The outcome of Russia’s parliamentary elections is predetermined. Yet the Kremlin cares about much more than the figures announced once the ballots are (mis)counted.
Vladimir Putin’s regime can of course falsify almost any result. Independent election monitoring has been largely destroyed, voting has been extended over three days, and electronic ballots are difficult to verify. But an entirely fictional election would cease to perform its most important function. It would tell the Kremlin nothing about the discipline of its officials, the resilience of regional elites, or the state’s ability to mobilize the population.
Russian elections are therefore more than a falsified vote count. They are a nationwide examination of the Putin system. Citizens play a secondary role. The real examinees are governors, bureaucrats, directors of state institutions, and party functionaries.
From September 18 to 20, Russians elect a new State Duma. At the same time, more than 2,200 regional and municipal elections will take place across the country, distributing approximately 20,700 elected offices and legislative seats.
The main question is not who will sit in parliament. There is no doubt that United Russia will finish first or, more importantly, that the Kremlin will retain control of the legislature through all the parties belonging to Russia’s managed political system. Every party allowed to contest the elections accepts Putin’s rule and opposes an immediate end to the war.
The last opportunity to cast a legal vote explicitly against the war disappeared in August. That was when the Supreme Court removed Yabloko from the ballot. The liberal party had called for a ceasefire and peace negotiations. Officially, it was disqualified for violating campaign finance and intellectual property rules. But the ruling came after Yabloko’s support among decided voters had, by some estimates, risen to about 6% within just a few weeks, compared with the 1.2% it received in the 2021 election. In addition, Nikolai Bondarenko, a popular Communist politician from Saratov and frequent critic of United Russia, had already been barred from standing.
This raises an obvious question: why hold elections at all if the Kremlin determines both the winner and the boundaries of permissible debate in advance?
The primary answer is the regime’s belief that it confers legitimacy. Even modern dictatorships can rarely afford to abandon elections altogether. A government based solely on coercion looks not only brutal but vulnerable. Putin prefers to claim that he acts on behalf of most Russians. Elections convert that claim into official percentages, televised maps, and millions of ballot papers.
After four and a half years of war, this demonstration has become particularly important. Putin has failed to achieve a decisive victory, but he cannot end the war without explaining what the enormous sacrifices were for. The Kremlin therefore needs periodic (and heavily staged) confirmation that the country endorses its chosen course.
United Russia is consequently running a two-track campaign. Its platform focuses primarily on wages, outpatient clinics, kindergartens, student accommodation, and technological development. The war has almost disappeared from its list of promises – the authorities understand how tired Russians are of both the conflict and the deterioration of everyday life. At the party congress, however, the rhetoric was entirely different: pledges to do everything necessary for victory, rejection of compromise with the West, and declarations of universal support for the war.
The same contradiction is reflected at the top of the party list. It includes Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, who embodies the technocratic normality of the pre-war era, as well as Vladislav Golovin, a veteran of the battle for Mariupol, and war correspondent Yevgeny Poddubny. They are joined by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and children’s rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova (who, like Putin, faces ICC accusations of the mass kidnapping of Ukrainian children). The party promises a return to normal life while simultaneously asking voters to endorse the war and a new military elite.
Legitimacy, however, is only one function of elections. No less importantly, the campaign tests whether the entire Putin system is still functioning.
Russia is not governed by one man personally supervising every polling station. Between Putin’s orders and the officially announced result stand governors, mayors, civil servants, state-owned company executives, university rectors, school principals, electoral commissions, and regional branches of United Russia. Each must mobilize voters who depend on the state, deliver the required turnout, prevent surprises, and present Moscow with a convincing result.
This machinery has already undergone a rehearsal during United Russia’s primaries. The party claimed that more than 12 million people took part. Independent observers, however, reported pressure on public-sector employees and students: state institutions first required them to register on the online voting platform and then instructed them to vote, sometimes for specific candidates.
The primaries simultaneously tested the Kremlin’s ability to bring war veterans – whom Putin has called Russia’s “new elite” – into politics. To make this easier, United Russia automatically added 25% to the tally of all participating veterans. Yet even with this advantage, only 58 war participants won their primaries – fewer than 10% of those seeking State Duma nominations. The largest concentrations of successful veteran candidates were found in Moscow, Chechnya, the Novosibirsk region, and the occupied part of the Donetsk region.
This outcome demonstrates why simply inventing the final figures is insufficient for the Kremlin. Elections reveal resistance within the system itself. Regional elites do not want to surrender safe seats to newcomers, even when Putin demands their promotion. Nor are voters necessarily willing to support a candidate merely because he participated in the war. Turning the president’s promise into a new parliamentary cohort required changing the rules of internal party competition.
Mobilizing ordinary voters presents another test. For years, Russian businesses and state institutions have compiled lists of people dependent on them. Human resources departments send messages to employees, order them to visit polling stations, and require them to report that they had voted. District and municipal leaders across the country are given strict key performance indicators for turnout and support for the ruling party. When they fail to meet their targets, the regime has long had a means of punishing them – the allocation of government funding and subsidies.
But this system has begun to break down. Businesses are cutting jobs and wages, meaning that employers’ voting instructions are no longer offset by past economic stability. The elimination of the lowest tier of local government has deprived the authorities of municipal intermediaries who personally knew local shopkeepers, farmers, and public-sector workers. Internet shutdowns in response to Ukrainian attacks impede both electronic voting and real-time monitoring of turnout. Meanwhile, the state-controlled MAX messaging app cannot yet fully replace WhatsApp and Telegram, which are familiar to ordinary Russians and regional officials alike.
This is why the final figures matter to the Kremlin only when accompanied by information about how they were produced. How many employees had to be coerced? Where could managers meet their targets with a single message, and where were threats required? In which regions do governors still control the administrative machinery, and where are local elites sabotaging candidates imposed from above? Where can discontent be safely channeled toward the loyal Communist opposition, and where does it turn into support for an anti-war party that must be removed from the ballot?
Elections also distribute positions within the regime. A State Duma seat offers little opportunity to influence policy, but it provides status, protection, and access to resources. At least a quarter of United Russia’s parliamentary faction may be replaced after this campaign, while turnover in regional and municipal legislatures could reach 40%. This allows the Kremlin to reward loyal officials, admit some of Putin’s favored “special military operation veterans” into the system, and determine which governors are capable of protecting the interests of their patronage networks.
The Kremlin will win these elections. The real question is not how many seats its party will be awarded, but how much coercion, administrative pressure, and outright fraud will be required to produce that victory – and how many cogs in the political machine remain willing and able to serve Putin’s interests. That is what the September elections are designed to tell the Kremlin.
Vsevolod Bederson is an independent researcher.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author 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.
In the upcoming Russian parliamentary elections from September 18-20, governors will be the top candidate in 45 of the ruling United Russia party’s 57 regional rosters (80%).
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, who is also considered the governor of the Russian capital, ranks second on the five-candidate federal party roster. Adding other governors running in second place brings the total number of such officials featured at the top of United Russia’s regional and federal rosters to 55. Since 2016, the number of governors heading the party’s rosters has risen sharply: from 19 in that year, to 49 in 2021 and now 55.
This growing reliance is telling. Regional leaders are not merely electoral “coattails” or “locomotives”; they also bear personal responsibility for results in their regions. Voting for United Russia can thus increasingly be seen as a referendum on governors’ approval, shifting accountability for the party’s performance onto their shoulders, and potentially becoming a major pain in their necks. For the party, it’s a useful corrective since it both keeps political elites in step and devolves any electoral uncertainty onto other officials.
Governors are well aware that they will be judged less by the economic performance of their regions — especially as their freedom to make essential decisions and attract funds is shrinking — than by their ability to maintain control over their territories. The clearest metric is pro-regime votes, including United Russia, and the absence of protests and unauthorized gatherings during the campaign.
At the same time, governors have limited impact on strategic campaign decisions. Major agreements and political bargaining — including the distribution of electoral districts among the five permitted parliamentary parties, United Russia, the KPRF or communists, LDPR, A Just Russia–For Truth, and New People — are arranged by the Presidential Administration, as are decisions on cancelling party and candidate registrations. Decisions on the rosters and candidates for the liberal Yabloko party and the KPRF are cases in point.
Most campaign funds are also beyond governors’ control, with rare exceptions in a handful of wealthier regions, such as Moscow, Tatarstan, Chechnya, and Sverdlovsk Oblast. Yet when it comes to electoral tactics, governors’ hands are largely untied. What arsenal do they have within this restricted space?
The first and most important instrument is the so-called administrative turnout — a bundle of measures aimed at pressuring, or directly compelling, people dependent on regional and municipal authorities or business management to turn out and vote for the ruling party. The key point is that some people have grown accustomed to obeying without even keeping a “fig sign in their pocket”, a Russian expression for concealed dissent, while others are surveilled by their immediate supervisors. The latter are personally responsible for delivering results and may risk their benefits or even their positions.
Governors chair closed meetings with municipal authorities — whose autonomy has severely shrunk since 2021 — along with senior managers of state-owned companies, military officers, and proxy civic organizations, to repeatedly assess their “vote buckets”: how many people each entity can bring to the polls and induce to vote for the ruling party.
Similar signals are transmitted from the top down through multiple administrative routes, including companies, the military, and ministerial hierarchies. “Administrative turnout” operates across overlapping levels, so an average voter receives the same signals from several directions, with each node embedded in an interconnected chain. As a result, few groups remain outside these circles — mainly small and medium-sized businesses, young people outside the education system, housewives, and some pensioners.
The second instrument may be defined as positive attribution: any positive change, new infrastructure, social facility, or beneficial decision in a region is attributed to the authorities and, ultimately, to United Russia. With governors heading the party rosters, possible gaps in this chain are bridged, and the campaign fuses into a eulogy for the authorities. Governors can, for instance, allocate bonuses to teachers at the beginning of the school year, or one-time payments to large professional or demographic groups. Such funding is presented as the generosity of the authorities and United Russia, whose candidates advocate for or bargain for these benefits. Virtually any such event makes prime-time news, as most regional media are loyal to the authorities.
The third major instrument is preferential arrangements for United Russia in terms of access to voters, media coverage, convenient venues, and political advertising. While officially allocated election time is distributed evenly among parties on the same TV channels and media outlets, additional opportunities — particularly news and reports — are available primarily to United Russia, whose candidates are often incumbents, directors, or officials, not to mention governors.
So-called black technologies, such as electoral carousels and direct vote buying, have become much less popular due to their limited efficiency and greater risk of detection and media exposure. Public scandals indicate to Moscow that a governor cannot control the territory and may result in punishment.
Yet, when all other instruments prove insufficient, there has always been a Plan B: falsifying the results through ballot stuffing, manually or electronically, using the votes of those who usually do not turn out — the same polling station commissions have often worked in their districts for years and know their voters — or by reallocating votes among parties during the count. For example, some estimates suggest that electoral manipulation may have significantly inflated Putin’s vote total in the 2024 presidential election. Not without reason, election observation is becoming increasingly performative and hollow.
Finally, the competitive nature of Russian elections has shifted from a contest among parties and candidates to competition between regional and municipal administrative machines at governors’ disposal. The current elections will thus show less support for United Russia than the ability of governors — and the administrative machine as a whole — to mobilize voters in the party’s favor and maintain control over their territories.
The author is an expert in Russian politics and governance. CEPA has withheld the writer’s name in recognition of possible retribution by the Russian regime.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author 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.
Sergei Kiriyenko became head of the Kremlin’s political bloc after the 2016 State Duma elections. His predecessor, Vyacheslav Volodin, lost his position partly because turnout in those elections fell below 50%, a show of popular apathy too notable to ignore.
Volodin had not wanted to overheat the system. But he worked hard to construct a network of sham public organizations around Putin, each offering unconditional support for the president and his policies. The All-Russia People’s Front was the clearest example.
Under Volodin’s model, a dependent or loyal electorate was expected to turn out on election day. This ensured predictability while also providing a measure of legitimacy. Protest-minded citizens, meanwhile, were expected to stay away from the polls and then draw the obvious conclusion: the authorities had won thanks to the votes of the loyal electorate.
At some point, however, this arrangement ceased to satisfy Putin. He had outgrown the political scenery built around the All-Russia People’s Front and wanted evidence of broader popular support. That support was supposed to be reflected in high turnout and a high share of the vote for the candidate backed by the authorities. Volodin’s model could not deliver the first of these.
Kiriyenko, the new man, understood the task perfectly. Under his leadership, the political bloc began systematically working to raise the official figures in federal elections — both turnout and the percentage of votes received by Putin and his new United Russia party.
Kiriyenko and his subordinates intensified the mobilization of the dependent electorate. Public-sector employees were joined by workers at businesses dependent on the authorities. Later, electronic voting was introduced, which, in theory, makes it possible to manipulate election results in virtually any way.
The quality of “popular support” therefore did not change when Kiriyenko replaced Volodin, but its official quantity increased. Moreover, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, the political bloc was prepared to conduct an electoral procedure in June 2020 that was not required under the law. The constitutional amendments could have been adopted by votes in the upper and lower houses of parliament without any “referendum.” Formally, that is what happened: the amendments were approved by the State Duma and the Federation Council. But the vote organized by Kiriyenko and his subordinates once again gave Putin impressive numbers to display.
Running election campaigns has been the primary purpose of Putin’s political bloc since the days of Vladislav Surkov. Resolving intra-elite conflicts in the regions, fighting the opposition, and managing personnel policy in the systemic parties and regions were important, but secondary areas of work. More precisely, all of them ultimately served one purpose: organizing federal elections.
Kiriyenko’s political bloc has taken this electoral focus even further, leaving “work” with the opposition to the security agencies. Putin’s system of government remains based on a functional approach: every element of the system has its own function, and it is precisely that function that gives the element — and the person responsible for it — influence and institutional weight.
To strip an element of its function — in the political bloc’s case, for the system to abandon elections — is therefore to strip it of influence and alter the balance among the elites. Under the unwritten rules of the power vertical, the loss of a function must be compensated by granting its overseer, and the elite group behind him, a position of equivalent status.
Vladimir Putin follows an ultra-conservative approach to personnel appointments, which is why the system has long struggled to provide such compensatory positions. Finding a position for Sergei Kiriyenko if his bloc were to lose its electoral function would be difficult — and, before a major reshuffle, perhaps impossible.
Kiriyenko has known Putin for many years. At one point, he signed the documents appointing Putin as head of the FSB. Kiriyenko was one of the architects of Putin’s power vertical when he served as presidential envoy to the Volga Federal District and, apparently, oversaw nuclear-weapons development at Rosatom. He is also part of the influential Kovalchuk brothers’ clan, which is unlikely to want to surrender any of its spheres of influence.
In 2022, the Kremlin’s political managers managed to preserve gubernatorial elections, and therefore their own function, even though the security agencies had proposed canceling them because of the war. Apparently, postponing this year’s State Duma elections was also discussed. But for the reasons outlined above, the political bloc managed to preserve the scheduled date, aided by Putin’s enthusiasm for elections.
There is another reason the political bloc needs to hold this year’s State Duma elections, and it is also closely tied to bureaucratic power. Elections allow the bloc to maintain relationships with major state-owned companies and private businesses loyal to the Kremlin, assigning them tasks related to corporate mobilization. The same applies to the country’s governors.
The election campaign and preparations for election day create a period when the political bloc can issue orders to people and institutions to which it does not normally give orders — particularly businesses — and tighten its control over regional leaders. Elections thus serve as a demonstration of the bloc’s influence and capabilities to other players within the elite.
For Kiriyenko and his subordinates, it is easier to take the risk of holding elections under difficult conditions than to surrender powers that may prove impossible to regain. As an experienced official, Kiriyenko also understands that the level of his next appointment within the system depends on the institutional weight he has today — and therefore on his control over elections.
By the logic of the bureaucracy, Kiriyenko, with the support of his patrons, is preserving the elections — and for now, he is winning. The only major risk he faces is if turnout or United Russia’s result slumps. In which case, he’s in trouble.
Andrei Pertsev is a senior journalist at Meduza and writes on elections, among other issues.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author 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.
With Russia’s parliamentary elections now imminent, the registration and subsequent hurried removal of the liberal Yabloko’s federal list from the State Duma ballot stand out as the campaign’s most consequential event — both for democratic opposition inside and outside of the country and the Kremlin itself.
The crackdown on the only party openly calling for peace began months before the election, targeting its most prominent figures, and has continued throughout the campaign, which ends with voting from September 18-20. A recent poll by a small, independent research group with access to voters inside Russia suggests Yabloko could have won 20-25% of the vote had it remained on the ballot, challenging the Communist Party (KPRF) for second place behind United Russia.
The authorities have long had ample scope to “adjust” the ruling party’s result by transferring votes between tallies. In 2024, manipulation inflated Putin’s total by 22–25 million votes in the 2024 presidential vote, adding roughly a third to his actual vote count.
Even so, keeping Yabloko convincingly below the 5% Duma threshold would have been extremely difficult, especially in the northwest, which includes the great cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, where its support is strongest, and voters tend to be more critical of the ruling party.
The Presidential Administration would have needed blatant fraud on a much greater scale, from ballot stuffing and rewriting vote counts to incidents such as a territorial election commission chair denying observers access to ballot bags and other underhanded tactics.
Such fraud would have seriously undermined the image the Kremlin has sought through its wartime elections, including the forthcoming Duma vote: a society united behind the president and his decision to continue the war in Ukraine. After receiving confidential polling a month before the election, it may have judged that conspicuously removing Yabloko’s federal list would do less damage to that image than the fraud needed to keep the party out of the Duma.
At the same time, with Yabloko’s most recognizable figures already forced out through discriminatory legal designations or criminal charges, its current 20-25% poll rating effectively guarantees that none of its more than 100 candidates still registered in single-member State Duma districts will win a seat.
But Yabloko and other pro-democracy movements still operating inside Russia in the fifth year of the war face a greater threat than failure in the coming federal elections. The Kremlin is also seeking to defeat the party in every regional election it is contesting this year, stripping it of all its five remaining seats in regional legislatures.
Yabloko fielded candidates for nine regional parliaments, but it remains on the proportional representation ballot in only one: Novgorod Oblast. In recent months, the Kremlin has secured the removal of the other lists, usually repeating the federal pattern: spoiler parties sue Yabloko on trumped-up grounds, including alleged intellectual property violations, amid attacks on its anti-war stance.
All three legislatures where Yabloko holds seats have elections this year: Pskov Oblast, Saint Petersburg, and the Republic of Karelia. These seats exempt its lists from signature requirements at all levels, including the State Duma, bypassing the main barrier generally used to exclude democratic opposition candidates: entirely opaque signature checks controlled by Russia’s security agencies.
Yet its sole remaining list is likely to miss the 5% threshold in Novgorod Oblast, where Yabloko held no seats in the outgoing regional legislature and only one on the capital’s city council. With the Kremlin removing its strongest candidates, the roughly 70 regional candidates remaining in single-member districts are unlikely to succeed.
Losing regional representation would likely mark the beginning of the end for Yabloko as a legal political force. The Kremlin previously stripped two other pro-democracy parties, Civilian Power and PARNAS, of their mandates, then revoked their registration after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Yabloko is the last officially registered pro-democratic party; other groups have failed to obtain registration both before and after 2022.
The consequences of Yabloko’s demise would extend across Russia’s remaining democratic opposition and civil society, affecting citizens who still seek ways to oppose Putin’s policies.
First, the signature exemption gives fragmented opposition groups a practical incentive to cooperate through a registered party. Boris Nemtsov’s election to the Yaroslavl regional legislature in 2013 gave PARNAS access to State Duma elections without collecting signatures. That exemption helped attract Alexei Navalny’s Party of Progress and other opposition groups into a coalition formed in 2015, with the aim of contesting the following year’s parliamentary elections on a joint list.
Yabloko now offers a similar route. Its candidates include Ilya Kostyukov in Belgorod, who headed the local team of Candidates’ Headquarters during Boris Nadezhdin’s blocked 2024 presidential bid. This network trains Independent candidates and provides campaign support, helping activists turn their local work into electoral campaigns.
Yabloko has also nominated representatives of Rassvet, the unregistered political party and civic movement built around Yekaterina Duntsova, a local politician who was also barred from the 2024 presidential election. Rassvet is developing regional and city branches that bring together anti-war activists and regional civic initiatives. Losing Yabloko’s signature exemption would weaken these groups’ consolidation and make it harder to sustain cooperation through a network of civic initiatives.
Second, losing regional deputies would deprive human rights groups of allies able to file formal inquiries, obtain official information, and challenge government narratives from official parliamentary rostrums. By taking up cases brought by local activists and connecting them with legal assistance, these deputies help civic groups defend citizens and sustain their work under growing repression.
Saint Petersburg’s Boris Vishnevsky exemplified this role, helping detained protesters secure legal assistance and demanding that prosecutors explain the criminalization of anti-war speech. Designated a “foreign agent” in March 2024, he was forced to relinquish his seat.
Yabloko’s short-lived registration briefly rallied exiled opposition figures and democratic forces inside Russia around a common electoral campaign to threaten the Kremlin by eroding its image of a full-fledged society consolidated around the war.
That collective action — that our recent CEPA report identifies as essential to keeping future democratic change possible — is now even more fragile than it was during all years of increased pressure after the full-scale invasion.
Mikhail Komin is a fellow with the Democratic Resilience program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author 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.
Europe’s response to Russia’s increasingly ferocious attacks on Ukraine and a widening shadow war campaign against European NATO has been familiar: strategic restraint.
That strategy is increasingly outdated. Something new is needed.
Hybrid warfare operates in the space between strategic necessity and military constraint. Both Putin and his entourage are faced with a stalling front line, an unfolding fiscal crisis, and Ukrainian strikes reaching ever further into Russian soil that, in autocratic regime logic, demand an aggressive response, not the negotiating table. Putin must escalate, driven by the realities of regime survival, whether Europe shows restraint or not.
Jonathan Powell, the UK’s national security adviser, who helped negotiate the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland nearly three decades ago, argued on September 13 that the Kremlin’s escalating reaction to Western pressure was “a sign of success” and that Europe should not “take its foot off the gas”.
While the shadow campaign against Europe does not prove Russia is buckling, it does reveal that it is willing to up the ante.
In that case, restraint will not bring an autocrat like Putin to the table. Powell’s experience offers a useful principle: adversaries rarely negotiate seriously until the cost of continuing exceeds the cost of settlement. Getting to this point, through generating a real crisis for Moscow, must be Europe’s principal objective.
The correct response is no longer strategic restraint, but to see the Kremlin’s increasing hybrid activity as an opportunity by using Russian hybrid attacks to strengthen Europe’s strategic position, not be weakened by them.
The Kremlin’s escalation will not, as of yet, head toward direct military confrontation with NATO despite all the recent rhetoric. Putin will continue to operate in Europe’s so-called grey zone: a strategic campaign of coercion, subversion, and sabotage designed to stay just below the threshold that would trigger a conventional response. Putin calculates he does not need direct military confrontation. He just needs Kyiv’s allies to lessen their support for fear of the consequences. That’s even more important given the Kremlin’s planned aerial offensive against Ukrainian power and water systems in the winter months.
That is the real message behind incidents such as August’s drone attack on Leipzig airport: supporting Ukraine carries real, potentially violent costs, so restraint looks like the responsible choice.
Europe’s response so far has been completely inadequate. Statements, diplomatic expulsions, and sanctions that follow each incident are not consequences the Kremlin fears. They are costs it has long learned to absorb. Indeed, the same airport was targeted in 2024, when an incendiary parcel ignited at its DHL logistics center as part of a wider European sabotage operation linked to Russia.
The pattern extends well beyond one German airport. In Slovakia, authorities foiled an attempted arson attack on Skyeton, a Ukrainian drone manufacturer. In Estonia, investigators are examining Russian involvement in a fire at Milrem Robotics, which supplies unmanned ground vehicles to Kyiv. Poland’s energy grid has been hit directly: cyberattacks targeted two combined heat and power plants and the systems managing renewable generation for nearly half a million customers.
Alongside sabotage sits open coercion. Moscow recently threatened “the most catastrophic consequences” for the United Kingdom for handing Storm Shadow cruise missile blueprints to Ukraine. Drone incursions in NATO airspace are increasingly routine: in May, a Shahed drone struck an apartment block in Romania, injuring civilians and forcing Bucharest to divert resources to guard its own territory instead. NATO jets shot down a drone over Lithuania on September 15, the latest of more than a dozen incursions into the Baltic states in recent weeks.
Fear of miscalculation in responding to such aggression has shaped Western strategic caution on Russia for a generation. Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski has challenged this aversion directly, warning that the West continues to “paralyze” itself for fear the Kremlin will go “rogue”.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s response to Leipzig went further than most: consulate closures, an expanded sanctions list, a shuttered cultural center. Yet it does not significantly break with the policy tradition. In fact, Putin boasted about it at the BRICS conference: a badge of pride, not a source of dread.
Europe has to change the calculation. A response that punishes an operation but does not alter the next decision in Moscow is not deterrence.
Europe must respond by increasing both the cost of attacking Europe and increasing the cost of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Statements, criminal charges, diplomatic expulsions, and sanctions all have their place. But if they repeatedly respond to Russian attacks without changing Moscow’s calculus, the Kremlin will keep treating it as the cost of doing business.
Europe needs policies that actually raise the price.
One needs to be put in place urgently: intercepting Russian drones and missiles over western Ukraine. Radosław made the case explicitly this week, arguing it is “far better to shoot it down in self-defense while it is still in Ukrainian airspace” than to wait for debris to fall on NATO territory, a shift that would also let Lviv’s airport reopen. Dmitry Medvedev has warned that NATO downing drones over Ukraine “will mean only one thing: NATO’s war with Russia.” Russian threats are inevitable, but they are also familiar. Any such action by European states would be wholly justified under international law and very low risk if carried out from NATO territory. Extending the logic of self-defense past the border is not a new war. It is closing the gap between the risk Europe already accepts on its own soil and the risk it has so far refused to accept on Ukraine’s.
Beyond drone interception, sharper tools exist. Seize, not just freeze, Russia’s frozen sovereign assets. Interdict shadow-fleet tankers in real time instead of sanctioning them after the fact. Lift the remaining restrictions on Ukraine’s use of long-range Western weapons to strike deeper and harder into Russia itself.
Some will argue Putin’s shadow war reflects long-practiced Russian strategy, not a sign of weakness: that Moscow has treated sabotage and subversion as legitimate instruments of state power for decades, and current escalatory events in Europe are continuity, not signs of desperation. This objection misses what has changed. The new wave of attacks (attempting to shut down power networks, as in Poland, or blow up aircraft, as in Germany) represents higher rungs in the escalation ladder.
Russia has always had a hybrid playbook; what has changed is that Putin now needs it more, since the alternatives — a battlefield breakthrough, a fractured Western coalition, a Washington able to pressure Kyiv into concessions — have not yet materialized. It’s also important to understand the scale and impact of Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil infrastructure and arms manufacturers. Putin is being made to appear weak in front of his own people. It’s not a great look for a despot.
Europe’s task is to make the shadow strategy, alongside the conventional war, more and more costly.
It can no longer treat Ukraine’s sovereignty and Russia’s increasingly widening response as two separate problems: one grand strategy, the other a matter of domestic resilience. It must apply the same calculation on every front where the Kremlin is still testing whether escalation is worth it.
Maksym Beznosiuk is a strategy and security analyst and writer whose work focuses on Russia, Ukraine, and international security. He is an Associate Fellow at GLOBSEC.
William Dixon is a Senior Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute and an Associate Fellow at GLOBSEC. He specializes in cyber and international security issues.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author 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.
Chinese ZPMC cranes supplied to American ports contained cellular modems that could bypass firewalls, gather information, and disrupt cargo handling. Chinese Yutong buses sold to Oslo came with connected battery and power controls. The Norwegian city’s public transport authority, Ruter, warned that, in theory, the buses “can be stopped or rendered inoperable by the manufacturer.”
Chinese connected vehicles carry cameras, microphones, and location sensors that gather data. Chinese-supplied apps, such as Hikvision’s Hik-Connect, send phone and SIM card identifiers to Chinese servers.
The West long has identified Chinese-supplied telecoms as a danger. It must now wake up and confront the danger of a vast array of Chinese products, ranging from cranes to cameras. Allies need to avoid instituting counterproductive sovereignty requirements. They should build a shared response that limits exposure by private purchase of Chinese consumer goods.
Without action, innocuous looking products will flood the market. A family buys a solar inverter. It looks like an ordinary private purchase, made by a family that chose Chinese because the product was good and affordable. The problem arises if the manufacturer can change the operation of thousands of these devices and threaten the grid.
Can the grid operator prevent such switching, without the manufacturer’s permission? If it can, there is no reason to ban the devices. If switching off thousands of inverters can cause a blackout, China holds dangerous digital leverage.
This threat is not theoretical. The International Energy Agency warns of blackouts from malicious software updates to inverters. Whoever controls enough connected capacity could spread disruption across borders before grid operators restore control. Chinese Deye inverters have stopped working, with warnings that US use was prohibited. China supplies more than 80% of inverter shipments to Europe.
Similarly, data from thousands of privately owned connected cars and cameras, combined through the cloud, can reveal infrastructure data, military supply routes, and activity around military sites. If a Chinese camera or microphone is placed near a military gate, it can capture conversations outside the frame. With cloud or support access, China could combine video, sound, locations, and timestamps from cameras and vehicles, identifying visitors, military supply routes, and daily routines.
A single, seemingly minor private purchase of a connected vehicle, camera, or home solar inverter suddenly becomes a major national security risk.
Alongside worries about Chinese tech, Europeans are questioning the dangers of US technology. An authorized CrowdStrike update for Windows disrupted critical services across industries and borders. The European Commission’s proposed Cloud and AI Development Act rightly addresses concentration, continuity, and foreign legal reach.
But the example of connected cars shows why the US and China are not the same. For a specific commitment by a US supplier on data use, an enforceable contract and an independent audit may be sufficient because they are backed by effective judicial protection, democratic laws, and independent oversight of intelligence services. There is a way to verify the manufacturer’s promise and hold the company to it.
In contrast, the Chinese state can, under its intelligence law, secretly demand access without effective independent review, so a Chinese manufacturer’s promise is not enough. Independent technical verification must then show that access is blocked. If less restrictive measures cannot contain the risk, a ban on that specific use case may be justified.
Allies need to forge a common response. My proposal is a common methodology, Digital Strategic Exposure (DSE), that assesses not only the device, but the cloud, subcontractors, and jurisdictions in which manufacturers operate. The aim is to limit dangerous digital leverage.
Under DSE, Europe would gain a legally defensible way of making decisions to exclude Chinese products where risks cannot be contained, without unnecessarily excluding American technology. Partners could compare their reasoning without sharing confidential evidence. DSE should become a pressure valve for easing transatlantic tensions and preventing a technological split in the West.
The US and the European Commission should run pilot programs in surveillance, energy, transport, and critical cloud and AI. NATO should set collective defense requirements and assess cross-border effects. National teams retain sensitive evidence; EU and national authorities keep regulatory and procurement powers.
My proposal offers a way through the transatlantic sovereignty dispute. Europe gains verifiable control while Washington can address dangerous dependencies without asking allies to copy its bans. Local control, limits on data aggregation, and tested continuity or exit can preserve access to useful American technology. Restrictions remain possible where narrower measures fail.
Humanoid robots raise the stakes: cameras, microphones, and wireless updates in machines that move and act. Uncontrolled digital dependence could soon walk into our factories and homes. We must bring it under control before they arrive.
The bottom line is that allies should de-risk from dangerous leverage, not from one another.
Đuro Lubura is Special Advisor to Croatia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Sea, Transport and Infrastructure. He leads high-level interagency working groups on national security issues and critical infrastructure, including the group drafting Croatia’s regulation on security risk assessment for electronic communications equipment. He completed Harvard Kennedy School’s Senior Executives in National and International Security program and holds IAPP’s Artificial Intelligence Governance Professional (AIGP) and Certified Information Privacy Technologist (CIPT) certifications. He has held senior positions in the military, police and intelligence services. He writes in a personal capacity.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author 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.
Steel and Silicon: Allied Innovation for the Next Century
2026 CEPA Tech & Security Conference
Ukraine’s 3 Army Corps, acting under strict operational silence, has been conducting a counterattack in the Lyman sector for months. The cloud of secrecy has now been lifted, and Russian forces have lost a significant amount of territory. The operation, named Vivaldi, has so far officially cleared 75 sq km (29 sq miles), Ukrainian forces say. It is not yet over.
“In Vivaldi, as you know, there are four seasons,” Brig. Gen. Andriy Biletsky said on September 15. “And this is only the first . . . Good news is coming.”
Russia’s leadership had hoped to encircle Ukraine’s formidable fortress belt in western Donbas, but the northern salient has been reduced, with Russian warbloggers claiming it will extend the battle for Donbas by a year. Credible independent sources say the Ukrainian territorial gain is even greater.
Ukraine has also been making effective use of mid-range strikes to hit Russia’s rear, softening defenses, and then using troops to retake ground. Kyiv’s forces have benefited from Russian commanders falsifying reports about their progress, leading to a lack of reinforcements and allowing Ukraine to seize the initiative. The UAF says more than 1,500 Russians have been killed and wounded, and 12,000 drones destroyed along with hundreds of vehicles.
The key to the counteroffensive was Ukraine’s combined arms effort. Much like the surprise offensive into Kursk in 2024, it demonstrated that mechanized assaults and heavy armor are still important on the battlefield in the right circumstances.
The Lyman offensive shows Ukraine is improving its deployment of combined arms, a tactic it struggled to deliver during its unsuccessful counteroffensive in 2023. In the race to adapt, both sides have sought to develop the countermeasures and conditions required to restore maneuverability to the battlefield.
In July, a Russian mechanized assault in Maiak featured the Arena-M active protection system (APS), which had been modified to defend tanks against first-person view (FPV) drones. Dmytro Putiata, a Ukrainian veteran and drone warfare expert, said the Ukrainians had found the system hard to break down.
The system on just one tank “destroyed seven FPV drones,” Putiata wrote on Twitter/X. “In general, it took 15 to 20 FPV drones to destroy a tank (there were seven of them).”
Not every sector, or every terrain, is appropriate for the use of heavy armor, and commanders are having to adapt to different combat environments.
In the Donetsk-Dnipropetrovsk-Zaporizhzhia sector, Yurii, a drone operator with Ukraine’s 23rd Separate Mechanized Brigade, said tanks were scarce.
“The main focus right now is on small infantry groups moving on foot or on all-terrain vehicles, supported by drones as they advance,” he said in an interview. “In our sector, tanks are very rare because of the large kill zone extending in both directions.”
The concept of combined-arms warfare hasn’t changed, but the older doctrines for its use are becoming outdated.
“Tanks are used noticeably less often compared with previous years,” said Viktor, a tank operator from Ukraine’s 28th Separate Mechanized Brigade. “The survivability of the vehicles themselves has also declined because the enemy is using more advanced strike UAVs and sectors of the front have become more difficult for concealing vehicles.”
He said a wide spectrum of measures are being deployed to adapt to the drone threat and restore mobility, including improved electronic warfare systems, both on heavy armor and for soldiers, protective structures welded onto tanks, and monitoring of the sky and coordination with electronic warfare (EW) units to determine the best time to carry out a mission.
Kyiv is also deploying mobile counter-drone teams and scaling drone interceptor units to combat the threat.
The new style of Ukrainian combined assaults has produced important results, such as in Lyman, but a major breakthrough will still be very difficult. Much like Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive, any limited breakthrough will face barrages of artillery and drones.
And the further forces move from supply routes, the greater the danger. Ukraine is also attempting to innovate by using heavy bomber drones to help ensure logistics in the sky.
“Despite the difficulty in ground operations maneuver observed in eastern Ukraine over the past few years, offensive operations are still possible in modern war,” wrote retired Australian General Mick Ryan. “But they need the intellectual effort to develop new techniques to make them viable and repeatable at scale.”
Both Kyiv and Moscow are making the “intellectual effort” and experimenting with how best to adapt to drone-saturated skies.
For its part, Ukraine is showing that mechanized maneuver remains possible but, as new technologies emerge, including autonomous systems, both sides will need better institutional adaptation, new doctrines, and the ability to quickly implement and learn from new technologies.
For now, Ukraine’s drone-led counteroffensives are leading the way, but we may soon see more tanks accompanying them.
David Kirichenko is a Ukrainian-American freelance journalist who has been covering Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine since 2022, and is an Associate Research Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society. He can be found on X/Twitter @DVKirichenko.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author 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.
Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan cut ties with the Soviet Union more than three decades ago, and have developed their own economies and foreign policies. Yet in the critical area of energy security, not much has changed; they remain heavily dependent on the Kremlin’s goodwill.
The crisis began to unfold this spring and summer, as Ukraine’s long-range drone attacks on Russia’s refineries got increasingly successful. On July 6, drones reached the Omsk refinery for the first time, some 2,700 km (1,700 miles) from the Ukrainian border, and Russia’s largest refining facility was forced to halt production.
Omsk, the eleventh major gasoline producer to be struck, was the principal supplier of petroleum products to Central Asia and Mongolia. And disruption followed as Moscow prioritized supplying its own regions with fuel.
While it was never part of the Soviet Union, Mongolia is the most vulnerable to the shock, as more than 90% of its petroleum products come from Russia. Lines formed at filling stations in Ulaanbaatar and significant restrictions on fuel sales were introduced.
The warning signs had appeared earlier in the year, when China banned exports of petroleum products after the disruption to oil flows caused by the US/Israeli war on Iran. Mongolian officials acknowledged that Russian imports would temporarily have to meet the country’s entire fuel demand as there was effectively no alternative.
Kyrgyzstan is also “completely dependent” on Russian gasoline, according to President Sadyr Japarov, and has accelerated the development of a new refinery with an annual capacity of 450,000 tons. Its first phase could cover a quarter of national demand, and Japarov says it will need at least two more plants to provide its own gasoline supplies.
In July, Russian gas deliveries to Tajikistan fell by half, while Russian aviation kerosene supplies stopped altogether. Dushanbe sought replacement volumes from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan but with limited success.
Tajikistan negotiates its annual fuel-supply volumes with Russia, but the arrangement resembles a recurring political bargain more than an ordinary market transaction.
Uzbekistan was less affected than its neighbors, as it has domestic refining capacity that covers part of its demand, but Russia still supplies nearly half of its gasoline.
With three operating refineries, Kazakhstan meets almost all its own domestic petroleum-product needs and suffered the least. Yet it could offer little assistance to its neighbors because of limited spare capacity.
It produces around 90 million tons of oil annually, but most is exported as unrefined crude, and only about 18% is refined domestically. The idea of building another refinery has been under discussion for 17 years.
The crisis has exposed structural vulnerabilities that matter more than the immediate challenges to supply.
All five countries are landlocked, and alternative supply routes must cross neighboring states, including Russia or China. The Caspian Sea offers a potential route for petroleum products from Azerbaijan and, eventually, Iran, but developing such alternatives requires infrastructure, commercial agreements, and political commitment.
The region has already seen how price rises can ignite mass unrest. Kazakhstan’s protests in January 2022 began with a sharp rise in gas prices, and fuel queues and dramatic price increases in Mongolia and Tajikistan are not merely economic problems but could rapidly become political flashpoints.
Moscow has historically used preferential fuel prices as an instrument for maintaining political influence and loyalty, but its capacity to do so has been severely curtailed.
It is remarkable that a region so rich in oil and gas cannot reliably supply itself with refined petroleum products, and that several states are still exposed to the insecurity of having a single supplier.
It is reasonable to ask if this is simply the result of market failures and weak investment, or if it was always the Kremlin’s intent. Dependency creates leverage, and leverage is a central instrument of Moscow’s foreign policy.
The region has sufficient crude-oil resources for a joint refinery capable of meeting a large share of its demand, yet no such project has materialized during 35 years of independence.
One explanation is commercial: oil companies may find it more profitable to export crude at world prices than to refine it and sell to markets where governments seek to maintain low consumer prices. Large refining projects also require long-term demand guarantees, stable regulation, financing, and agreement on how costs and benefits will be shared.
These obstacles are real, but they are not insurmountable. A regional strategy could combine new refining capacity, diversified import routes, strategic fuel reserves, and more transparent pricing.
And, crucially, such measures would reduce the ability of any single supplier to turn any disruption into a strategic crisis.
The central lesson is straightforward: formal independence and genuine energy sovereignty are not the same thing. Central Asia has spent 35 years building the former, the latter needs to follow.
Sergiy Makogon is a Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He is a seasoned executive and energy expert with over 20 years of expertise in the Ukrainian and Central and Eastern European (CEE) gas markets, as well as European security.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author 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.
Until recently, governments controlled the means to wage war. No longer. Private companies own and manage critical military infrastructure like satellites, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. Call it the switch power. For policymakers, the shift in control deserves attention.
The clearest early signal of switch power came in Ukraine. Ukrainian forces were preparing a naval drone strike against Russia’s Black Sea Fleet off occupied Crimea. The operation depended on Starlink. Elon Musk declined to activate it, arguing the strike risked excessive escalation. No government could force immediate activation; no alliance mechanism stepped in; Kyiv had no recourse beyond persuasion.
It’s a dangerous dependency. Even though most of the key switch companies are American, they often balk at following orders and find themselves in conflict with the US government — or held hostage by hostile governments. For Europe, reliance on US companies sits awkwardly alongside ambitions for strategic autonomy.
Competition to the Starlink monopoly is emerging. Amazon is building what it now calls Amazon Leo, formerly Project Kuiper; Europe is investing in its own Starlink rival IRIS². France recently hosted an International Space Summit to build Europe’s sovereign space capabilities. The US is attempting to carve out a secure military use of Starlink called Starshield.
But dependence has grown faster than alternatives can be built. In the meantime, governments would do well to treat this as a standing condition rather than a one-off failure to be fixed and forgotten.
Governments have relied on defense contractors for centuries without losing strategic control over the relationship. Switch power requires four conditions:
- The infrastructure is operationally central, not merely helpful.
- No comparable substitute exists.
- No substitute can be deployable in time.
- The provider retains real discretion over access, pricing, coverage, or use conditions, rather than simply executing fixed instructions.
Starlink met these conditions during the Crimea strike: it linked navigation, command, targeting, and execution into a single chain, and no alternative could have been fielded on the relevant timeline.
In 2026, Ukrainian officials said SpaceX disabled the Starlink access that Russian drones depended on. Washington received a lesson during operations against Iran when SpaceX reportedly raised prices for military satellite services as demand grew, and the Pentagon paid because replacing that capability mid-campaign was unrealistic.
A private company not only can change prices or contract terms mid-conflict. It can pick sides, or even carry out policies its country of origin opposes. Hostile governments can apply pressure by closing market access or imposing regulations that hurt businesses. Sometimes private companies refuse orders. The Pentagon ended up in litigation against Anthropic after the AI company refused contract terms permitting mass surveillance and use of autonomous weapons — a dispute that left a procurement decision hostage to a courtroom timeline rather than an operational one.
Taiwan is where the stakes are clearest. Beijing does not need to attack American satellites directly to blunt US military effectiveness around the island; it can lean instead on the commercial exposure of firms doing business in China. Chinese authorities froze expansion plans for Tesla’s Shanghai factory, citing data security concerns tied to the rollout of Starlink over Ukraine.
Redundancy needs to be operational: a backup provider listed in a procurement annex is not the same as one that can actually assume a mission mid-conflict. Contracts should treat political refusal as seriously as technical failure, spelling out crisis-activation terms, territorial restrictions, and data portability with the same rigor applied to cost and delivery schedules. Militaries should rehearse not only the loss of a platform or a network, but the loss of the company that operates it.
Few defense ministries currently have such a plan on file. Governments will still decide when they want to fight. Increasingly, though, their freedom to act is conditioned by who holds a switch. That is a question most governments have not yet asked — or answered.
Nikola Lunić is a Serbian analyst and Navy Captain (Ret.). He previously served as Serbia’s Defence Attaché in London and Oslo and as Executive Director of the Council for Strategic Policy. He is a Strategic Affairs Consultant and a regular guest lecturer at the Faculty of Law, University of Osijek. His analysis has appeared in CEPA, New Eastern Europe, and Kyiv Post, among other outlets.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author 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.
Steel and Silicon: Allied Innovation for the Next Century
2026 CEPA Tech & Security Conference