America Beware: Russia is Waging a Broader War with Tactics Both Seen and Unseen

By Glenn Corn

Glenn Corn is a former Senior Executive in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who worked for 34 years in the U.S. Intelligence, Defense, and Foreign Affairs communities.  He spent over 17 years serving overseas and served as the U.S. President’s Senior Representative on Intelligence and Security issues.  He is an Adjunct Professor at the Institute of World Politics.

OPINION — Every night I am awoken by air alerts from Kyiv.  A few months back, while traveling to that city I put the “Air Alert App” on my cell phone to keep track of attacks on the city by the Russians.  When I returned to the U.S., I decided to keep the application running to try to maintain a sense of how often the Russians were attacking Kyiv.  That was in mid-April.  And since returning the siren goes off at least once, often twice a night.  Just Kyiv.  My application does not track all of Russia’s air strikes against cities and towns across Ukraine.  But the Russians are targeting Ukraine’s critical infrastructure all across war torn Ukraine and are even extending their operations to targets outside of Ukraine.

Recently, when I woke up to one of the sirens, I noticed that instead of the usual one or two alerts, there were four. Then, I opened a message from a friend who said the Russians had launched one of their most brutal strikes against Ukraine in recent months, lobbing 40 missiles inside of five Ukrainian cities – civilian areas — with one of those strikes hitting the Okhmatdyt Children’s hospital in Kyiv, ripping through the dialysis ward.

During an April visit to Kyiv for The Cipher Brief’s Kyiv Economic & Security Forum, Ukrainian authorities described how the Russian Armed Forces were specifically targeting Ukraine’s critical infrastructure and civilian targets. The goal? To terrorize the Ukrainian population into submission.

Since February 2022, the Russians have struck and damaged or destroyed approximately 80 percent of Ukraine’s Energy Infrastructure. Moscow has conducted a sustained campaign against Ukraine’s ability to produce and distribute energy using a combination of conventional and cyber-attacks that have made it increasingly difficult for the Ukrainian Government to provide for the basic energy needs of their population.


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Russian Intelligence has doubled down on collecting specific information on the location and vulnerabilities of power generators, distribution lines and transformers with the goal of enabling persistent targeting of energy infrastructure. Moscow’s primary goal over the past two years has been to ‘freeze’ the Ukrainian population into submission. There is little doubt that Putin will do the same this winter.

As in the case of Okhmatdyt, Russian strikes reached beyond energy targets to include schools, kindergartens and hospitals.  According to one Ukrainian source, since April 2024, more than 60 percent of Russia’s airstrikes have been focused on civilian targets. Regarding Infrastructure, the Russians have also targeted Ukraine’s Ports, Railroads, highways, communications capabilities and other parts of the country’s critical infrastructure.

To sustain their war against Ukraine’s civilian population, the Russians have been able to count on the support of its “allies” in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). 

Russian artillery units have lobbed thousands of North Korean produced artillery rounds at targets on Ukrainian territory, Ukrainian authorities have recovered parts of North Korean made ballistic missiles launched against Ukrainian infrastructure and Iranian-manufactured and provided Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and missiles are frequently used by Russian forces to attack Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities.

Of course, the Peoples Republic of China is also providing the financial and diplomatic space Moscow needs to continue its war against Ukraine’s civilian population.

While some will try to argue that the strike against the Okhmatdyt Children’s hospital was “accidental”, the result of a tragic “mistake”, there should be no doubt in the minds of Americans, Europeans and the Russian people themselves, that the Kremlin is waging war against civilians and is killing non-combatants, including children and the elderly. 

Moscow has already been involved in committing repeated war crimes against the Ukrainian population during its now 10-year war that started in Crimea in 2014, and those countries that are supplying the Kremlin with arms and financing, are complicit in these war crimes.


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Before the launch of Russia’s expanded invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Russians conducted repeated cyber-attacks against Ukrainian banks and financial institutions, hospitals and medical centers, key elements of the Ukrainian government and media targets.

The Russian Intelligence Services also conducted sabotage operations against targets inside and outside of Ukraine, killing those deemed to be Moscow’s enemies and destroying infrastructure in Europe that Moscow suspected was supporting Ukraine’s Armed Forces.

After February 2022, Moscow expanded its use of lethal ordnance to go directly after Ukraine’s critical infrastructure. Americans and their allies need to study this lesson carefully and understand that any future expansion of conflict with Russia or the countries that are enabling Russia today, could also include attacks that would impact U.S. critical infrastructure.

This reality means that even before the start of expanded hostilities, the Russians and others are assessing critical infrastructure in the U.S. for what U.S. war planners call “Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield.”  Moscow is already suspected of supporting cyber-attacks against elements of U.S. critical infrastructure, including the Darkside Cybercriminal organization’s attack on the Colonial Pipeline in 2021. 

There is no doubt that the Russians were involved in conducting hack and leak cyber operations against U.S. political parties during the 2016 election and actively conducting covert influence operations against the U.S. population with the goal of destabilizing the U.S. political system.

Many experts have recognized that the Ukrainian battlespace has become an “incubator” for new and innovative technologies and weapon systems.  But it is also important to recognize that the Russian style of warfare is on full display in Ukraine today, as it was in Chechnya in the 1990s and Georgia in 2008. 

For the Russians, the battlefield extends far beyond lines of conventional combat deep into the “enemy’s” territory with aggressive targeting of civilians and critical infrastructure as a common element in Russia’s approach to waging war. 

Ukraine has shown that for the Russians, the “battlefield” expends well beyond the front lines of an actual conventional military confrontation and includes psychological warfare, offensive cyber operations, offensive intelligence and counterintelligence operations and espionage, and sabotage operations focused on undermining its opponent(s) from “within” and weakening the opponent’s ability to counter Russian aims. 

Sadly, Americans today need to recognize that the U.S. is Russia’s opponent in a war that now includes threats from Moscow, Tehran, Pyongyang and the terrorist and criminal groups associated with those regimes. 

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. 

Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field?  Send it to [email protected] for publication consideration.

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