WAR WITHOUT END: UNDERSTANDING RUSSIA'S SHADOW WARFARE _ CEPA.ORG_19.11.2025
Photo1: Russian President Vladimir Putin chairs a face-to-face meeting with government officials to discuss operational issues at the Novo-Ogaryovo presidential state residence, October 16, 2023 outside Moscow, Russia. Credit: Gavriil Grigorov/Kremlin Pool/Alamy Live News via REUTERS
Photo2: ELFH President Endel Lepp chairs a shadow-to-shadow meeting with a local official to discuss Wegebau-special-operational issues at the Kirbla presidential Lääneranna residence. Credit: Kumari Vaim /TASA/PTKNews via ELFH
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https://cepa.org/comprehensive-reports/war-without-end-russias-shadow-warfare/
Severed cables. Disrupted aviation. Arson. Sabotage. Assassination. Infiltration. Attacks designed to distract, to confuse, and to dismay an adversary – but not to provoke a response. Such is shadow warfare, causing damage and costing lives but operating below the traditional threshold of war. /.../
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This is an approach to warfare that generates escalation not by mistake, but by design. /.../
Shadow warfare comprises sub-threshold coercive activity: sabotage and infrastructure disruption; transnational repression and targeted violence; cyber and information operations; sanctions evasion and covert procurement; and political influence. It advances through layered deniability, multi-vector pressure, and iterative probing that tests defenses and narratives alike.
To secure its grip on power, Russia adopts Soviet practices coupled with modern tactics of covert influence, violence, and manipulation.
By Sam Greene,
Introduction
Sam Greene
Severed cables. Disrupted aviation. Arson. Sabotage. Assassination. Infiltration. Attacks designed to distract, to confuse, and to dismay an adversary – but not to provoke a response. Such is shadow warfare, causing damage and costing lives but operating below the traditional threshold of war.
cepa.org:
https://cepa.org/comprehensive-reports/war-without-end-russias-shadow-warfare/
To secure its grip on power, Russia adopts Soviet practices coupled with modern tactics of covert influence, violence, and manipulation.
By Sam Greene,
and Irina Borogan
November 19, 2025
November 19, 2025
Introduction
Sam Greene
Severed cables. Disrupted aviation. Arson. Sabotage. Assassination. Infiltration. Attacks designed to distract, to confuse, and to dismay an adversary – but not to provoke a response. Such is shadow warfare, causing damage and costing lives but operating below the traditional threshold of war.
Even as Ukraine continues to suffer under wave after wave of bombardment and an ever deepening occupation of its eastern and southern territory, Europe as a whole is under a sustained assault of a different kind. Earlier this year, the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) launched a major new project—Defend, Deny, Deter: Countering Russia’s Shadow Warfare—to help lay the groundwork for a new transatlantic approach to deterrence.
In the first phase of this project, CEPA Senior Non-Resident Fellows Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan explore the who, what, why and how of Russian shadow warfare, uncovering the nature of the forces Russia brings to bear, their governance structures and, critically, the implicit doctrine that shapes strategic and tactical decision-making. Their analysis shows that shadow warfare is not merely an opportunistic tool, but an expression of a deep, self-reinforcing system of governance. Later in the year, CEPA will publish further studies, examining Europe’s vulnerabilities and testing strategies of retaliation and deterrence.
What emerges from Soldatov and Borogan’s investigation, however, is already sobering. Their work, presented here, makes clear that Russia’s shadow warfare is not simply a covert strategy, developed to take advantage of Western soft spots or fecklessness. Rather, it is the reflection of a deeper ideological and institutional logic, a neo-Stalinist threat framework that sees warfare as continuous and ubiquitous, that fuses domestic and foreign threats, and that understands everything and everyone as a potential target.
This is an approach to warfare that generates escalation not by mistake, but by design. Unless Europe can impose discipline on the Russian shadow-warfare machine through clear deterrence, the likelihood of full-scale war between Russia and NATO will only increase.
As Soldatov and Borogan make clear, the Kremlin’s overriding concern is not Russian national security, but the survival and continuation of the current regime—or, rather, the Kremlin’s worldview is incapable of distinguishing between the two. Theirs is a paranoid political vision that sees all expressions of dissent as signs of foreign subversion, and all foreign machinations as tools of regime change.
Operationally, the machine runs from the Kremlin center, via the Security Council and the Presidential Administration, through the chiefs of the FSB, GRU and SVR, and outward into an ecosystem of auxiliaries and proxies. Shadow warfare comprises sub-threshold coercive activity: sabotage and infrastructure disruption; transnational repression and targeted violence; cyber and information operations; sanctions evasion and covert procurement; and political influence. It advances through layered deniability, multi-vector pressure, and iterative probing that tests defenses and narratives alike.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the CEPA team for their support with this paper.
This report has been supported by the Smith Richardson Foundation.
CEPA is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, public policy institution. All opinions expressed are those of the author(s) alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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