War without end: Deterring Russia’s shadow war

Europe is no longer merely a witness to Russian aggression. It is one of its principal targets. While Ukraine remains the most visible front in Russia’s confrontation with the West — and while it is primarily Ukrainians who are suffering and dying under massive bombardment — it is no longer the only battlefield. Across Europe, Russian-linked actors have sabotaged critical infrastructure, disrupted aviation and energy systems, penetrated digital networks, surveilled military facilities, and targeted political opponents and defense officials, a reality long familiar to several front-line European states. These acts are rarely claimed by their perpetrators, often ambiguously attributed by their victims, and almost never met with decisive retaliation. Taken individually, each attack may appear manageable. Taken together, they constitute something more troubling: a sustained campaign of shadow warfare designed to degrade European security while remaining below the threshold that would trigger a military response.

Over the past year, the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) has conducted a major study of the actors and tactics involved in Russia’s shadow warfare, its strategic underpinnings and governance structures, and the processes and patterns of European response. Since 2022, these activities have become more tightly synchronized with Moscow’s broader war aims in Ukraine. At its core, this research argues that Russia’s shadow warfare is not a temporary or stop-gap expedient, nor a collection of opportunistic “hybrid” adaptations. Rather, it is a system of conflict rooted in ideology, embedded in institutions, and biased toward escalation. The danger it poses thus lies not in the limited damage it causes today, but in the potentially unlimited damage it could cause tomorrow as the risk of inadvertent escalation grows. As a result, deterrence is necessary both to secure Europe against ongoing attacks and to ward off potentially catastrophic eventualities. European states have begun to develop effective responses, and we can already draw valuable lessons from their experience. Troublingly, however, CEPA’s research finds that Europe’s failure to deter this campaign has less to do with a lack of awareness, which would be easily remedied, than with a persistent mismatch between how Russia fights and how the West responds. Overcoming this mismatch will require consistent structural and behavioral change.

At the heart of Russia’s shadow warfare is a worldview that does not recognize clear boundaries between war and peace, or between domestic and foreign threats. In the Kremlin’s eyes, the war in Ukraine, covert operations in Europe, and the repression of dissidents at home and abroad are not separate endeavors. Rather, they are fluid fronts in a single, existential struggle, the ultimate aim of which is regime survival. This outlook has deep roots in Soviet, and particularly Stalin-era, concepts of permanent confrontation, in which conflict is not an exception to normal politics, but its organizing principle.

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