty over performance, and internal competition. It argues this creates strategic drift and continual escalation risk, threatening wider conflict between Russia and NATO. The Kremlin’s intelligence apparatus, instead of being purged after failures early in the 2022 Ukraine invasion, was expanded and resourced to conduct broader global covert operations beyond Ukraine, targeting Western public opinion, military aid, and security institutions. The report stresses that traditional Western responses based on resilience and sanctions might backfire as any imposed costs tend to validate Russian aggression rather than deter it. Effective deterrence, it concludes, requires imposing real strategic costs on the Kremlin to discipline the shadow warfare machine. The analysis draws heavily on historical Soviet doctrine, showing continuity in Russian strategic culture and paranoia about perpetual Western hostility, autocratic survival, and great power status at all costs. The report is part of CEPA’s ongoing project aimed to inform transatlantic strategies to counter Russia’s hybrid warfare.
Category: Military & Paramilitary Operations
Subcategory: Unconventional / Paramilitary
Country: Russia
Source report: cepa.org/comprehen…
