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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
From the revolutionary use of drones to staged coups, child abduction and psychological warfare, the war in Ukraine is like no other. It is a new form of total war, combining traditional military force with all the non-military tools of the Russian state. The 2022 invasion was just the next stage of a conflict that Russia has been fighting since 2005, using all the tactics at its disposal to control Ukraine's politics and wreak havoc. Combining over a decade of research, astute analysis and powerful stories from the front line, and including striking photographs of the people and scenes he encountered along the way, Bob Seely has written the authoritative guide to this new form of conflict. Travelling extensively throughout Ukraine, Seely meets figures such as Panoushka, the sniper who continues to fight despite the loss of her fiancé, and Ksenia, the seventeen-year-old who journeyed through Russia searching for her abducted younger brother. Above all, Seely argues that understanding Moscow's new total war is critical because Russia considers itself at war with the West as well as Ukraine, directing some of the tactics used there against us. Insightful, gripping and at times moving, this book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the unconventional methods Russia and other authoritarian states will use to challenge the West for global supremacy and undermine our beliefs, power and influence.
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i“A must-read book for policy-makers, especially in the defence and foreign affairs spheres. This thoughtful, clear-eyed and outspoken work proves how Putin’s Russia employs multi-frontal warfare in a way that we are likely to see more of in the coming years and explains why the war in Ukraine will be seen as one of history’s paradigm-shifting conflicts. If this important book is heeded, Bob Seely’s time on the ground in Ukraine will have been put to phenomenally good use.”
Andrew Roberts, co-author of Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Gaza
“Packed with insights personally drawn from the battlefields of Ukraine and ably weaving them together to demonstrate how Russia is blazing a trail in new ways of war, Seely’s book is an indispensable guide to conflict in the twenty-first century for the public and policy-makers alike.”
Professor Mark Galeotti, author of Forged in War: A Military History of Russia from its Beginnings to Today
“Bob Seely, with his unique blend of experience as a journalist, soldier and MP, delivers a sharp, insightful look at the Kremlin’s approach to warfare. In the age of Russia’s shadow war against the West, this is a must-read.”
Andrei Soldatov, exiled Russian security services expert and author of Our Dear Friends in Moscow
“Piercing, unflinching and grounded in original Russian sources, this book lays bare the Kremlin’s doctrine of war as statecraft, revealing not just how Russia fights but how it thinks.”
Dr Jade McGlynn, post-doctoral fellow at King’s College London and author of Russia’s War and Memory Makers
ii“This is no dry academic tome – on page one you find Seely in a deadly position as he is hunted by a Russian drone in eastern Ukraine. He explains through stories of real people how the Russian state has reinvented warfare for the twenty-first century, not by abandoning past doctrines but by fusing them into something far more dangerous, flexible and continuous: a new form of total war. In this book, Seely puts together his ideas gained through decades of experience, giving us the opportunity to understand the strategic drivers of the horrors on the ground and the future horrors that await us if we do not wake up to what is happening. If you ever wondered what was really going on with Putin’s Russia and its relations with Europe, you need to read Seely’s book – he completely nails it.”
Adam Holloway, former soldier, foreign correspondent and Member of Parliament
“Bob Seely has combined fine scholarship with journalistic skill and political analysis to provide a superb account of Putin’s war in Ukraine. It will be the go-to book for anyone who wants to understand the war’s genesis, Putin’s motives, the new dimensions of conflict that the war has originated and their dangerous implications for democracies now pitted against Putin. Seely’s book is not written from an ivory tower as a military handbook. It is a first-hand account, sometimes composed at a brisk pace while some of the 900 bombs Putin drops on Ukraine each month are literally raining down around him. There are also vivid descriptions from the front line, and these moving and powerful stories help us understand the courage and resilient stoicism of Ukrainians and that for them this is an existential struggle – a war for survival.”
Lord Alton of Liverpool, chair of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights
“This book combines in-depth research on the history and philosophy of warfare with vivid, personal reporting from the front line in Ukraine and sobering strategic perspectives on security and defence in Ukraine, Europe and the United Kingdom. By confronting the reader with the realities of war, TheNewTotalWar leaves no room for denial.”
Nataliya Zubar, chair of the Maidan Monitoring Information Centre, Kharkiv, Ukraine
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Contents
Chapter 1
Koleso, Khartiia and the New Total War
‘Ahistoricalstruggleforourexistence’
– Solomiya Khoma, Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center1
I am sitting in a bomber drone ‘bunker’ in the basement of an abandoned farm a few kilometres from the Russian front line in eastern Ukraine. On my left is a 21-year-old pilot, call sign Koleso (wheel). He’s guiding his airborne Vampire drone onto tonight’s target, a Russian trench. The Vampire strikes fear into Russian soldiers. They’ve nicknamed it Baba Yaga, after a Slavic folklore tale about a haggard witch who flies around at night, frying and devouring the young. It’s not a bad description.
As his drone nears the target, Koleso moves the camera from looking ahead to looking down, constantly checking two of his screens. On the right is Ukraine’s battlefield software, called Kropiva (nettle), which charts his course and has identified the targets. In the centre is the video feed from the drone’s thermal imagery camera. Its green crosshairs sit over grainy black-and-white images of woods and fields. It picks up the trunks and thick branches of the birch and conifers but not the late autumnal leaves, giving the 2impression of deep winter out in the woods. The light reflected off the ground looks as if snow has already fallen.
Koleso prepares to kill his enemy.
The unit I am with is Khartiia, one of Ukraine’s new regiments, which sprang up after the 2022 Russian invasion and is designed to be a model of best practice. To get to the bunker, we meet late at night in the empty car park of a small service station between the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv and the front line. After a final, sparsely manned checkpoint, we drive into the ‘drone zone’ – the 10-kilometre band where small, so-called ‘suicide’ or kamikaze drones are most likely to operate, hunting for targets and detonating on them, making movement a tense game of Russian roulette. In the rear of the zone, you’d be unlucky to be struck, but the nearer you are to ‘line zero’, the busier the sky. Electronic warfare tools can confuse a kamikaze drone into veering off target by just enough to miss, but it’s a risk best avoided.
We drive fast along the potholed, abandoned roads that punish the car’s suspension, past vehicles destroyed by drones in previous days and weeks. We take a sharp left. The road thins. To our right are orange lights from the nearest Russian villages just over the border. After a few more twists and turns, we park in between overgrown bushes by the side of a barn. It’s pitch black and very silent. Red headtorches are turned on as we walk up a path in single file, following the boots of the soldier ahead. A password is exchanged and we file into the empty farm outbuildings ahead. Hidden under a rusting canopy is a pick-up truck with repair tools. Stacked up alongside the walls are spare batteries for the drones and the bombs that they are dropping.
The outbuilding is home to a three-man team; as well as Koleso, there is Kosak (Cossack) and Sonic. Under the canopy, Kosak, a 3burly man with a tattoo stretching from his right arm around his shoulder, is making minor repairs to a Vampire drone with a hand grinder, known locally as a bulgarka. Glints fly in the dark, reminding me of the hand-held sparklers we light on Bonfire Night in the UK. We are escorted down a steep brick stairway into the basement, where the team lives for days at a time. It’s a tight space, with just enough room for three mattresses laid out on the floor. The walls, whitewashed many years ago, are faded, but there are pictures on display, an old armchair and a couple of friendly cats, who come in for company and occasionally try to steal the team’s food. As forward positions go, it’s homely.
From here, the three-man team launch repeated missions with their drones. Pilot Koleso sits in one of the corners with his screens on a couple of tablets in front of him. The team has a target list, to which late priorities are sometimes added. Tonight, they are visiting destruction on a series of trenches covered with tree trunks and thick branches (known locally as brindage) under which Russian soldiers live. Koleso’s co-pilot tonight is a dispatcher in battalion headquarters. Their conversations are brief and occasional as Koleso glides the drone towards the target. They talk in a chat room on gaming software – no billion-dollar contract here for communications. Ukrainians have innovated all the way through this war, from communications to drones. Even the bomb has had a homemade stabiliser added, in the shape of an empty plastic fizzy-drink bottle with its bottom sliced off. Other bombs, stacked up outside the basement, have 3D-printed tail fins.
Koleso hovers his drone over the target for perhaps fifteen seconds. To be under or near it must be petrifying. The Vampire is noisy, and below it Russian soldiers are huddled, desperately hoping that the anti-tank mine it is carrying is not intended for them, not 4tonight. Ukrainians are aware of the psychological effect of drones in general and the Vampire in particular. It adds to the suffering inflicted on their Russian invaders.
Koleso adjusts the position just slightly and then hits the release. We see the bomb, a TM-62 anti-tank mine, green and flat and about the size of half a dozen large dining plates, fall 60 metres to the earth. As it lands, a white and grey-tinted explosion envelops the centre of the screen as the trench target is incinerated. Khartiia has just added another couple of unlucky soldiers to Russia’s dead and seriously injured, a total that as of spring 2025 ranged from estimates of 600,000 to an astonishing 900,000.
Koleso lifts the drone slightly before pulling it back. The camera points towards the enemy on the return journey to ensure that it is not being followed.
Shortly after the drone lands, orders come through for no movement above ground, drone or human. The skies over our stretch of the line are closed. There are enemy drones hunting for our positions. We hold still. Drone teams are some of the highest-value targets in this war, and the Russians will throw artillery, drones and even missiles at us if they find our position. Bomber drone positions need to be close to the front line but not on it. The team’s neighbouring position was hit a couple of weeks before. I ask the senior officer with us, call sign Acoustic, what happens under incoming fire? I assume we hunker down and wait for it to pass? No, Acoustic tells me. When one drone hits, more, plus artillery and mortars, will be on their way, so you ‘bug out’ fast, pile into a car and drive like hell to outrun the other drones, which will give chase like electronic flying zombies.
Thirty minutes later, HQ tells us the skies are clear. The Russian drones have moved on. We leave the basement and watch Sonic 5continue his night’s work. He carefully loads two bombs – they look like mortar rounds – to the underside of the drone. We return to the basement as he arms the weapons for Khartiia’s team to resume their deadly work.
• • •
For frontline soldiers, the tactics and tools of Russian warfare have been clear. But talk to others involved in this two-decades-long conflict, where Ukraine has fought for its survival and Russia has rethought and redeveloped its tactics of total war, and the answers are different.
This has been a war fought using cutting-edge drones, with tactics changing every couple of months, but also one of First World War-style trenches and panic-inducing artillery bombardment. It has been a war not only of algorithms and bots peddling disinformation but also of assassinations, blackmail and bribery. It has been a conflict in which the Russian state has abducted children. It has been a war in which special forces, spies and organised crime work together to stage coups. In the West, it has been a conflict that includes assassination and, increasingly, sabotage. The Kremlin has funded the hard left and right in Europe and elsewhere; it has used Western lawyers and banks to facilitate some of the largest financial thefts in history whilst intimidating the media into silence. Russia has groomed, cultivated and manipulated politicians and celebrities in Europe and the US to do the Kremlin’s bidding, either wittingly or by being, as Russian revolutionary Lenin once called them, ‘useful idiots’.
In Podil, a dockside area of Kyiv near to the city’s onion-domed centre, Solomiya Khoma and Serhii Kuzan monitor the tactics of 6their enemy in Ukrainian territories that Russia seized, either in 2014 or at the beginning of the 2022 invasion. They work in a small office without electricity – Russian missiles are systematically destroying Ukraine’s electricity grid. Serhii reels off a list of tactics used by the Russians: ‘Mass torture and murder, filtration camps, forced passporting [forcing people to take Russian passports to access basic services such as healthcare], the public destruction of Ukrainian books and the active work of Russian occupation administrations to change the outlook of the Ukrainian population to a pro-Russian one.’2
Solomiya explains that this is Ukraine’s war of survival. Ukraine was by no means the perfect state and internal corruption, significantly manipulated by Russia, helped damage its ability to defend itself. But its people want to be free to form their own nation and are dying in large numbers to defend that idea. If they lose, it is the meaningful end not only of their state but also of their identity as a people, which will be subjected to forced Russification. In the past, Ukraine’s language was repressed within the Russian Empire. The Bolsheviks crushed initial attempts to form a Ukrainian state in 1917, aided by divisions amongst Ukrainians. In the 1930s, a full decade before the Holocaust, the Soviet Union’s leaders forced a deliberate policy of mass starvation on Ukraine to compel the collectivisation of its peasant farmers and destroy Ukrainian identity in the process. Between 4 and 7 million died. The Holodomor, as it is now known, was covered up by the Soviet Union and its Western ‘fellow travellers’ for decades. ‘For centuries, the Russians have been engaged in the deliberate extermination of Ukrainian identity: from the physical destruction of millions of people to the banning of language, religion, culture and history,’ says Solomiya. ‘Our goal is to end this struggle now and not pass it on to future generations.’ 7
In telling the story of the conflict in Ukraine and Russia’s new way of waging war, this book presents a series of fundamental ideas. These are outlined in the following pages.
INTEGRATIONISKEY
Russia has created an integrated, flexible and innovative form of warfare based on the use of the full spectrum of state tactics and tools – the ‘unification of everything’3 – in the service of aggressive state power. This reflects the idea that, according to the head of the Russian armed forces, the ‘very rules of war’ have changed.4 Some of these tactics or tools would not be understood as instruments of warfare in the West, but critically, they are, regardless of category, interpreted as tools of ‘contemporary military conflict’ in Russian military doctrine.5
Russia’s new form of warfare is an updated form of total war, in which allthe tools of state power can be used in conflict, military or otherwise, to gain advantage over the adversary. This is an evolution of the old idea of total war based on industrial strength, mass armies and popular will. Russia has developed this idea now more than any other nation in recent history. This integration has sometimes been called hybrid warfare, although the term has become so overused as to have limited value. Whilst Western nations talk about integration, Russia does it.
RUSSIA’S NEW TOTAL WAR IS THE INTEGRATION OF THE TWO RUSSIAN WAYS OF WAR OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
The first way of war is what soldiers call ‘traditional’ or ‘conventional’ war. That’s the war we see in films and books, the war of armies and tanks, planes and warships. Yet the Soviet Union had a second way of war, which they practised in the last century – revolutionary, 8subversive, politicised conflict. That was the war of spies and blackmail, assassination, propaganda and disinformation, of fake organisations, political ‘fronts’ and paramilitary groups, of politicians and opinion-formers being knowingly or unknowingly manipulated by their adversaries, of the use of economic and other forms of power, including language and religion. This second way of war, also known euphemistically as ‘active measures’, a term invented by the KGB, has not necessarily been seen as a way of war in its own right. I believe it should be, especially given its likely prominence in this century.
In Russian, the word for ‘war’ is voina,* whilst the revolutionary, subversive form of conflict has often been referred to as ‘struggle’ or bor’ba.† Russia’s new way of war is the integration of military war and political struggleinto a seamless whole.
IT’S NEW ENOUGH TO BE NEW
This way of war issubstantially new. However, it has its roots in Soviet and Russian historical experience, thinking and behaviour. Many of the tools of this new total war were initially developed and integrated in the Soviet Union. Some tools, related to language and religion, have their provenance in the Russian Empire. However, whilst it has similarities with the past, this new way of war is not just a repeat of its predecessors. The level of integration is greater than before. Some of the tools are new.
The integration of military and non-military tools sits withinRussian military doctrine. It is a new approach to conflict, with much more focus on the human mind as the ultimate battlefield 9even during periods of ‘traditional’ war. This new warfare is more ideologically flexible than before. During the Cold War, Moscow aligned with and used the hard left worldwide; now it allies with both the political hard left and the hard right, as well as unscrupulous commercial structures and media influencers, to aid its aims. There is more emphasis on non-military tools and tactics and the level of creativity is higher.
In this way, whilst Russia’s new way of war is inspired by the past, it is not a facsimile of it.
THE CONFLICT IN UKRAINE STARTED IN 2005 ANDHAS GONE THROUGH THREE CLEAR STAGES
By rooting this book in Russian thinking and theory, I show that the conflict in Ukraine has been ongoing for nearly two decades. Putin has aimed to pull this country of nearly 40 million people back into Russia’s sphere of influence, stifling Ukraine’s genuine independence and trying to create a Russian vassal state with a veneer of independence.
The first stage of the Ukraine conflict took place between 2005 and 2013, after the democratic revolution of late 2004, known in Ukraine as the Orange Revolution, and the defeat of Russia’s presidential candidate. From then on, Putin began a systemic campaign of primarily non-military methods to undermine the Ukrainian regime. To do this, he used economic, political, cultural, religious and informational tools, including supporting political parties run by agents of influence; intense espionage; the corruption of police, security agencies and the armed forces; and the use of influential businessmen to buy up parts of the Ukrainian economy.
The second stage of the conflict began in early 2014, as the FSB spy agency – heir to the infamous KGB – ‘curated’ a string of 10violent uprisings in multiple Ukrainian oblasts (counties) using Russian political-front organisations and paramilitary groups. They aimed to collapse Ukrainian state authority. Most of these uprisings failed although two, in the oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk, succeeded.
The third stage of the conflict was signalled by the large-scale invasion that began in February 2022. Even then, this was not a conventional invasion but a show of force in which spies, special forces and agents of organised crime working with Ukraine’s pro-Russian fifth column planned to seize the presidency, Ukraine’s Parliament and other key buildings. The aim was to carry out a coupd’étatwhilst the Ukrainian Army was pinned down in the east of the country.
The conflict against the West has gone through phases that have broadly mirrored these stages. Putin’s infamous 2007 speech in Munich rejected the post-Cold War settlement. Sabotage and political warfare against Europe and the US started after the 2014 partial invasion of Ukraine, with a significant increase after the 2022 full invasion. Conceptually and emotionally, Putin and the Russian regime have been in active conflict with Ukraine and the West since the first decade of this century.
RUSSIA’S NEW WAR BLURS ‘WAR’ AND ‘PEACE’
By combining the traditional with the subversive, Russia’s new war blurs the meaning of ‘war’ and ‘peace’. This blending of traditional categories will be a significant feature of 21st-century conflict. The wide array of integrated tools in Russia’s way of war enables a perpetual struggle, so that even outside periods of traditional, military warfare or threat of warfare, the Russian state remains in conflict with the idea of Western liberal democracy. Fighting against the West and weakening it through divisions, schemes and 11machinations, as well as waging war in Ukraine and threating war elsewhere, is an end in itself.
The father of military theory, Carl von Clausewitz, said – and I paraphrase – that war is the continuation of politics by other means. It is a truism that many are familiar with. Russia closely aligns its military and political ends. However, for Putin, politics is also an extension of warfare in the Darwinian struggle of nations.
This view of international politics evolved in the last century. The name associated with it was that of another German, Erich Ludendorff, the country’s military leader for much of the First World War and an early Nazi sympathiser.6 For Germans who shared his outlook, ‘peace’ signified nothing more than a period of non-military conflict and preparation between war in the permanent zero-sum game of the struggle for power. This idea was also adopted by revolutionary Russia’s early leaders, who believed communism and capitalism could not co-exist. One would eventually defeat the other. They were right, but not in the way they hoped.
So, the idea of permanent struggle is not only Clausewitzian (war is politics by other means) but also Ludendorffian (politics is war by other means). Russia’s new way of war – its new total war – is, therefore, a recipe for permanent conflict, whether that conflict is political or military. This is the thinking of those who rule Russia. It is a doctrine for eternal conflict.
ADVANCED INFORMATION THEORIES AREAT THE HEART OF THIS WAY OF WAR
Information warfare is a vital part of this type of war. It is designed to create conflict and confusion, to manipulate emotions and to present rival realities – or, as one Ukrainian told me, ‘messing with people’s minds so they don’t know what’s true or not’.7 Information 12warfare encompasses a variety of techniques from the interconnected fields of psychological warfare, propaganda, indoctrination and disinformation.8 Research into psychological forms of manipulation goes back decades and formed part of Soviet top-secret research programmes.
TOTAL WAR IS DESIGNED TO BE EFFICIENT(EVEN IF THE RUSSIAN MILITARY ISN’T)
This new form of total war is designed to be used in a unified manner to become more than the sum of its parts, thus allowing Russia to challenge the US and NATO despite its shrinking resources. Force is used to achieve political aims, and Russia escalates to the use of force when the original tools and tactics are insufficient, as occurred during 2014 and 2022.
This form of war is also designed to be efficient. Why physically attack a country when you can carry out a coup or corrupt its leadership through oil deals or cheap loans? The tools and tactics used depend on the type of conflict, the aims of the conflict and the ‘permission set’ that soldiers, spies and other state officials would be allowed to use. There are different tools for different rules.
RUSSIA HAS EVOLVED THIS NEW WAY OF WAR TO ACHIEVEITS GOALS WHILST LACKING THE SUPERPOWER RESOURCESOFITSRIVALS
The Russian state wishes to dominate nominally independent former Soviet states. It aims to develop and defend its anti-Western value system, especially against what it perceives as indirect forms of conflict, such as democratic revolutions and popular protest – the so-called ‘colour revolutions’.9
The roads to the strategic neuroses of Vladimir Putin and his 13security cabal meet in Kyiv, the ancient citadel of the first eastern Slavic civilisation. They aim to control Ukraine, feeling that Russia is less of a great power without Ukraine and that the West is physically and psychologically closer than is comfortable. A democratic Ukraine threatens Russian autocracy by presenting a rival path of development. Western nations have underestimated Putin’s obsession with Ukraine – and this is a strategic error. Putin’s obsession with Ukraine is near-existential for him and his Russian regime. As ex-CIA director William Burns has written, ‘It is always a mistake to underestimate his [Putin’s] fixation on controlling Ukraine and its choices.’10
RUSSIA’S NEW TOTAL WAR ALSO HELPSTO CONTROL ITS CITIZENS
A Russia at war with Ukraine or in conflict with the West enables not only political control but the justification and opportunity to reimpose a Russian state identity that is hostile to the West. Russia’s total war and its confrontation with Ukraine and the West is an external manifestation of an internal battle over political identity and values – about how the nation defines itself. War and conflict become a means of control, whilst a new image and character for the Russian state is created. War stifles dissent; war justifies and makes real the propaganda that many older Russians have experienced for much of their lives. Putin, who once sardonically joked about the ‘old Russian entertainment’ – the search for a national idea – is imposing a new national identity built around xenophobic nationalism, political authoritarianism and religious orthodoxy.11 The ‘war against NATO’ in Ukraine – a war Putin defines as being fought against ‘Nazis’, ‘fascism’ and the US ‘Antichrist’ – makes the Russian population much more pliable for what the regime has in 14store for it. The forging of a new national Russian identity in opposition to the West, underway since the early 2000s, has become more marked since 2014 and more virulent since 2022.
RUSSIA’S STRATEGIC OUTLOOK AND CULTURE HASN’T CHANGED
The influences that have shaped Russian thinking about conflict and its place in the world – its strategic outlook and culture – have not fundamentally changed from the Soviet days.12 There was a temporary thawing from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, after which the door of strategic change slammed shut.
Since then, Russia has recreated its sense of permanent struggle with a re-energised and reimagined integrated theory of war fit for Russia’s battles this century. By combining the conventional with the subversive, Russia’s new way of war results in a blurring of the tools of war and peace – and even the notion of war and peace as distinct terms. The wide array of integrated tools enables Russia’s perpetual struggle with Western nations, so that even outside periods of traditional military warfare or threat of warfare, the Russian state remains effectively in conflict with the West, and by doing so, reaffirms its identity in conflict with Western liberal democracy. Russia’s new war is a whole-state concept of conflict; it is a strategic art, not simply a military one.
RUSSIA’S NEW WAY OF WAR IS A BLUEPRINT FOR AUTHORITARIAN DICTATORS TO CHALLENGE THE FREE WORLD
Due to Russia’s deep history of creative thinking about war, the current conflict is an indicator of how authoritarian states will challenge the West for global supremacy. The Russo-Ukraine conflict is becoming part of a wider global struggle for the future of humanity 15between open and closed societies, between democracies such as the US, the UK and their European and global allies and authoritarian states such as Russia, China and allies like Iran and North Korea (both of which are supplying equipment to Russia and in North Korea’s case, soldiers too). It is as yet unclear what influence US President Donald Trump will have on this wider ideological struggle or whether he will move the US to a more neutral or a pro-Russian camp. We should remember that the destruction of the Western alliance, by whatever means, remains one of Russia’s great strategic goals.
Russian forces have started to conduct sabotage operations in Europe to create ‘sustained mayhem’ according to the head of Britain’s domestic security agency, MI5.13 Our enemies are either in non-military conflict with us already or are strategically shaping the world for a more violent clash of nations and civilisations. As Vladimir Putin himself declared in late 2024, ‘A serious, irreconcilable struggle is unfolding for the formation of a new [world order].’14 Russia is building its military beyond its needs in Ukraine. Other states in Eastern Europe may be in danger.15 We in the West are spending billions to support Ukraine. Our generals tell us we may ourselves be at war with Russia in the next decade. The Russian people have alreadybeen told that they are at war with NATO in Ukraine. As the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky once said, ‘You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.’
Ukraine is, for now, the physical battleground in that struggle. If we can grasp the new nature of modern conflict and react to it, the West and the international order we created will survive. If we fail, the next few decades will witness the twilight of democracies.
This book is intended to be an investigation into the style of conflict that will be, at least in part, waged to undermine our beliefs, 16our power and our influence. Some, possibly many, of the tactics being used by Russia are being or will be used by China, Iran and other states dedicated to attacking the current global order. The Russian permanent struggle template is, therefore, also a global one. It is a blueprint for the wars of the twenty-first century. It is a toolkit for the conflicts that are coming – or the conflicts that are arguably already here.
• • •
I want to describe and explain this form of warfare because too few people, including diplomats, soldiers, politicians and journalists, understand it. If Western leadership doesn’t understand what it is up against, our nations are in peril.
There are several reasons for our collective ignorance at this dangerous time. First, in the West, war is seen as something limited in time and space – it has a start and end date. It is difficult for us to understand the idea of permanent conflict. Second, conflict possesses characteristics we associate with ‘war’. So Western minds don’t ‘get’ some of the tactics of warfare associated with not only Russia but other twentieth-century revolutionary regimes. We may see child stealing, assassinations or economic conflict as ‘bad things’ that happen in and around war but we don’t consider them part of conflict strategies – and certainly not a core part. Whilst a narrow definition of ‘war’ may still be about ‘traditional’ war – the war of tanks and planes manned by uniformed men and women – warfare and especially conflict, in the Russian leadership’s mind, has a much wider definition.
Third, the act of violent war, whether we like it or not, remains the ultimate human theatre. ‘Traditional war’ contains life and death, 17love and hate, courage and bravery, as well as treachery, cowardice and deceit. We are moved by the tears of refugees and innocents; we seek timeless heroes and villains. We are naturally drawn to action because it contains such powerful images and stories, some of which are contained in this book. All this is hardwired into human nature. But it can stop us from seeing the real strategies and tactics of conflict.
Let me give you an example: as of the winter of 2024, what was Russia’s main effort? Most people would assume that it was on the battlefield. However, arguably Russia’s main effort was to target the will of the Ukrainian people so that, exhausted by war, they will reluctantly sue for peace. Russian forces have been targeting morale and will by using missiles and devastating glide bombs to strike major cities, particularly Kharkiv, whilst at the same time degrading Ukraine’s electricity capacity. As of early 2025, 900 bombs are being dropped a month – not including the many more that are hammering Ukraine’s front line.
Imagine a family living in one of Ukraine’s great cities such as Kharkiv, in a cold apartment in a freezing continental winter, surviving on limited electricity with bombs hitting the city several times a week, with air raid sirens multiple times a day, with their frightened children partially schooled in bunkers underground. How long will that family stay if they can move somewhere safer in Ukraine or to Western Europe, never to return? Under the stress of bombs, the cold and an imploding economy, the Kremlin is trying to break Ukrainian will to set conditions for a Russian victory, made more likely by a US administration that has appeared at times dangerously agnostic and a European leadership whose actions rarely match their rhetoric. Already, 8 million Ukrainians are internal refugees and a similar number have fled the country. As one senior Ukrainian military officer put it: 18
Is this their main effort? I believe yes, yes. Because for them it’s much more important to kill many civilians, to destroy our civilian infrastructure, to cut the access to resources, water and electricity, heat and so on and not just to destroy the army … Because this is a hybrid war … [The] Russians are doing this war in different spheres, as well as in cyberspace, as well as in promotion of disinformation and fake news.16
This war has ebbed and flowed and we cannot predict future events. Western conventional wisdom, so often wrong on Russia, wrote off Ukraine in 2022. Ukrainians won the decisive battle for Kyiv and when Russian lines in north-east Ukraine collapsed in 2022, an ecstatic population believed a quick victory was possible. Since the initial disaster, the Russian Army has regrouped and the Russian regime has developed a three-pronged strategy to pursue the war. Whilst in many senses illegal and immoral, this strategy has been slowly succeeding and has put Russia in a more commanding position both for when it comes to negotiations and the war’s continuation. We overestimated Russia in 2022. We underestimate it now.
Russia’s three-pronged strategy has sought to attrite (wear down) Ukraine. It can be succinctly explained as hold the line, make life hell, break the link:
Russia is holding its line – it’s done this by building up very significant defences, thousands of acres of landmines and many kilometres of deep trenches and dug-in positions. From there, it has been making grinding progress on the frontline battlefields, willing to see the slaughter of many thousands of its own men for a smaller but still significant number of Ukraine’s volunteer army.Russia is making life hell for Ukrainian civilians by bombing 19cities as well as destroying electricity supplies. Putin wants to freeze Ukrainians into surrender.Russia is working to damage the relationship between Ukraine and its Western backers, without which Ukraine would be unable to fund or fight this war. This includes the use of an array of tools of political warfare, including information and disinformation campaigns and the manipulation of politicians, not only in Europe but also in the US and globally.Whilst Russia’s military weaknesses have been well reported, we should be aware that it fits our narrative to highlight Russian failings and portray the conflict as David versus Goliath, with an assumed eventual victory for a Ukrainian David. But the Russians are learning and improving. Russia has maintained a recruitment rate of 30,000 soldiers a month, enough to maintain its forces despite its extraordinary casualty rates and the horror of relentless, so-called ‘meat assaults’, where small fire teams of five or six are relentlessly sent towards Ukrainian lines. Russian troops are still willing to fight, whether through the threat of rape or death, financial inducements or misplaced patriotism repetitively instilled through two decades of propaganda.
Russian industrial production is also now kicking in. They are learning the art of drone war, which is making the battlefield even more lethal. Russia is building a brutal military machine, which is learning through fighting and dying. We should be in no doubt that at the end of this war, Russia, in terms of drones and electronic warfare tactics at least, will have a significant advantage facing NATO forces in the Baltic republics.
• • •
20So, what are my qualifications to write on this subject?
In 1990, I was working for a national newspaper during the dying days of ‘Fleet Street’, as it was then known. For the first time, I had money in my pocket. A friend working for then MP David Alton (now Lord Alton) told me about Ukrainian priests who were being sent to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site without protective clothing as punishment for their religious beliefs. The power station blew up in 1986, radiating deadly fallout into the atmosphere and across northern Europe. To work there without protective clothing was a slow death sentence from the inevitable cancers that would follow.
When I started as a journalist, I had just missed the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Eastern European revolutions, but I wanted adventure and I wanted to see this country, the Soviet Union, which had for so long threatened us. Intrigued and fascinated, I arrived in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, then still part of the Soviet Union, during Easter 1990, just as the banned Greek Catholic church was allowed to celebrate Easter for the first time since the Second World War.
Crossing the border and arriving in Lviv, I felt as if I had stepped into a black-and-white 1950s movie, so little seemed to have changed. The city was not so much stuck in time as trapped in history. There were the very priests I was planning to meet, conducting the first church services in this part of Ukraine since it was conquered by Stalin’s Soviet Union. The unique sights and sounds of that Easter – the chanting Orthodox liturgy, the charismatic radiance of those priests, the faded but still splendid baroque majesty of St Peter and Paul’s Church – enthralled me. Around the priests seeking sacramental blessings were petite babushkas(grannies) wrapped in shawls. They reminded me of my mother, whose German and Slavic ancestry came from nearby. In the nooks of their elbows, the ladies 21carried wicker baskets with painted eggs covered by embroidered linen napkins. Some wore the traditional Ukrainian linen tops called vyshivankas. They queued on ancient, pockmarked streets to enter the candlelit cold church. The only animation and colour in that drab Soviet world seemed to come from the ebullient priests and the faithful, chatting away in a sing-song rural Ukrainian.
From there, I went to Kyiv and started filing stories, thanks to the support of the then Times Moscow bureau chief. A few months later, I was back permanently as a stringer – a junior foreign correspondent – for the newspaper, covering not only Ukraine but also the wider collapse of the Soviet Union. I was twenty-three. I stayed for four years. Since then, I have returned regularly.
As a young reporter, I feared the events that have come to pass decades ago. I first wrote about Russian determination to control its neighbours in 1995 in an article for the WallStreetJournal.17 I witnessed at first hand Russia’s ‘managed conflicts’ in Georgia and Moldova. I wrote of the strategic mistake of partitioning Serbia and how Russia would use it as an excuse to do the same, which it did in short order in Georgia and later Ukraine. I’ve long been fascinated by the fusion of different forms of conflict and I’ve tried to understand them from informational, military and political angles, having been a foreign correspondent, a reservist soldier on permanent service for a decade and then a Member of Parliament. In addition, I devoted a decade of academic study to Russian warfare for my PhD from King’s College, London.
Before the 2022 invasion, I argued that Putin would, in his remaining years in power, attempt three things: first, destroy Ukrainian independence; second, rebuild and reshape Russia as a virulently anti-Western nation and a core leader of the global anti-Western alliance; and third, try to break NATO and with it, Western power. 22I didn’t pretend to know when these would happen or how, but as the military build-up around Ukraine continued in 2021, I argued that common sense suggests that dictators don’t like to back down.
Putin has tried to crush Ukraine. He has created a brutal, militarised Russia. He has not yet tried to take on NATO. However, unless we relearn the art of deterrence, I fear it will be only a matter of time. Ukraine’s defeat, should it happen, will pave the way for an extraordinarily dangerous confrontation. Therefore, it is in our practical as well as our moral interest that Ukraine succeeds. Polling from Ukraine shows that Western support has a material effect on Ukrainian willingness to fight. Holding back Putin’s brutalised Russian Army at the gates of Kharkiv is better for us and Ukraine than blocking him in the NATO-member Baltic republics or at the Polish border.
I am a believer in the extraordinary achievements of the Western world, especially my own nation, but since the end of the Cold War, we have lacked strategy and we have become divided. We have failed to understand how others, especially our adversaries, view us and the world. Our leadership has at times been weak, short-termist and self-absorbed, more intent on advertising our own ‘progressive’ virtues than dealing with a hard world. Faced with determined dictators in Russia and elsewhere, Western nations have been hesitant and unsure. An alliance of the indecisive is facing an axis of the ruthless. The West urgently needs to relearn the art of deterrence and the art of strategy. It also needs to relearn the values that made it great and be willing to defend them.
Now that Ukraine is at war, there is a tendency to brush its problems under the carpet. I am not blind to its faults. The hidden domination of the secret services, the growth of organised crime and the interconnection between oligarchs and politics have acted as a 23significant drag on progress in Ukraine. Before 2014, its elections were rigged for Moscow’s candidate. In many ways, Ukraine was an easy ‘mark’ for the Putin regime, with its deep well of knowledge in the dark arts of political and economic warfare, perfected over the lifetime of the Soviet Union. However, whatever Ukraine’s faults as a state, one should be clear that there is no moral equivalence between the actions of Putin’s Russian state, which have been murderous and barbaric, and Ukraine’s. Those that claim such equivalence are the Kremlin’s modern ‘useful idiots’.
Slowly from the 1990s and more quickly from the 2000s, as new generations came of age, there has been a slow but definite refusal in Ukraine to follow Russia down the path of its new authoritarianism. The two ‘brother’ nations, Russia and Ukraine, decisively went their different ways. Of the two paths, Putin, in partnership with his FSB internal security agency and other malign forces, took the road well travelled by Russian leaders: strangling civil society and creating an authoritarian state with a veneer of sham democracy. Putin liberally murdered his opponents along the way and created a state based on the trinity of an unrepentant secret service, a corrupt bureaucracy and exceptionally violent organised crime. Ukraine, slowly at first, took the road less travelled in the East Slavic world. It has become a vibrant, if messy, democracy. In doing so, Kyiv rejected Moscow’s rule as well as Moscow’s rules.
What has distinguished Ukraine from Russia has been the growth of civil society. People from all walks of life see themselves as free and organise themselves outside the control of the state – but nevertheless influence it by their actions. Ukraine’s volunteers, military and civilian, have shown the true value of a free society. They are the greatest proponents of freedom in our era. At critical moments – in the 2004–5 Orange Revolution to protest and overturn the rigging 24of the country’s presidential elections, in the 2013 Revolution of Dignity to oppose the country’s reabsorption into the Russian economic and political space, in the first invasion of 2014 and during the desperate days of the 2022 invasion when Russian forces were at the gates of Kyiv – these volunteers saved the nation from the Leviathan facing them. They did so in 2005 and 2013 by taking to the streets, and from 2014 onwards by manning the patriotic volunteer brigades that fought Russian troops in the east of the country, making with their own hands much that Ukraine’s hollowed-out army needed, from drones to camouflage nets and uniforms. Critically, and somewhat remarkably, civil society was protected by some senior members of the Ukrainian security service, the SluzhbaBezpekyUkrainy, or SBU, who refused to countenance a violent crackdown in 2005 and probably in 2013 too. Those decisions, perhaps surprising ones, changed the course of Ukrainian and Russian history.
As of 2025, some 45,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died, along with tens of thousands of civilians and more than 300,000 Ukrainians injured. This roll call of the dead and maimed suggests that this is the worst of times for Ukraine. But ifthe nation survives, sees off one of the world’s largest and most brutal armies and builds a defensible state, generations yet unborn will say that thiswas their finest hour. The eternal heroes in this nation’s founding story will be those men and women who stayed to serve and stood to be counted.
So, there has been a stoicism amongst many, if not all, Ukrainians, especially those that are fighting or otherwise playing their role. They have the qualities that the British were once admired for: a good-natured and understated determination, a desire to ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’. There is a fatalism mixed with bloody-mindedness, which explains why air raid sirens are so often ignored. There is a surprising positivity too, manifesting itself in the close 25comradeship of conflict, despite the fact that many will not finish this war as they started.
Most understand that Ukraine may never have another chance to form a state. Russian rule under Putin, if it does return, will be nasty, brutish and rapacious. This is ‘a historical struggle for our existence’, as Solomiya Khoma frames it. And in that clear choice, there is a sense of comfort in accepting their fate and doing the best they can with it. Finding humour in the darkest of circumstances is not new for Ukrainians. One of the 150 or so interviewees for this book, a three-time injured drone pilot with the call sign Pisok (sand), told me of the time he’d been injured alongside his former commander. Pisok’s injuries had been mild, but his commanding officer had both hands and one of his legs blown off. Yet Pisok reassured me that ‘even now he is laughing and telling jokes’. Turning away from me, he reflected, ‘We need to live thislife.’
• • •
My aim for this book is that it is useful, useable and used. It is aimed at different audiences, including interested readers who want to know the story of the war but also want something beyond the headlines. It is also written for military comrades. It’s for students, civilian and military, in universities, military academies and staff colleges the world over studying war, strategy and international affairs.
This style of war, in its complexity and breadth, is the war of the twenty-first century. In five years, I believe the infantry soldier’s primary weapon will be a day sack of drones thrown into the air to keep stag (guard) on a company outpost, or as reconnaissance or to help assault an enemy position. For commanders, they will need 26to understand why the idea of a safe ‘rear area’ for HQs to function and troops to rest may be a thing of the past and why armour is increasingly vulnerable. It is a truism repeated by soldiers in Ukraine that a $1,500 drone will destroy an armoured personnel carrier (APC) worth a million dollars whilst a handful of them can ‘kill’ a $2 million tank.
All, including our political leaders, need to understand that conflict starts, as Russia’s Chief of Staff has written, in undeclared ways and potentially years before the ‘traditional’ war begins. The tragedy is that too few, in Ukraine itself, Europe or the US, saw the coming storm. One of the greatest tricks the Kremlin ever pulled was to fool Ukraine and the West into thinking it wasn’t at war.
To make the book readable for all, I alternate between the story of how the Russian state developed this new form of war and the experiences of Ukrainians – between the story of ideas and the stories of people.
I explain why there is confusion in the West about what war is and how Russian thinking about strategy has developed over two centuries. I tell the story of the rise of Russian fascism – for that is what it is. I look at the characteristics and tactics of Russia’s new way of war. I show the development of Russia’s subversive espionage war and argue why we need to see it as a way of war in its own right. I examine how Putin merged this with traditional war to make a single blueprint for integrated conflict, using all the tools and tactics of his authoritarian state, and how he may have personally helped to mould it. I then explain how Russia plans conflict and the order in which it does things to achieve its effects.
I tell the story of the drone war and the war to steal Ukraine’s children. I tell the stories of the war against the cities, Russia’s attempts to destroy Ukraine’s will to fight and the soldiers on the ground, 27in the trenches and manning the aid defences. I talk to a widowed sniper who twice a week walks to the edge of no man’s land to kill Russian soldiers and who unburdened her grief by telling me the most harrowing thing she has done in this war was to bury her fiancé, a man who was not only her love but also her commanding officer. I show the human side of the conflict as well as its theory.
The serving Ukrainian soldiers I talk to are almost always referred to by their call signs, out of respect for their military roles but also for security reasons. When I use a full name, it is used because that person is in the public eye. When I use a first name only, I am doing so because revealing either their full name or their call sign could potentially help their enemy, especially if they are working in special or secret military units. Please assume all are pseudonyms.
Finally, the book is dedicated to a specific audience, one that I have already mentioned: the volunteers of Ukraine. I have written it so that they can better see and understand the overt and covert wars being waged against them to destroy their identity, their language and their nation. I thank them for letting me tell their stories, and I thank the army, national guard, secret service (SBU) and military intelligence (HUR) units and individuals who let me visit them and spend time with them. In return, I am telling the story of Russia’s conflict through the eyes of Ukraine’s volunteer army. Their blood, toil, tears and sweat have saved their nation three times since the turn of the century. They may yet be called to save it once more. Their forebears would have been proud of them. Their descendants will be.
SlavaUkraini– Glory to Ukraine. 28
NOTES
1 Solomiya Khoma, interview with author, 29 August 2024, Kyiv.
2 Solomiya Khoma and Serhii Kuzan, interview with author, 29 August 2024, Kyiv.
3 Senior Ukrainian military intelligence officer, interview with author, 18 September 2017, Kyiv.
4 Valeri Gerasimov, ‘Tsennost Nauki v Predvidenii’, Voyenno-Promyshlennyy Kuryer, 27 February–5 March 2013, http://vpk-news.ru/sites/default/files/pdf/VPK_08_476.pdf (accessed 1 June 2015).
5 Russian Federation, ‘Voyennaya Doktrina Rossiyskoy Federatsii’, 25 December 2015, http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/47334 (accessed 5 March 2017).
6 Whilst Ludendorff brought the term ‘total war’ to a wider audience, it was first used by sociologist Hans Freyer in Der Staat (Leipzig: Ernst Wiegandt, 1926). See Jan Willem Honig, ‘The Idea of Total War: From Clausewitz to Ludendorff’, in Andreas Herberg-Rothe, Jan Willem Honig, Daniel Moran (eds), Clausewitz:The State and War (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2011), p. 39.
7 Alya Shandra, interview with author, Kyiv, 14 February 2017.
8 Agnieszka Bryc and Maria Domańska, ‘Russia in the Trenches of Cognitive Warfare’, New Eastern Europe, 27 September 2024, https://neweasterneurope.eu/2024/09/09/russia-in-the-trenches-of-cognitive-warfare/ (accessed 27 September 2024).
9 The Kremlin has presented colour revolutions as a powerful form of indirect warfare where mass street protests, controlled by external Western forces, aim to overthrow governments. See Tracey German, ‘Harnessing Protest Potential: Russian Strategic Culture and the Colored Revolutions’, Contemporary SecurityPolicy, vol. 41, no. 4, 2 May 2020, p. 541 and ‘Russia and the “Color Revolution”: A Russian Military View of a World Destabilized by the US and the West’, Center for Strategic and International Studies, 28 May 2014, http://csis.org/files/publication/140529_Russia_Color_Revolution_Summary.pdf (accessed 16 February 2021).
10 William J. Burns, ‘Spycraft and Statecraft’, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2024, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/cia-spycraft-and-statecraft-william-burns (accessed 23 May 2025).
11 John Willerton, ‘Searching for a Russian National Idea: Putin Team Efforts and Public Assessments’, Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization, vol. 25, no. 3, summer 2017, pp. 209–34.
12 Articulated in Norbert Eitelhuber, ‘The Russian Bear: Russian Strategic Culture and What it Implies for the West’, Connections: The Quarterly Journal, vol. 9, no. 1, 2009, pp. 1–28.
13 Frank Gardner and Suzanne Leigh, ‘Russia on Mission to Cause Mayhem on UK streets, warns MI5’, BBC News, 8 October 2024, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp8e15yr1gwo (accessed 17 December 2024).
14 ‘Putin Announces War for New World Order: We Approached a Very Dangerous Line’, Pravda, 7 November 2024, https://english.pravda.ru/news/world/161107-putin-war-world-order/ (accessed 17 December 2024).
15 DPA, ‘German Major General Warns of Russian Military Build-Up’, Yahoo News, 18 January 2025, https://www.yahoo.com/news/german-major-general-warns-russian-085622367.html (accessed 19 January 2025).
16 Conversation with author, September 2024, Ukraine.
17 Robert Seely, ‘The Truth about Russia Foreign Policy’, Wall Street Journal, 25 October 1995.
* Phonetically pronounced as ‘vayna’ with the stress on the last ‘na’, so vayna.
† Phonetically pronounced as ‘bar’ba’, with the stress on the final ‘ba’, so bar’ba. These terms are used by Soviet and Russian military theoretician General Makhmut Gareyev, former deputy Chief of Staff for the USSR armed forces and former president of the Russian Academy of Military Sciences.
Chapter 2
Reinventing Conflict: What is War?
‘Warshavebecomefuzzyattheedges.’
– Hew Strachan1
Nearly two decades ago, the great military historian Sir Hew Strachan questioned whether we still knew what war was – a seemingly bizarre statement. He asserted, ‘One of the central challenges confronting international relations today is that we do not really know what is a war and what is not. The consequences of our confusion would seem absurd, were they not so profoundly dangerous.’2
Wars, Strachan continued, had become ‘fuzzy at the edges’. What did he mean?
By definition, war has always had explicit assumptions attached to it. It is fought between recognisable armies with recognisable soldiers using recognisable kit fighting a recognisable enemy in a specific timeframe. It is ‘war’ as popular imagination would recognise it. However, some aspects of modern warfare have been marked by an indefinability that has spawned new ideas. Whilst ‘warfare’, the means by which war is fought, has been defined by its ever-evolving nature, as humanity seeks new tools and technologies with which to wage it – from bows and arrows to tanks and jets – the ideaof ‘war’ 30as a violent clash of wills was seen as static. However, both are now in a state of flux.
Definitions of war have encompassed ‘traditional’ state-on-state violence, conflicts fuelled by organised crime or between groups competing for control of natural resources.3 They include paramilitary violence driven by political organisations and Russia’s so-called ‘controlled’ or ‘managed’ conflicts in former Soviet territories, where violence and chaos are turned off and on at will by the Kremlin. ‘Information war’ and ‘psychological war’ have become critical handmaidens to conflict and sometimes even standalone components of conflict in their own right.
Some military scholars, in examining Russian warfare prior to 2022 and even 2014, have questioned whether future conflicts could be waged without armies. The lead characteristic of this new generation of warfare is that it may not primarily depend on armies or organised military violence to achieve its goals.4 This new ‘warfare’ might be devoid of actual ‘war’ or at least without the conventional armies to accompany it. This aligns with the Russian view of modern conflict, which sees the mind as the primary battlespace and psychological and informational warfare techniques as critical to ‘new generation’ warfare. The definition of warfare, therefore, is up for debate. As historian Jeremy Black argues, ‘There is no agreed definition today among the multitude offered, and none that works across time and cultures.’5
As discussed, Clausewitz, the Western father of military theory, defined war as an extension of politics.6 Physical force was the integral ‘means of war’ to enable the exertion of that will.7 In this way, he saw the violent clash of wills as being at the heart of war. The centrality of violence to the definition of war is today affirmed in NATO and US doctrine, where warfare ‘remains a violent clash 31
