The Russian Way of War

In September, I visited the command post of Ukraine’s Tsunami regiment: a volunteer unit of several thousand soldiers fighting in the east of the country. It was the first time I had been inside a post since serving in the United Kingdom’s armed forces during its campaign against the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) in northern Iraq seven years earlier. From a cramped basement near the city of Kramatorsk, I watched on screens as Tsunami frontline teams crept between rubble-strewn houses, clearing a village of Russian soldiers. Lieutenant Colonel Olexandr Gostyschev, the regiment’s commander, deliberated, via gaming software, with his frontline, mortar line, and drone line as his team prepared to strike the shell of a house hiding three Russian soldiers. The Russians were lying prostrate, as if willing themselves to meld with the ruins around them. Eventually, Tsunami hit the house with a single mortar shell. Once the smoke drifted away, we could see the Russians were no longer moving. There were no celebrations from the Ukrainians. Instead, the men edged forward to the next Russian position.

A week later, after I had returned to the United Kingdom, the regiment texted to say that it had recaptured the village—the latest in a series of small victories. That month, Tsunami had liberated just under a mile of Ukraine, but at the cost of 15 lives and many injuries. (The soldiers are coy about exact figures.) That translates into one fatality for every 300 feet of land. The regiment has many miles yet to travel.

For the first year of Ukraine’s war against Russia, the endeavors and sacrifices of regiments like Tsunami served as inspiration for Western populations. Millions of people across Europe and the United States flew Ukrainian flags and cheered as desperate Ukrainian defenders halted Russia’s brutal advance. Weapons flowed to Kyiv, and Western militaries trained thousands of Ukrainian soldiers. The European Union gave the country billions of dollars in economic support.

But recently, Ukraine’s momentum has slowed. “Our briefings are sobering,” said Mike Quigley, the co-chair of the U.S. House of Representatives Ukraine Caucus, in an August interview with CNN. Another Western official told the outlet that it was “highly unlikely” Kyiv could “change the balance of this conflict.” Some politicians have even called for their countries to stop helping Ukraine. Washington cannot agree on a new funding package to aid Kyiv.

Over the last six months, many prominent Western analysts have said Russia and Ukraine should begin negotiations. According to these proponents, a settlement with Russia is inevitable. There is little indication that the Kremlin will consider withdrawing, and it is willing to expend an extraordinary number of lives to hold the land it occupies. Its armies have laid too many square miles of land mines for Kyiv to retake all it has lost. And a negotiated settlement would still be—relative to the West’s initial expectations—a Ukrainian triumph. As the political scientist Samuel Charap wrote in Foreign Affairs in July, a divided Ukraine that is “prosperous and democratic with a strong Western commitment to its security would represent a genuine strategic victory.”

Yet to assume a cease-fire would hold, or that Russia would ever stop trying to undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty, misunderstands Moscow’s objectives and, with it, Russia’s way of war. Although U.S. and European analysts may think about warfare in terms of relative wins and losses on the battlefield, for Moscow, conflict is a much more flexible term. It is a spectrum of activity that includes many tools of state power—including religion, disinformation campaigns, energy supplies, assassinations, and grain exports—along with standard tools like artillery barrages.

For Russia, the goal of conflicts is not always to defeat an enemy army. It may also be to give Russia more power over its neighbors or to weaken states or alliances it opposes, such as NATO. In the case of this conflict, Putin is trying not only to stifle Ukraine’s independence but also, he claims, to weaken NATO in a generational struggle to save Russia. This conflict has been ongoing for nearly 20 years, and Russia’s targets include Ukrainian soldiers on the battlefield, Ukrainian civilians, and Western populations and leaders.

Russia’s approach to conflict, born of its revolutionary Soviet inheritance, extends beyond Moscow. It is a template for how other potential Western adversaries might confront the United States, Europe, and their partners in other regions. China and Iran, for instance, have similarly comprehensive approaches to conflict—ones they are already using in their neighborhoods. Grasping Russia’s way of war is therefore crucial not only to supporting Ukraine but also for protecting the entire rules-based international order.

WAR AND STRUGGLE

Russia has long been home to creative thinking in both conventional and nonconventional warfare. In the conventional arena, during the 1920s and 1930s, Soviet military thinkers generated novel ideas such as the concept of deep battle—breaking through enemy lines and creating a continuous moving front. These ideas shaped, and continue to shape, NATO thinking.

In the unconventional space, Soviet influence was even more profound. From its founding days, Soviet leaders developed a body of ideas and practices about subversive conflict, including forging documents, co-opting agents abroad, and establishing disinformation campaigns. An early example was the groundbreaking Operation Trest. Carried out in the 1920s, Trest operatives established fictitious underground political cells in Europe in the 1920s to infiltrate anti-Bolshevik groups and lure their members back to the Soviet Union, where they were executed. It combined front organizations, disinformation operations, espionage, and physical assassination. It established a pattern the Soviet Union would deploy throughout the twentieth century.

The Soviet Union was, therefore, responsible for significant developments in two ways of war: traditional warfare and subversive warfare. In Soviet terminology, conventional war (“traditional war” in U.S. military terminology) has been generally referred to as voina—war—and unconventional forms of conflict as bor’ba—struggle. War was the province of the Red Army, whereas struggle was that of the KGB secret service and the Communist Party. Voina depended on the usual tools of combat, such as tanks, aircraft, and soldiers in uniform. Bor’ba, by contrast, entailed tools such as espionage, blackmail, and paramilitary and terror violence. Although these two ways of war were theoretically integrated, they were not in practice.

For Moscow, conflict is a flexible term.

After the Soviet Union’s collapse at the end of the 1980s, Moscow briefly put aside these ideas as its budget shrank and it retreated from much of the world. But beginning in the late 1990s, the Russian state again began to plan for the threats and potential conflicts it faced. The security establishment, motivated in part by victimhood and lingering Soviet paranoia, concluded that the primary threats came from being outclassed in both direct conventional warfare and indirect psychological conflict by the United States and its allies. The Kremlin knew it could not match NATO in exerting hard power, even in its own backyard. So it dusted off its old tactics. The result was the development of a Russian military doctrine that has integrated Russia’s two ways of war into a single way of war, closely aligned to its political goals. This doctrine, broadly speaking, uses all the tools of the state to maximize Russia’s power.

And there are many such tools. In my own research, I have found just over 100 outside the narrow confines of conventional military operations. They include, for example, using the Russian Orthodoxy to ensure the population remains loyal, taking hostages, blackmailing, publishing war poetry and weaponizing supplies of energy. Not every tool is used in every conflict. The tools that worked in Syria will not be identical to disinformation campaigns in Europe or the United States. When each one is deployed depends on the context of the conflict.

But nowhere have more of these tools been used than in Ukraine. Moscow has, in fact, been using them against Kyiv for nearly two decades. Although many analysts believe that the Russian-Ukrainian conflict began with Moscow’s 2022 full-scale invasion or with the 2014 annexation of Crimea, the starting date of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict is the 2004 Orange Revolution, when Ukrainian activists prevented the corrupt, pro-Russian candidate Victor Yanukovych from becoming president after his fraudulent election. The Kremlin responded by using political, economic, and informational tactics to undermine Yanukovych’s opponents. Moscow, for example, gave money and gas deals to sympathetic Ukrainian oligarchs, enabling them to buy parts of Ukraine’s eastern industries and fund pro-Russian politicians. The Kremlin engaged in espionage and corruption to hollow out Ukraine’s spy agencies and ministry of defense. (The heads of both organizations, at various times, were Russian passport holders.) It spread online disinformation. And Russian television broadcast shows into Ukraine with the message, as one Ukrainian put it to me, that Moscow “has the right to interfere in the affairs of neighboring countries.”

Russia’s tactics seemed to pay off: in 2010, six years after the revolution, Yanukovych won the presidency. He then set about switching Kyiv’s alliances. In late 2013, Yanukovych abandoned a long-planned treaty with the European Union. In its place, he announced a pact with Russia. Had Ukraine signed it, the pact would have been a truly extraordinary Kremlin coup, proof of the power of indirect conflict. But before the agreement was formalized, thousands of civil society activists flooded the center of Kyiv to begin three months of protests. Dozens of people were killed by Ukrainian police officers, but the violence could not stop the movement. Eventually, Yanukovych was forced from office.

The Kremlin knew it could not match NATO in exerting hard power.

Undeterred, Putin began to move closer to voina—traditional war—by sending unmarked Russian troops into eastern Ukraine and Crimea. But this operation was still irregular, relying heavily on paramilitary groups and intelligence operatives. It had echoes of 1990s conflicts that Russian operatives had curated in Moldova and Georgia, if on a larger and more professional scale. In fact, the operational plan for Ukraine broadly followed a template written in 2013 by Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s chief of the general staff, which, in turn, closely resembled earlier KGB templates on staging coups.

The curated uprising succeeded completely in Crimea and partially in the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, where Russian operatives, organized crime groups, and local thugs established two “people’s republics” that were ostensibly independent but were actually controlled by Moscow. Yet elsewhere in eastern Ukraine, including in cities such as Kharkiv and Dnipro, the coups failed. In the southern port city of Odessa, Russia’s efforts literally went up in flames: the 40-person core of Moscow’s cell was burned alive in a trade union building.

But despite its failure to engineer the political collapse of Ukraine, even this modest success enabled Russia to create a managed conflict—blocking any potential Ukrainian moves toward EU or NATO membership. Moscow then tried to parlay this partial gain into a wider political victory. So as the Kremlin pocketed Crimea, it dangled Donetsk and Luhansk as leverage in negotiations. The provinces could rejoin Ukraine, Moscow said, but only under conditions that would force Kyiv to effectively accept pro-Russian paramilitary forces and political parties on its soil. The resulting arrangement would have locked Ukraine into an ever-tighter relationship with Russia, slowly strangling the country’s genuine independence.

Kyiv saw through this gambit, and the peace talks flopped. By 2020, it was clear that Putin’s strategy was failing. Russia and Ukraine were still negotiating over the east, but Kyiv was simultaneously deepening its Western relationships. Russia remained in de facto control of the seized territory, but it had destroyed its “soft” power and degraded its international influence in the process. In his drive to subjugate Ukraine, Putin had created exactly the united Ukrainian identity he wanted to squelch. As one Kyiv resident told me, “We have such an expression: thanks to Putin, Yanukovych, for creating the Ukrainian nation.”

CONTINUED OBSESSION

Despite the defeats, Putin remained obsessed with controlling Ukraine. And so, having exhausted his nonmilitary and paramilitary options, he ordered a major invasion of the country in February 2022. The third stage of the conflict began: outright voina.

Putin’s primary goal—swiftly suppressing Kyiv’s government—was akin to Soviet actions in Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968, where Moscow sent in troops and tanks to suppress opposition and reassert its rule. But unlike in those two states, Russia’s military performed poorly. Indeed, Putin’s shambolic but brutal invasion was the very opposite of the integrated plans Russian doctrine endorses. Yet over the course of this year, Russia’s strategy has evolved. Although still centered on large-scale conventional war, Putin has established three interlocking objectives. To attain them, he is once again using a mix of traditional and nontraditional warfare.

On the conventional warfare front, Moscow is focused on holding its defensive lines. It is doing so by extracting such a high price from Ukraine’s attacking forces that regiments like Tsunami are bled dry. This strategy may work because Kyiv, unlike Moscow, is sensitive to losses. Putin would willingly shed half a million Russian lives for half the number of Ukrainians.

Russia has combined this conventional military strategy with irregular techniques. One is to use drones and missiles to destroy Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure—in particular, its water and electricity—in order to make wartime life unbearable for the country’s people. So far, Ukrainians have refused to yield. Putin’s attacks have, however, ravaged Ukraine’s economy, which has shrunk by 25 percent since the war began.

Putin would willingly shed half a million Russian lives for half the number of Ukrainians.

And then, Putin has engaged in renewed bor’ba. He has, for example, tried to blockade Ukraine’s Black Sea grain exports to press the developing world to demand an end to the conflict. The blockade is also designed to fan inflation in Europe, in hopes of prompting the continent’s people to push Ukraine to concede. He is, separately, magnifying Western voices that want a quick settlement. His disinformation campaigns are designed to show that Ukraine cannot win—and that it should sue for peace. Together, these strategies are designed to fray and weaken the financial and military umbilical cord that stretches between Ukraine and the West.

So what should the Western alliance be doing? Its first task is to clearly understand Russia’s strategy and see that Moscow’s aims extend beyond the ground war and toward damaging U.S. and European support for Ukraine. Indeed, reducing this support may be Russia’s primary goal. Western support to Kyiv is what soldiers would call the conflict’s center of gravity: the one thing, that if successfully attacked by Russia, would cause all others to fail.

Once Western officials recognize this fact, they must recommit to supporting Kyiv. Putin’s latest budget puts the Russian economy on a war footing. He is engaged in a conflict of attrition against Ukraine’s soldiers, against Ukraine’s population, and against Ukraine’s supporters. To stop him from winning, U.S. and European production lines need to consistently provide arms to Ukraine, and U.S. and European militaries need to offer systematic, large-scale training to modernize Ukraine’s army. France, the United Kingdom, and the United States must also persuade the developing world that Ukraine’s struggle is just and that the oppressive power is Russia. That way, they do not lose the battle for the global South.

Russia’s military doctrine is not so much a doctrine for war as it is a doctrine for statecraft.

As they take these steps, Western officials must recognize that supporting Ukraine’s fight for independence is overwhelmingly in their interests. Any outcome that leaves Putin with a substantial part of Ukraine will enable him to claim he fought NATO to a standstill at the gates of Russia. He will declare victory and rearm for new waves of direct or indirect conflict.

Given Putin’s bloody determination, NATO and the EU must accept that they will be in a state of deep cold war with the Kremlin as long as Putin is president of Russia—and perhaps afterward, too. The West needs to be war-gaming scenarios to avoid future conflicts and seeking out measures to blunt Russia’s attempts to weaken its societies and the international order. The West needs to be mindful of global tactics that Putin could unleash, such as cyberattacks on a scale never before seen, fomenting violence in the Balkans, or cutting Internet cables and energy pipelines in Europe’s seas.

Through these acts, Russia would keep the West consumed, draining its resources and weakening its ability to address other international threats. They would certainly make it harder for the United States to respond to challenges from its other main competitors: China and Iran. As with the Soviet Union, both states have revolutionary heritages and, like Russia today, integrated approaches to conflict. Beijing, for example, weaponizes trade to its advantage, much as Moscow has manipulated energy exports. Like Russia, China engages in cyberattacks along with intellectual property theft. Beijing is also seeking to expand its territorial waters in the South China Sea. Iran, for its part, uses religious loyalty, propaganda, and paramilitary and terrorist violence to extend its power without launching traditional wars. Tehran may soon use nuclear threats, as Russia does now.

These countries’ styles of fighting show that conflict is rarely a binary—either war or peace. It is, instead, a continuum that involves multiple aspects of state power. In reality, Russia’s military doctrine is not so much a doctrine for war as it is a doctrine for statecraft, one that it and other states will use to undermine the Western alliance and the international order. Stopping these revisionist powers is essential to protecting democracies from authoritarian countries. But it will not be easy. Like Tsunami’s soldiers on the frontline, we have many miles left to travel.