War Without End: Deterring Russia's Shadow War - CEPA
AI Analysis
The Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) highlights Russia's ongoing shadow warfare across Europe, which includes sabotage and cyber operations. These actions are part of a broader strategy aligned with Russia's war aims in Ukraine, necessitating enhanced deterrence measures from European states.
Key Takeaways
- Russia's shadow warfare targets European critical infrastructure and digital networks.
- These activities are synchronized with Russia's broader objectives in Ukraine.
- CEPA's study emphasizes the need for Europe to develop effective deterrence strategies.
- The mismatch between Russian tactics and Western responses hinders effective deterrence.
- Russia's strategy is institutionalized and ideologically driven, posing long-term risks.
Why It Matters
This shadow warfare represents a significant threat to European security, as it operates below the threshold of military response, complicating traditional defense strategies. Addressing this requires structural changes in European defense policies to effectively counter and deter these hybrid threats.
War Without End: Deterring Russia's Shadow War - CEPA
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War Without End: Deterring Russia’s Shadow War
Either Europe will continue allowing Russia's shadow war to set the terms of escalation, or it will act now to prevent a larger war.
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March 31, 2026
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Introduction
Sam Greene
Europe is no longer merely a witness to Russian aggression. It is one of its principal targets. While Ukraine remains the most visible front in Russia’s confrontation with the West — and while it is primarily Ukrainians who are suffering and dying under massive bombardment — it is no longer the only battlefield. Across Europe, Russian-linked actors have sabotaged critical infrastructure, disrupted aviation and energy systems, penetrated digital networks, surveilled military facilities, and targeted political opponents and defense officials, a reality long familiar to several front-line European states. These acts are rarely claimed by their perpetrators, often ambiguously attributed by their victims, and almost never met with decisive retaliation. Taken individually, each attack may appear manageable. Taken together, they constitute something more troubling: a sustained campaign of shadow warfare designed to degrade European security while remaining below the threshold that would trigger a military response.
Over the past year, the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) has conducted a major study of the actors and tactics involved in Russia’s shadow warfare, its strategic underpinnings and governance structures, and the processes and patterns of European response. Since 2022, these activities have become more tightly synchronized with Moscow’s broader war aims in Ukraine. At its core, this research argues that Russia’s shadow warfare is not a temporary or stop-gap expedient, nor a collection of opportunistic “hybrid” adaptations. Rather, it is a system of conflict rooted in ideology, embedded in institutions, and biased toward escalation. The danger it poses thus lies not in the limited damage it causes today, but in the potentially unlimited damage it could cause tomorrow as the risk of inadvertent escalation grows. As a result, deterrence is necessary both to secure Europe against ongoing attacks and to ward off potentially catastrophic eventualities. European states have begun to develop effective responses, and we can already draw valuable lessons from their experience. Troublingly, however, CEPA’s research finds that Europe’s failure to deter this campaign has less to do with a lack of awareness, which would be easily remedied, than with a persistent mismatch between how Russia fights and how the West responds. Overcoming this mismatch will require consistent structural and behavioral change.
Shadow Warfare as a System, Not a Tactic
At the heart of Russia’s shadow warfare is a worldview that does not recognize clear boundaries