Russia may (or may not) agree to silence the guns of its invading forces in Ukraine, but it absolutely will not stop its broader and escalating shadow war hostilities against European NATO.
Whatever the outcome of the current negotiations, Putin’s obsession with Europe is so great that leading European nations and hardline anti-Kremlin states like Germany, France, Poland, the Baltic states, and the UK will continue to experience attacks.
Ukraine has been the fulcrum of the Russian president’s campaign to change the post-Cold War settlement of 1989-91, but it is only one part of a much more ambitious campaign to build a more Russia-friendly Europe.
It’s worth remembering that Putin’s ultimatum to the West in December 2021, on the eve of his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, was primarily targeted at NATO’s presence on the European continent. In particular, it made extraordinary demands for the withdrawal of troops and weapons from NATO’s Eastern flank, including the return of NATO forces to their bases of 1997. That would have meant withdrawing garrisons in the Baltic states, Poland, and Romania.
US tactical nuclear weapons, a central element of NATO’s European defense, would also have been withdrawn from the continent.
The collective West — a favored and oft-used Kremlin shorthand for Russia’s eternal enemies — is today applied mostly to European countries and the UK, rather than the US. Meanwhile, a second propaganda label — “Anglo-Saxons” — describes the UK as the key manipulator of the US. Putin’s people reserve a special place for Britain in their demonology; it is characterized by a fierce hatred and exaggerated passion.
In the Kremlin’s eyes, Europe is very much the weaker part of that collective, unlike the US, which is acknowledged as the superpower. Moscow firmly believes that Europe must be put “in its place” regardless of any deal over Ukraine.
This explains the Kremlin’s accelerating shadow war operations against Europe — including arson, sabotage, drone attacks, targeted assassinations of Russian emigres, and cyberattacks against infrastructure — that aim to unnerve the population and pressure governments to shift policy in Russia’s favor. An end to fighting in Ukraine does not change this logic.
Internal Russian factors also make a sustained peace improbable. Three and a half years of war in Ukraine have eroded the role of many key Russian institutions in anything involving relations with the outside world.
For instance, nobody cares what role Lavrov and his foreign ministry play in the current negotiations; the real talks with the Americans are taking place elsewhere and are handled by other actors — starting with Putin himself, his personal appointees such as Kirill Dmitriev, and the intelligence agencies, which have boosted their influence through several rounds of hostage exchanges.
Meanwhile, the government, including Prime Minister Mishustin and the Central Bank, has been reduced to a logistics machine for the military, with no say at all in how the war is actually run.
The two institutions that matter in the wartime Kremlin system, and that have grown in importance throughout the conflict, are the army and the intelligence and security services.
Putin has been reluctant to let his generals turn their battlefield reputations into a national political presence — having learned the lessons of the wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya, and indeed the 2023 Wagner uprising — but the army has nonetheless expanded its footprint in Russian society.
This is visible in the distribution of lucrative military contracts across the country, contracts that can keep industries, oligarchs, and entire regions afloat and insulated against Western sanctions. It is also palpable in the business world: these days, companies need to stay on good terms with the local military commissariat to keep their employees protected against abrupt drafting and dispatch to Ukraine. These days, qualified workers are expensive — and in short supply — in Moscow and in the regions.
The security agencies, meanwhile — omnipresent and all-powerful after two decades of growing power — have made full use of the Kremlin’s paranoia about Ukrainian spies and saboteurs, and now have their fingers in everything of any importance in the country — from federal ministries and regional governments, which are kept in line through selective repression carried out by the FSB, to corporations harassed by innumerable criminal investigations, which involve the FSB, or military counterintelligence, in one way or another.
The army and the security services are keenly aware that an end to the Ukraine war would be bad news for them. And they share a traumatic institutional memory of what happened at the end of the last big Russian war on foreign soil — the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Following Gorbachev’s decision to withdraw the troops in 1988-89, the Soviet army was humiliated, downsized, and underfunded for years, with the KGB subject to some harsh public scrutiny, however temporary, and ultimately split into pieces.
This trauma has been deeply ingrained in the mindset of both the Russian army and the security services, even though the political circumstances of the two wars are very different. The war in Afghanistan ended under Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost, which loosened the Kremlin’s grip over Soviet society. Putin, by contrast, would have little choice but to increase internal repression after an end to open hostilities in order to keep the country under his control — essentially, to stay in power. At first glance, that might seem to strengthen the hand of his secret police forces, but they would much rather not find out.
That past trauma has convinced the top brass of the security and intelligence agencies in Moscow that the current conflict is not just a war in Ukraine, but the third round of a century-long struggle between Russian and Western spy agencies, with stakes as high as the survival of the Russian state. (In this version of history, the first round ran from 1917 to 1945 and was “won” by the Soviet agencies; the second covered the Cold War was “lost,” with disastrous consequences.)
From this apocalyptic perspective, territorial gains in Ukraine, the fate of Zelenskyy, or a downsized Ukrainian army are too trivial to matter. By Russian spy standards, such outcomes would simply be inconsequential. It would merely enable a greater focus on the next round, with the new and bigger target of democratic Europe.
Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). They are Russian investigative journalists and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities. Their book ’Our Dear Friends in Moscow, The Inside Story of a Broken Generation’ was published in June.
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.
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