Are We at War with Russia? How Warden’s Rings Map Russia’s Hybrid Strategy

Russia’s hybrid campaign against Europe since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine shows that war in the 2020s is not defined by the moment tanks cross borders. Conflict today is a continuum, one in which hostile states use non-kinetic, unattributable means to degrade the ability of an adversary to function long before conventional forces engage. The West still tends to treat these actions as ‘pre-war’, or something separate from conflict itself. They are not. They are part of an escalatory strategy aimed at undermining and degrading our deterrence logic. This makes it difficult to ascertain where Europe is on the ‘spectrum of conflict’ with Russia. We may not be exchanging fire, but our infrastructure, airspace and people are still subject to Russian aggression.

To understand where we are, we must understand who Russia targets and why. Revisiting a model developed for an earlier era is helpful: John Warden’s ‘Five Rings’, first outlined in The Enemy as a System. Originally conceived for air campaigns against industrial states, Warden’s framework argued that a state could be paralysed by striking at the system that sustains it: leadership, organic essentials, infrastructure, population and, lastly, its fielded forces. Warden proposed delivering this effect through long-range precision strike, bypassing armies to attack the core. This doctrine has been central to how the US has waged war through its overwhelming airpower advantage.

The relevance of his insight has not faded. Russia’s hybrid approach can be mapped onto Warden’s model, with kinetic airpower largely replaced with grey-zone tools: cyber, information operations, energy coercion, sabotage, criminal proxies and political subversion. The target set remains the same. The delivery mechanism is different.

Attacking the Rings Without Attribution

Since February 2022, Europe has experienced a sustained campaign of Russian activity that maps almost perfectly onto Warden’s five rings.

On the leadership ring, Russia has deployed a wide spectrum of political warfare: targeted assassinations and intimidation in the UK, Germany and Poland; efforts to influence political parties in Slovakia and the Western Balkans; cyber-enabled kompromat against senior officials; and disinformation operations during European and UK elections. These are not marginal activities; they are attempts to fracture political cohesion and erode decision-making capacity.

On organic essentials, Russia has exploited Europe’s structural dependence on critical resources. The manipulation of gas flows in 2022–23 was a deliberate attempt to induce political panic and undermine support for Ukraine. Cyber attacks on Jaguar Land Rover, German steel producers and Scandinavian energy companies illustrate a wider Russian campaign against industrial capacity. Undersea cables and pipelines in the Baltic and North Sea have also been sabotaged or mysteriously damaged. This is strategic coercion by other means.

On infrastructure, Russia has repeatedly targeted the systems that enable economic and military movement: cyber attacks on power distribution networks in Poland and the Baltics; GPS jamming that has disrupted civilian aviation across Scandinavia; and sabotage plots against railway lines and military logistics hubs uncovered in Germany and the UK. These are, in effect, classic infrastructure-ring strikes, achieved without a single bomb dropped.

On populations, Russia has waged cognitive warfare. The manipulation of migrant flows into Finland in 2023–24 was intended to create political stress. The summer 2024 UK riots saw Russian-linked networks amplify far-right narratives to inflame disorder. Disinformation around inflation, energy prices and NATO spending has been used to weaken European public support for Ukraine. This is slow-burn attrition of democratic cohesion.

And on fielded forces, Russia has engaged in sub-threshold testing: dangerous close intercepts of RAF and NATO aircraft in the Baltic; jamming of military navigation systems; proxy sabotage against ammunition depots and logistics nodes; and continued use of deniable, non-uniformed forces in occupied Ukrainian territory. These actions probe NATO’s thresholds, seeking to understand which behaviours the Alliance tolerates, and where it may fracture.

Across every ring, Russia is applying pressure. Europe is already in conflict; not future, not theoretical, but present and continuous.

A Three-Phase Model of Modern Conflict

If Warden helps us map the target set, we still need to understand the framework for escalation. Contemporary conflict appears to operate in three phases:

• Phase 1: Hybrid / Grey-Zone Operations

This is the current European reality. Russia conducts sustained, unattributable attacks on leadership, infrastructure, industry and public cohesion. The objective is strategic corrosion, weakening the system from the inside.

• Phase 2: Probing / Sub-Threshold Testing

Once grey-zone activity has shaped the strategic environment, Russia probes allied responses: air and maritime harassment, cyber intrusions into military networks, sabotage of logistics routes and challenges to NATO aircraft. What we are seeing presently are rehearsals disguised as incidents.

• Phase 3: War (Overt Kinetic Conflict)

Where political conditions align, as in Ukraine in 2022, Russia transitions to full-scale war, using conventional forces, massed fires and overt strikes on infrastructure, governance and population.

This three-phase model matters because European states still tend to treat Phases 1 and 2 as ‘competition’ rather than conflict. That misdiagnosis creates risk. It encourages complacency. And it leaves governments unprepared for transition to kinetic war, should it come.

What Europe Must Do

Three strategic implications follow.

First, Europe must recognise that grey-zone activity is not preparation for war – it is war itself. A response framework that waits for tanks to cross borders is already obsolete.

Second, defence must be reconceived as system protection, not simply force generation. Leadership integrity, energy security, industrial resilience, population resilience and infrastructure redundancy all become core components of deterrence. This requires cross-government, not solely military, solutions.

Third, NATO must treat probing as a strategic indicator, not a tactical anomaly. Repeated airspace incursions, sabotage, GPS jamming and cyber intrusions are not irritants. They are escalatory steps within a systemic campaign.

What we must resurrect from Warden is the recognition that states are systems, and that systems can be degraded by deep attacks, just as much as frontline battles. But Russia’s grey-zone campaign shows that modern strategic paralysis could be delivered through ambiguity just as much as airpower.

Europe is not in a pre-war moment. We are already in the initial phases of an extended conflict fought through digital, economic, political and societal pressure. If we fail to protect our state systems now, we may only realise that Russia has achieved paralysis at the moment we are required to react.

© Calvin Bailey, 2025, published by RUSI with permission of the author.

The views expressed in this Commentary are the author's, and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.

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