A Weakened Vladimir Putin Is Waging a Secret War Against the West

“How did you go bankrupt?” one of the characters in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises asks another. The answer: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

As his enemies were advancing toward the gates of Damascus, Bashar Assad, the now-deposed butcher of Syria, must have called his buddy Vladimir Putin, asking for reinforcements. A decade ago, Putin had provided massive military might to keep Assad in power during the Syrian civil war. But this time, one can surmise, Putin essentially answered his plea, “Nyet.”

The Russian strongman may well have asked, “How did you go bankrupt?” Assad’s response, in effect, amounted to, “Gradually, then suddenly.”

Putin has to be fearful that in time he, too, might go bust. Now that Russian trade with the West is basically closed off, Putin has become indebted to China’s leader, Xi Jinping. Inflation is roaring in Russia. And much of the nation’s fighting force lies dead on the Ukrainian battlefield. Nonetheless, a diminished Putin is still dangerous. He has shown that he won’t go quietly. And he has turned to a quiet form of dark-ops engagement with his enemies in Europe and the United States.

It’s the fight of the weak against a stronger adversary, deploying secret criminal and psychological warfare, and carrying out a dangerous and sometimes bloody game. And it’s escalating fast. Americans need to be on alert because at any time that game could spark a real shooting war. And when superpowers are involved, tanks and bombs can quickly turn into submarines and missiles.

Right now, the dogs of war look an awful lot like vandalism and petty (and not so petty) crimes. In the past few months alone, incidents linked to Russian sabotage have included smashing the Estonian interior minister’s car windows; breaching Finnish water treatment plants; setting fires in military-related facilities, Warsaw’s largest shopping mall, and historic structures around Poland; causing the crash of a DHL cargo plane in Lithuania, killing a crew member and injuring others; attempting to assassinate the CEO of one of Germany’s leading weapons makers; undermining anti-Russian factions in neighboring Georgia; plus conducting countless cyber hacks and purported attempts at online election interference in Europe and the United States. Not to mention the allegedly deliberate severing of vital undersea communications cables in the Baltic Sea by a Chinese vessel—possibly, in the view of Western officials, on orders from Russia. (An official Kremlin spokesperson characterized these last claims to The Wall Street Journal as “absurd, unsubstantiated accusations.” Russian officials have denied the country’s involvement in sabotage and vandalism.)

The list of suspicious attacks goes on and on. But often tracing them back to Moscow is impossible, or nearly so.

“This year there were 500 suspicious incidents in Europe,” Czech foreign minister Jan Lipavský told reporters ahead of a NATO foreign ministers meeting in Brussels last week. “Up to 100 of them can be attributed to Russian hybrid attacks, espionage, influence operations.” Almost certainly, according to various sources, Russian-affiliated spies, vandals, arsonists, saboteurs, hackers, and assassins are behind many of the others. And yet there’s uncertainty in each instance about how deeply the Kremlin’s involvement goes. That’s part of the game.

The Insider, a Russia-focused, independent media outlet, reports confidently that European-based “acts of Russian state terrorism are now growing in tempo, scale and ambition…. Culprits tied to these operations have been arrested in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Poland, Czechia, and the Baltic Sea region. Their targets for arson or bombing attacks include industrial sites, defense plants, shopping malls, bus depots, and museums.”

But lacking concrete evidence of Moscow’s role in the plots, certain European nations have been reluctant to call out the Russians. “We are simply being too polite,” Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen lamented in a conversation with the Council on Foreign Relations in July. “They are attacking us every day now.”

European governments and NATO observers are on edge, and despite Moscow’s denials, some leaders have started to lay blame at Putin’s doorstep. America, meanwhile, has been spared from illicit Russian physical attacks—for now. That’s not to say that one day an operation might go awry, killing not one or two people, but leading to casualties on a scale that could provoke armed conflict (see seasons one and two of the Netflix series The Diplomat), in which the US government might be drawn into the fighting.

The Gray Zone and the Shadow War

Part of the problem for European authorities is that these attacks are occurring in what is known as the gray zone; they are low-level, small-scale strikes, sometimes carried out by agents who might not even know they are acting on Moscow’s behalf. The relatively minor damage from the incidents and the uncertainty surrounding their perpetrators often leave governments confused and hesitant to finger Moscow for these low-impact, high-density incursions on their territory.

Such shadowy assaults are not new. They are, in fact, part of Moscow’s war against the West that goes back well before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Russia knows it doesn’t have the firepower or the economic clout to win a hot war with NATO. So, analysts contend, it is pursuing the smaller-guy stance: Toss a drink in the face of the big-guy opponent at the bar, kick him where it hurts, disorient him, and leave him uncertain and unwilling to go on.

German air force colonel Sönke Marahrens is an expert on asymmetrical, hybrid warfare, as this strategy is called, and a senior nonresident fellow at the Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University. He emphasizes that he is not speaking on behalf of his government when he tells me that “sabotage is in the Russian tool set for what they call reflexive control”—a form of psychology that aims to intimidate, bewilder, and distract its adversaries. “These events create psychological effects, which are (or can be) amplified in the modern social media environment.” In other words, the frequency and variety of small attacks can be leveraged to knock countries and citizens back on their heels, leaving them unbalanced. Putin wants to show, Marahrens says, “that security is not a given” due to “the psychological side effects on the targeted society.”

The explicit choice to pursue gray zone warfare traces back, in part, to a 2013 article by Russian chief of the general staff Valery Gerasimov. The general still sits atop the Russian army. In his essay, he laid out a blueprint for waging permanent conflict with the West, one in which Russia engages in “whole-of-government warfare that transcends boundaries between peace and wartime, best described as a fusion of various elements of soft and hard power across various domains,ˮ as summarized by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The strategy later became known as the Gerasimov doctrine, and it detailed how Russia could pursue hostilities below the threshold of open warfare, in the gray zone. Examples may include anything from using troll farms as a way of influencing Americans’ electoral choices to allegedly sending operatives to map out America’s telecommunications grid.

Shadow wars fought below the threshold of open warfare are nothing new. The US, in advance of World War II, actually waged such war. I wrote a book, 1941: Fighting the Shadow War, that discussed America’s gray zone war against Nazi Germany prior to Pearl Harbor. Although Adolf Hitler’s forces had overrun and occupied most of the formerly independent nations of Europe, the American public was not ready for US troops to enter the war. But President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to assist the British—the last holdout left fighting Hitler—approved a secretive campaign against German business, shipping, and mineral interests in South America; illegally siphoned military supplies to Great Britain, in violation of the Neutrality Act, established in the 1930s; and broadcast alerts to the Royal Navy about lurking German U-boats. This shadow war eventually infuriated Hitler to the point that he, and not the United States, initiated a formal declaration of war.

Putin, despite all of his threats about potential nuclear options, clearly does not want a major shooting war with Europe and North America. Such a conflict would devastate the world, and Russia would certainly lose, even with the backing of China. But short of open war, Putin apparently wants Europeans to feel the sting and disorientation of war, to fear Russian power, and above all, to back off from their support of Ukraine.

This gray zone posture leaves European nations with few tools to answer Russian attacks beyond making arrests, exiling spies, and closing borders. The attacks and the threat of worse to come have also prompted another tool: emergency preparedness announcements to the public. In November, Sweden’s government dispensed copies of In Case of Crisis or War, 30-plus pages of advice about sheltering in an attack, first aid for the injured, communications without access to electronic devices, and psychological defenses. The Swedish government warned, “There are other ways, besides armed conflict, to influence and undermine our society; for example, cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, terrorism, and sabotage. These types of attacks may occur at any time. Some are happening here and now.” Neighboring Finland, Norway, and Denmark have recently published their own versions, with Finland’s offering advice on “preparing for incidents and crises.”

Entirely stopping Russia’s scattershot attacks is next to impossible. Moscow has managed to continue its gray zone warfare despite European nations’ control of their borders and the expulsion of many Russian diplomats and others. Moreover, the Russian military’s foreign intelligence agency, known as the GRU, has reportedly resorted to farming out its dirty work by hiring petty criminals to carry out attacks. In fact, according to The Insider, some of these vandals and saboteurs never even know they are paid by Russian plants in their homelands. They simply sign up for an easy payday to smash windows, light a fire, or graffiti a monument. “The criminal underworld is fertile ground for finding such people,” Latvian state police chief Armands Ruks recently observed. “If they have the inner conviction to commit crimes, they make good candidates.”

In any case, Putin keeps a large moat between GRU headquarters and its clandestine minions scattered across Europe. After each incident, Moscow denies any ties to the suspects, even those arrested with incontestable evidence of ties to the Kremlin. Marahrens says that when attacks occur, “There is no 100% certainty, and even if you think you can reach 100%, a Russian Secret Service officer explained…that he was taught that even when you get caught with a smoking gun in your hand, throw it away and tell them it’s not yours. Someone will believe you. It’s all about ambiguity.”

So why should the United States be concerned about this shady amalgam of thugs and small-time criminal operators? Article 5.

Article 5 is the mutual defense provision of NATO’s originating treaty. It was signed during the Cold War when the possibility of the old Soviet Union sending tanks into Western Europe seemed very real. Article 5 states that an attack against one member of the Western military alliance “shall be considered an attack against them all.” It is a call to arms for each and every ally. In NATO’s 75-year history, Article 5 has been invoked only once: immediately following the 9/11 attacks, when NATO forces were mobilized in support of the US and the allied incursion into Afghanistan.

But what if, say, some GRU-inspired plotter gets his hands on sarin gas or a high explosive and carries out an attack resulting in mass casualties? Does it amount to an Article 5–level attack on a NATO member nation? Even the NATO-phobic Donald Trump might feel he must act according to the treaty’s obligations.

For now, it appears that Putin (a former KGB officer himself) and his spy masters are playing a game of chicken. “Russia is testing the limits of Article 5 to stir up uncertainty,” Roderich Kiesewetter, a German lawmaker and former general staff officer of the German military, told Politico earlier this year. Nobody knows where the limits of gray zone warfare lie. And tracing the culpability of bad actors back to Moscow can take weeks and even months of forensics, intelligence, and police work. In the meantime, Putin can plausibly or not-so-plausibly deny and deny and deny.

That said, European governments are beginning to attribute acts of sabotage to Russia, even when some ambiguity remains. Estonian defense minister Hanno Pevkur, speaking to Politico, urged, “When something happens, just go public. Go show that these guys were hired from Russian services, and these guys conducted these attacks, getting the money from Russia.”

European security services have bolstered their collaborative efforts to identify and halt Moscow’s agents, according to multiple news reports. A few days ago, for instance, authorities announced that an Estonian citizen had been convicted of recruiting people to smash the Estonian minister’s car windows and deface World War II monuments. He was reportedly nabbed shortly before hightailing it out of the country. In the spring, an Estonian court tried and convicted him, along with six others, as part of a group of 11 alleged conspirators—two of whom are believed to be in Russia. The prosecutors did not say how many of the guilty, if any, were GRU agents. (Suspected saboteurs with ties to Moscow, who allegedly targeted an Ikea in Lithuania, have been detained in Poland. Nine alleged Russian operatives were connected to sabotage plans in the Baltics and, possibly, Sweden, the Polish prime minister said.)

These few arrests, of course, are unlikely to cause Putin to pull back his secret dogs of war. That will only occur when the price for such forays rises significantly—when the West strikes back in some fashion, and with force. Otherwise, Putin and his teams will keep on, unless, of course, the political situation becomes unstable in the Russian homeland.

Once that occurs, his own bankruptcy may come. Gradually, then suddenly.