EXPERT INTERVIEWS – It’s a theater of conflict that isn’t quite war – or a war that is fought in the shadows, using non-traditional and hard-to-trace methods that might include cyberattacks, the cutting of undersea communications cables, and more. But “gray zone” conflict, as it has come to be known, is profoundly dangerous and to date has confounded policymakers seeking to find a deterrent.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) recently released a report about Russia’s activity in the realm of gray zone warfare – specifically the Kremlin’s increasing use of sabotage to pressure the U.S. and its allies on Ukraine. Cipher Brief experts have written and spoken often about the issue, and the need to confront it more directly. Earlier this year, The Cipher Brief published a three-part series on gray zone warfare – how it works, and what can be done in response. And this year, The Cipher Brief launched a new Gray Zone Group of experts to drive understanding of hybrid warfare.
It’s a rapidly evolving threat, and in a recent conversation with Cipher Brief experts Dave Pitts, a former CIA Senior Executive, and Nick Fishwick, a former Senior Member of the British Foreign Office, Cipher Brief CEO Suzanne Kelly asked about how the Trump administration’s pivot to Russia, and the ongoing discussions about a possible peace deal for the war in Ukraine, are impacting Russia’s gray zone activities.
“Great-power competition is intensifying, but more so than ever, great powers want to avoid a war with another great power,” Pitts said. “That leaves us squarely in the gray zone, where countries try to advance their national interests and achieve the same outcome they could from a conventional war without taking all that risk.”
Pitts and Fishwick spoke with Kelly in an episode of The State Secrets podcast. You can watch the full discussion on The Cipher Brief’s YouTube channel, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Excerpts of their conversation follow.
The Cipher Brief: How would you define gray zone operations versus more generic sabotage or clandestine interference?
Pitts: I would define the gray zone as that geopolitical space between peace and war, where nations work to advance their national interest, but to also undermine the national interests of their adversaries and even set the conditions for future war, all without triggering a military response. Nations can calculate that if they stay under the threshold of triggering a military response, they can do a lot of damage to their adversaries and advance their own national interest.
Fishwick: Gray zone is basically war. War is now happening across the world in different forms from which people of my generation expected. You go back to the days of the Cold War, when we woke up every morning expecting nuclear armageddon could happen – itt was either that or nothing in the 70s and 80s, whereas now it's not that.
I may well regret saying this one day, but I don't think nuclear war is likely. It's less likely than in the Cold War days. But bad-actor states — and the Russians are right up there with the very worst of them — have got a whole range of things that they can use, illegal belligerent activities designed to undermine our security, our ability to stand up for our values.
The secret services in the Soviet Union before 1991, although they definitely did active things like supporting propaganda and trying to influence states, a big part of their core mission was simply espionage. Now, the Russian special services — and we've seen the rise of the GRU in particular over the last 15 to 20 years — are actively embracing active measures: killing people, sabotaging things, interfering with elections, doing things online to influence opinion, and so on.
Examples in my country go back almost 20 years to the murder of [Alexander] Litvinenko. And they carry on from there to 2018, when there was an attempt by the GRU, under the most ridiculous cover possible, with the most pathetic tradecraft imaginable, to murder a former GRU colleague called [Sergei] Skripal, and they inadvertently murdered a completely innocent British woman at the same time. I would say that's basically acting as a country at war with us.
What's happening at the moment is the Russians are thinking, We can persuade this U.S. administration to do a deal with us, and we can get the Americans out of our way in Europe, and we can focus on a form of regional power conflict in Europe that we've not had the luxury of enjoying before. They weren't powerful or Western-leaning enough to do it before the First World War, and after the Second World War they were too held back by the power of the United States as the underpinning force in NATO. If the United States ceases to be the underpinning force in NATO, and Europe is having to protect itself, the Russians think that gives them lots of opportunities.
The Cipher Brief: Dave, what's your perspective on that? How do you see Russia's intentions?
Pitts: Great-power competition is intensifying, but more so than ever, great powers want to avoid a war with another great power. History teaches some brutal lessons. Go back and look at World War II and those countries and the militaries that were defeated. It was brutal for decades. If you look at what's going on with Russia, if we use the numbers provided by Ukraine, Russia has lost the equivalent of what would be one of the world's largest militaries. And it's lost a massive amount of national power. So great-power warfare has significant consequences, and great powers want to avoid that.
That leaves us squarely in the gray zone, where countries try to advance their national interests and achieve the same outcome they could from a conventional war without taking all that risk. That's why I think we're seeing more gray zone activity. We probably are likely to see more as it continues.
What's going on with the [Ukraine] negotiations is great-power competition. This is not a negotiation among several countries that are trying to bring the end to a war. Russia has the same objectives through these negotiations that it had three years ago when it invaded Ukraine: it still wants to control Ukraine, control Ukraine's political future, undermine and weaken NATO and ensure Ukraine never becomes a NATO country, and fracture the relationship between NATO and the United States. It is still working to achieve that.
If the war in Ukraine were simply a border conflict that escalated, then you could more quickly get both sides together to form some common cause to end the war. But when we see Russia refusing to engage in a real ceasefire, and we see it continue to try to shape and influence the negotiations with its red lines and demands for concessions, it's clear what Putin's goals are. We should not expect Russia to change its objectives now just because we're asking them to come to the table.
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The Cipher Brief: Nick, there's a history of bad Russian behavior in the UK. Usually when these things happened in the past, you've had some Russian officials kicked out of the country, labeled persona non grata. Do you think those types of measures are going to work in the future, or do Western countries have to change the way they're thinking about these operations, and change the response?
Fishwick: As far as I can see, they are changing their response. Here in the UK, our own domestic security service MI5 is trying to adjust the way it responds to a changing threat picture. What does that mean? It means that 40 or 50 years ago, MI5 would have had teams of people following every known and suspected intelligence officer around London. And if a KGB officer or any Soviet diplomat wanted to travel more than 25 miles away from the center of London, they would have to get special permission to do it.
I don't know whether they have to get special permission [today]. It doesn't really matter because the Russians are not stupid and they're not thinking, We'll just use the people that are most likely to be identified by MI5; they're thinking, We'll use criminal organizations. We'll use nationalities which aren't Russian, or aren't even British.
They might be Bulgarian. There's been a lot of publicity recently about the Russian use of Bulgarians. It's a classic ploy. Bulgaria, unfortunately, has a relatively close historic relationship with Russia going well back before 1917. So it's probably relatively easy for [Russia] to recruit people [in Bulgaria]. And Bulgaria has had a problem with organized crime, even since it's been in the European Union. So they're going to use people like that, organizations like that, groups like that, people who aren't obvious MI5 targets, who know how to commit sabotage. I do think that MI5 will be aware of this and will be monitoring it, but it makes it much harder to monitor.
The Cipher Brief: Dave, what do you think in terms of the response to this?
Pitts: One part of this narrative that Russia didn't see a year ago, and that it sees today, is that Russia is better as a partner to the United States than an adversary. They want to exploit the [U.S.] desire for an agreement. Russia believes we want this agreement more than they do, so Russia is willing to accelerate attacks – more destruction, more death, to create a sense of urgency for that deal. And Russia thinks that that sense of urgency means outcomes favorable to them.
They will still use coercion, intimidation and fear to achieve their goals. That's everything from sabotage and arson and assassination plots, to attacks on undersea gas pipelines and communications cables. I think there's been sabotage operations by Russia in 15 different countries since the invasion of Ukraine. There are even some claims by Finland that Russia is using forced migration as a weapon. We know they will continue to try to undermine NATO. I think one of their plans is to try to stoke this common distrust that they see in our current administration against NATO and to try to identify that common ground.
The thing about the gray zone is it's hard to respond. Escalation is a ladder. Certainly, if a country has plausible deniability, other countries will hesitate to respond. But in some cases, we're afraid that if we take the next step, we're going to escalate to something bigger that gets out of control. One of the things you do see is cooperation between the United States and in NATO on countering the cutting of undersea cables. It took a while to get to that. There are some modest efforts underway. I certainly think the intelligence sharing that's going on is a big deal. There was a disruption of that assassination plot in Germany, which was based on good intelligence and good intelligence sharing.
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The Cipher Brief: The Trump administration has a very different approach to Russia than that of the Biden administration. Reuters is reporting that the National Security Council under the new Trump administration is no longer holding regular meetings with European officials on Russian sabotage efforts. How much of a chill does this put on intelligence sharing if the rest of the world doesn't share President Trump's views of Putin?
Fishwick: If the actions of the American administration are to pick fights with Canada and Greenland and to start being really friendly with Russia – well, the one thing you want with a senior partner is reliability, and that's now gone. And I don't think America is going to find a new form of reliability in Putin. It's an inherently unstable regime and it's a cynical and murderous regime. And even if you wanted to have a relationship just based on interests and all that, those business interests and geostrategic interests from leaving Europe for Putin, that's not going to work, not least because Europe is, as I've said before, a powerful economic player and it's powerful in terms of American interests. I can't see how that's actually going to be in America's medium-term interests – forget about long-term interests.
The Cipher Brief: Will there be an immediate impact on the willingness of ally partners – let's take the Five Eyes organization as a perfect example – will there be a pulling back of intelligence sharing if all parties aren't equally trusted?
Pitts: This is a challenge. The relationships among the intelligence services, particularly those that work together all the time, are pretty strong. And what you hope is that those relationships stay strong. But what I would say is that those services also work for their governments. And so if the political relationship gets a little frayed, there could be some pressure downward to not share, to slow down things among those intelligence services because they are the service for their country. I think it would be terrible and regrettable if that happens, because one of the things that has been great for U.S. national security and the national security of our allies has been that very strong intelligence sharing, which has really been a strong contributor to the global order that we've enjoyed for 80 years.
So I hope that doesn't happen. I hope that there can be continued close connections among those intelligence services. I think it's vital.
The Cipher Brief: What are you going to be looking for next, as indicators that we might be in more of a dangerous moment?
Pitts: I think Putin sees a path to a win here. But we give Putin too much credit for being smart on some other things. Putin is completely capable of undermining his own plan, because I think he's trying to calculate how far he can push the president, or how long he can not agree with some of the things that the president is trying to get done. So that is the thing I'm watching – are there some gaps and fractures there in that relationship?
The other thing I would say is in one of the Gray Zone articles I wrote [for The Cipher Brief], I said China is waging a great war against the United States and Russia is supporting it. China is holding its cards close to its chest. It's done a lot to enable Russia; minimal investment, minimal risk, but nonetheless it's invested in the outcome of this. A Russia win is a China win, and I think China is watching very closely and is already adapting its strategy on how to engage against the United States and Taiwan and South China Sea and other parts of the world where that competition is playing out. There'll be some long-term consequences as this plays out.
Fishwick: We've got to not panic. We've got to stay firm. I thought what Dave said about the intelligence relationship was 100% spot on. It's worrying, and if it gets bad, then of course, intelligence sharing will be affected. The idea of a Five Eyes country effectively threatening another Five Eyes country, I would not have expected that.
But let's hope it's just a bit of silly rhetoric that's going to pass. I'm hoping that the intelligence relationships will hold up; you'll have to work very hard to undermine those relationships because they are very close. So let's not panic. Let's hope those relationships hold together, whatever the rhetoric at the top. But don't assume that: hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.
I think we sometimes need to remind ourselves what an unsuccessful country Russia is, and how unsuccessful it's been since at least 1917. The Russian Revolution didn't do the Soviet economy any good. And the story of the Russian economy since the fall of the Soviet Union has been very uneven. So at the moment, it's an extremely low-productivity country. It's not great in terms of technological creativity. Its GDP is tiny. Again, we don't need to panic about this, even if the U.S. backs off support for Europe. We can cope, if we're given the time to transition.
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