A Frog in a Pot – Turning Around Russia’s Hybrid War

‘A wolf circling sheep’ is how Christopher Steele once described Vladimir Putin’s relationship with the West.

Steele’s case has itself become part of the Russian president’s cognitive warfare strategy. The former MI6 officer compiled the 2016 dossier alleging that Donald Trump had been cultivated and supported by Moscow for years before his first presidential victory. Just as the dossier contained – in all likelihood – Russian disinformation crafted to split readers between those demanding more and those dismissing the entire text, Putin has pursued a broader strategy of injecting toxic doubt into Western minds. He has sown uncertainty not only over America, but across every country and in every domain where trust and unity matter.

The world has since tilted in favour of autocracies and their malign agendas, with disruption of the rules-based international order a reality, and with it an increase in the frequency of geopolitical upsets such as the transatlantic rift. Democracy remains in retreat in the face of authoritarianism. Freedom House, which since its creation in 1941 has been tracking the state of freedom, found 2025 to be the 19th year of declining freedom, due to political repression, armed conflict and authoritarianism.

Russia is a main protagonist in a new pattern of conflict, defined by the term ‘hybrid warfare’, a format which allows the Kremlin to overcome its power asymmetry to destabilise Europe, build alliances worldwide, including in Africa, and pursue its imperial ambitions in Ukraine by undermining support for Kyiv.

But others are learning from Moscow’s experience – and the West’s response – not least on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. These lessons should be learned quickly, particularly in the fight for democracy and against authoritarianism.

The Lessons of Grey Zone Conflict

‘Hybrid warfare’, otherwise known as the ‘grey zone’, describes a spectrum of hostile actions below the threshold triggering a military response, from political interference at one end, to cyberattacks, assassination and non-conventional conflict – such as the covert invasion of Crimea in Ukraine – at the other. The frog is heated slowly enough as not to risk it hopping out of the pot.

This form of warfare blends traditional and irregular tactics, uses of state and non-state actors, espionage, money laundering, sabotage and undermining industrial capacity, and usually relies on information and cyber warfare more than kinetic operations. This represents the fuzzy space that exists between conflict and peace in international relations.

As the Taiwanese strategist and retired admiral Lee Hsi-ming has observed, grey zone conflict combines threats, intimidation and fear. In the case of Taiwan, this form of coercion is aimed at deterring the possibility of a declaration of independence by Taipei and to prevent others from supporting Taiwan’s case.

This system of warfare represents both an echo of the past and a precursor to future conflict. It reminds us how much things change the more they stay the same, especially when it comes to Russian foreign and security policy.

In 1584, the Estonian chronicler Batthasar Russow noted that Russian military might was based not on courage, strength or force, but rather on opportunism, cunning and intimidation, adding that whenever Moscow encountered resistance, they accomplished nothing.

Vladimir Lenin referred to Moscow’s enduring strategy with the West as a ‘state of partial war’. Well before Vladimir Putin’s time, this included deception, subversion, disinformation, psychological warfare and the funding of domestic actors elsewhere with the aim of sowing and exploiting divisions among Western societies.

Grey Tradition in Russia

The tempo of recent events suggests that Russia has stepped up its attacks, probing NATO defences with drones and supersonic fighters, hacking key infrastructure systems and carrying out assassinations with a degree of brazenness if not a certain clumsiness. The Novichok attack against the former Russian GRU intelligence officer Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in 2018 followed from the murder of ex-FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko 12 years earlier by mixing polonium into his tea in London’s Millennium Hotel. A defected FSB (the successor to the KGB) agent, Litvinenko, had coined the term ‘mafia state’ to describe Putin’s regime. In 2013, exiled businessman and former Putin backer Boris Berezovsky ;was found hanged in his London flat.

These numbers pale by comparison to state murders in Russia – of journalists and other political opponents, including Forbes Russia editor Paul Klebnikov and Anna Politkovskaya, along with Sergei Yushenkov, the leader of the anti-Kremlin party Liberal Russia in front of his Moscow home, lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, the reformist regional governor Boris Nemtsov and in February last year Aleksei Navalny, the imprisoned opposition politician. The volume and frequency of these attacks have the effect of numbing audiences to their occasion, risking the proverbial frog’s eventual demise.

Again, during the Soviet period, political assassinations were de rigueur, both as a means of removing opponents and signalling the long memory of the Soviet state. Stalin took this to an art form. His bitter ideological rival Leon Trotsky was killed with an ice-pick in Mexico in August 1940, while the Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov was knocked off with a ricin-tipped umbrella while waiting on Waterloo Bridge to take a bus to his job at the BBC in September 1978.

Stalin officially purged 777,975 people for political charges from 1929 to 1953, with the greater part of that total – 681,692 people – killed in 1937-38, the years of the Great Purge. Unofficial estimates put the figure as high as 1.2 million.

The brief post-Cold War period between 1990 and Putin’s Munich Security Conference speech in 2007 remains the exception to this pattern of violent Russian behaviour. At Munich, the Russian leader attacked America’s domination of world affairs and criticised NATO expansion, meddling in Russian elections and nuclear treaty violations, stating that Russia would no longer accept a ‘unipolar world’.

There are other constants, including the use of propaganda. As General Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s Chief of the General Staff, has commented, it is a ‘most promising type of weapon’. During the Cold War, Moscow relied on its AGITPROP (agitation and propaganda) department as the conduit for disinformation. In a pre-digital age, this relied on cultural exchanges, films and theatre. Today, this means of propaganda happens through RT and Sputnik and X, along with other forms of social media. The message is kept simple, and while the content may be fake it is repeated ad infinitum until it drowns out other signals.

The threat of military action remains, even though the Russian military machine is a ghostly impersonation of its Soviet predecessor. The contemporary kinetic aspect ranges from conventional war in Ukraine to private military assistance to African states. Such armed non-state actors are, according to Freedom House, contributing to a less free, less safe world, not least in the Central African Republic, Sudan and across the Sahel, through Mali and Burkina Faso.

The Flow of Capital Through Conflict

Money continues to play its part in political interference, not necessarily buying allegiance, but silencing to opposition. There is a more sinister aspect, where Western leaders prefer authoritarianism over democracy, favouring a metric of the pace and extent of wealth accumulation, rather than individual rights.

Supporting foreign domestic opposition is not new either. These are the same tactics followed also by others – as Lenin observed, ‘There are no morals in politics. There is only expedience.’ What is new, however, is the shift from supporting opponents on the left of politics, over to right-wing populists. The aim remains the same however: to radicalise political debate and thereby distract and dissipate opposition elsewhere to Russia’s foreign forays.

In the same way that the Soviet Union sought to sponsor proxy regimes in the Cold War, there is a clear playbook to support like-minded authoritarianism. Where regimes manipulate elections to cling to power, strengthening the grip of elites – Russia and China, among other authoritarians – are there to offer support, narrowing the space for democratic contestation. The state and party conflate as the security of the state is deliberately equated with regime stability.

This much is clear from examples worldwide, from Venezuela through Uganda and Tanzania to Georgia.

An Integrated Response

If the pattern of Russian preferences is clear, so too is the need to develop what General Sir Nick Carter, the UK’s former Chief of Defence Statt, describes as ‘a doctrine of integrated action’ in dealing with the continuum of hybrid war. Democracies generally don’t do this well, since they are instinctively transactional given the short-term electoral horizons in which they are operating.

But doing nothing is not a worthwhile option. As Sir Max Hastings, the veteran war correspondent and writer said of Britain’s attempts to cosy up to Trump: hoping that you will be the last to be eaten by the crocodile is not a viable strategy.

Some better alternatives exist.

First, call this a form of warfare. The use of terms such as ‘hybrid war’ or ‘grey zone’ is misleading; these should rather be labelled subversion, sabotage, lawfare, terrorism, assassinations, murder, illegal incursions by air, sea and land and cyber or political warfare. And if the Russians – or the Chinese, Iranians, North Koreans or whoever – carry out a cyber-attack, do not only acknowledge, assess and attribute it, but act. The Russian goal to undermine trust in democracies and institutionalise passivity is achieved when societies feel helpless against this action. The West’s goal must be not just to become more resilient but to prevent these actions. Being specific about the diagnosis will enable a clear understanding of the problem and the solutions. For instance, in the case of oppositions undermined through flawed and sometimes fraudulent election processes, there is a need to develop a playbook for change – detailing the roles and limits for internal and external actors, governmental and non-governmental, national and multinational.

At the other end of the continuum, states must prepare adequately for conventional conflict in a way that stresses mass and training as much as technology and equipment.

There is a need to be clear, too, about how to reduce the fuzzy conflict zones the Russians and others exploit. A failure to do so can only increase the dangers of Russian expansion and escalation.

This requires realising that we are today in a new Cold War, that alliances have responsibilities if they are to be effective (not least around defence spending), that lines must be drawn and credibility maintained, not least through supporting Ukraine. While neither under- or over-estimating Russian strengths, the idea is to build political and institutional resilience to outweigh and outlive a recidivist Kremlin.

There is a stake for others outside of Europe. This era of Russian expansionism does them great harm, too, witness the regimes in CAR, Mali, Sudan and elsewhere, where politics and people have been weaponised in Putin’s global view.

Transparency helps. Corruption and authoritarianism thrive in the dark. Muddy waters are to the liking of malevolent foreign agents just as publicity is the best antidote. Funding a free press is probably the best investment that philanthropists and businesses intent on positive change can make. Quite contrary to President Trump’s assertion, of a phrase employed by Lenin and Stalin, that the fourth estate is the ‘enemy of the people’ in his berating of ‘fake news’; the freer the better.

Political oppositions within authoritarian states must become organised. They need to ask themselves a single question in doing so: how do we increase our leverage over the regime? This has questions about internal organisation as much as external affairs, and an understanding of the bouquet of radical options.

There is a need however, to routinely discount the likelihood of salvation from outside. Outside actors, for their part, must adopt the old credo: First, do no harm. They must resist the temptation to trade and profit from authoritarians, and to be exposed where this occurs.

Unity among democrats is key and depends on leadership and organisation. That is somewhat akin to herding cats but can be facilitated by a combination of clear process, prominent personalities, and a powerful narrative.

As Freedom House puts it, ‘all those who understand the value of political rights and civil liberties must work together in the defence of democracy.’

Such an ‘insurgency for democracy’ demands better organisation and training, tough choices and plenty of stamina, remembering that governance is not just about high ideals or administration, but about leadership.

To confront hybrid war, the bottom line is to do to Russia the same things that they are doing to others, only better, operating also under the threshold of international aggression, dragging them down on multiple fronts, soaking up energy, bandwidth and resources. The fear of not upsetting the Russians and other authoritarians is one of the biggest security weaknesses under which liberal democracies currently suffer.

© Eerik Kross and Greg Mills, 2025, published by RUSI with permission of the authors.

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