Sabotage, espionage, cyberattacks, propaganda, drone incursions. Russia is waging a shadow war across Europe because it fears all-out warfare against a more powerful adversary. It knows that when kinetic attacks are carried out below what European leaders and citizens usually consider to be the threshold of war, it can exploit Western confusion and inertia.
What is Shadow Warfare?
Shadow warfare is a concerted campaign of physical assaults designed to degrade an adversary without provoking military reprisals. This comprises activities such as:
- Sabotage and infrastructure disruption,
- Transnational repression and targeted violence,
- Cyber and information operations,
- Sanctions evasion and covert procurement.
It advances through layered deniability, multi-vector pressure, and iterative probing that tests defenses and narratives alike. Shadow warfare has evolved into something more aggressively kinetic and strategically targeted. Hybrid warfare emphasizes narratives and ambiguity. Shadow warfare is oriented toward physical harm. This includes fires in ammunition plants, critical infrastructure sabotage, telecommunication outages, or assassination plots targeting defense industry leaders.
Shadow warfare distinctly differs from several other forms of conflict. Total warfare mobilizes a society’s full military, economic, and political resources for all-out conflict. While shadow warfare aims to impose maximum harm below the open-war threshold. The Cold War centered on great-power competition waged indirectly through diplomacy, alliance-building, and proxy wars such as Vietnam and Afghanistan. Shadow warfare targets an adversary more directly via political, economic, and kinetic action. Asymmetric warfare pits unequal opponents against each other across military, economic, and political domains.
Why Does Russia Use Shadow Warfare?
Shadow warfare is a crucial dimension of Russia’s playbook. It has taken center stage in the Kremlin’s widening attacks, particularly in Europe. Such warfare represents a concerted campaign of attacks to degrade an adversary without provoking a military reprisal.
Moscow operates in a constant state of confrontation, using shadow warfare to manipulate, coerce, and destabilize. Russian intelligence services often execute difficult-to-attribute operations to shape strategic outcomes and achieve the Kremlin’s goals. This often involves proxies, criminal networks, and state-controlled enterprises
“Shadow warfare is simply understood as one of the options put on the Kremlin’s strategic table by a range of both military and non-military forces, alongside information manipulation, the deployment of military forces, and bombardment, through to the use of weapons of mass destruction,” as CEPA Senior Fellow Sam Greene explains.
Why Russia’s Shadow Warfare Matters
Shadow warfare is persistently misclassified. Authorities investigate sabotage as criminal damage. Sailors frame cable disruptions as maritime accidents. Cyber intrusions are technical incidents. Each response may be reasonable on its own. Together, they have the effect of fragmenting responsibility. Authorities typically handle these incidents as a series of unrelated problems, rather than as a coordinated campaign of hostile state actions.
Shadow warfare is a system, not a tactic. At the heart of Russia’s campaign is a worldview that does not recognize clear boundaries between war and peace, or between domestic and foreign threats. In the Kremlin’s eyes, the war in Ukraine, covert operations in Europe, and the repression of dissidents at home and abroad are not separate endeavors. Rather, they are fluid fronts in a single, existential struggle, the ultimate aim of which is regime survival. This outlook has deep roots in Soviet-and particularly Stalin-era-concepts of permanent confrontation, in which conflict is not an exception to normal politics, but its organizing principle.
Russia’s Shadow Warfare and the War on Ukraine
Shadow warfare is closely tied to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. While that conflict remains the most visible front in Russia’s confrontation with the West — and while it is primarily Ukrainians who are suffering and dying under Russia’s assault — it is no longer the only front. Across Europe, Russian-linked groups have sabotaged critical infrastructure, disrupted aviation and energy systems, penetrated digital networks, surveilled military facilities, and targeted political opponents and defense officials. These perpetrators rarely claim responsibility for their acts. Through this sustained campaign, the Kremlin seeks to break allied cohesion and weaken the material and political support sustaining Kyiv.
Russia’s and Partners’ Shadow War Cost-Benefit Analysis
Russia’s leadership, like China’s, does not view conflict through a binary war–peace lens. And the dangers to free societies are growing. Other powers, including Iran and North Korea, as well as Russia and China, are probing for vulnerabilities in democratic systems. China, for its part, employs shadow warfare in Europe and Asia, the most graphic target being Taiwan. Through their actions, they aim to paralyze decision-making and keep retaliation below the threshold of open war. If free societies want to check shadow warfare, they must begin imposing meaningful consequences on the aggressors.
Shadow Warfare Strategies and Tactics
Assassinations
Russia uses assassinations and targeted killings as an integral part of its shadow warfare, deploying state intelligence services like the FSB and GRU to eliminate human targets. These include dissenters, defectors, and foreign-based adversaries. For example, Spanish police found the Russian defector Maksim Kuzminov assassinated in February 2024. The attack followed an earlier video statement by GRU operatives promising to kill him. The same year, German authorities exposed a plot to kill the CEO of German defense company Rheinmetall, Armin Papperger. Russian agents targeted Papperger in response to the company’s cooperation with Ukraine.
Sabotage
Russia uses sabotage as a component of its shadow-warfare toolkit. Operatives conduct deniable, sub-threshold operations that target critical infrastructure, public safety, and political stability. These actions include arson, railway disruption, cable-cutting, and cyberwarfare. These acts cause political and information chaos as well as economic damage and affect military and political effectiveness. In November 2025, Polish authorities attributed sabotage on a railway line, transporting military aid to Ukraine, as a deliberate act of Russian sabotage. The following month, Poland said Russia attempted to shut down parts of its energy network. A tanker dragging its anchor across the Finland–Estonia undersea power cable caused severe damage. Russian agents recruited a London criminal gang to commit an arson attack against a warehouse storing supplies bound for Ukraine.
Infiltration
Russia’s shadow war strategy relies heavily on infiltration to penetrate, monitor, and manipulate foreign governments, militaries, and critical industries. Intelligence operatives collect sensitive information and identify vulnerabilities for later exploitation. These agents often utilize diplomatic cover, clandestine networks, cyber intrusions, and recruited intermediaries to achieve their objectives. In March 2025, a UK court convicted three Bulgarian nationals accused of surveilling a US military base in Germany. These activities also support sabotage and information operations, allowing Moscow to shape events from the inside while maintaining plausible deniability.
Strategic Narratives and Propaganda
Strategic use of information and propaganda complements these efforts by shaping perceptions and sowing mistrust within targeted societies. Russian state media, proxy outlets, and online influencers amplify divisive narratives, fabricated stories, and questionable news sources to confuse audiences.
Why Does NATO Need to Stop Russia’s Shadow War?
If NATO does not respond and impose consequences on Russia’s shadow war, the alliance risks inadvertently escalating risks to its own security. The last decade of muted responses to Russia’s hybrid warfare and challenge to Western foreign policy in wars such as Ukraine and Syria has not de-escalated tensions. They have emboldened Russian military and intelligence services to up the stakes, try new tactics, and seek new harm.
The Kremlin is aware of Russia’s diminished military status as its war in Ukraine fails to achieve meaningful strategic goals. Planned confrontation in the West through instigated shadow war crises, and a paralyzed response, remains one of its remaining options to achieve its objectives. A cohesive and coordinated response to Russia’s shadow warfare is essential for ensuring Russia’s leadership understands NATO’s strategic deterrent of collective defense.
Michael Newton is the Director for Communications and Information Systems at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).
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.
War Without End: Russia’s Shadow Warfare
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