The west must match Russia and China in the dark arts of the grey zone

Receive free War in Ukraine updates

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest War in Ukraine news every morning.

The writer is a senior fellow at National Defense University and the editor-in-chief of the PRISM journal

Russia’s unprovoked war against Ukraine grinds into its 18th month. It is a war fought with blood and iron. Shorn of the nuance or ambiguity of the so-called grey zone, this is old-fashioned, heavy metal warfare. Desperate to prevail, Russia has dangled the threat of nuclear retaliation against any western-supported escalation. In these circumstances one might ask if the grey zone remains a valid concept? Are cyber attacks, disinformation and influence campaigns still relevant? The answer is a resounding “Yes”.

Ukraine is but a single front in a larger war on a global scale over what is and is not permissible in international relations. While defending Ukraine’s sovereignty is vital, the war over the future global order is also being fought along many other fronts and Russia is not our only adversary.

Ināra Mūrniece, Latvia’s defence minister, warned recently that it is wrong to think Russia has been weakened by this war and is incapable of strategic surprises. On the contrary, though its military has performed dismally in Ukraine, Russia maintains a robust capacity to subvert our interests with a full range of tools below the threshold of military combat. In 2016 Russian trolls interfered with the US presidential election. In 2017 the Kremlin-backed Sandworm hacker group unleashed NotPetya malware on the online world, costing billions of dollars. Russia’s information warfare machine can sow discord in strong and weak countries alike.

China, too, uses a sophisticated grey zone toolbox, including economic and trade coercion, naval power, a huge fleet of “fishing” vessels to bully neighbours in the South China Sea, militarisation of atolls in the South China Sea, Confucius Institutes at western universities and foreign police outposts which monitor expatriate Chinese. In 2021 China imposed a trade embargo and other sanctions on Lithuania in retaliation for the opening of a Taiwan Representative Office in Vilnius.

The non-military means available to advance a country’s strategic interests have expanded in recent years. Our adversaries make effective use of them. Russian and Chinese information campaigns cast blame for the Ukraine war on Nato expansion and the hegemonic “west”. Ukraine’s friends may recognise this as the lie it is, but it resonates in the global south and in enclaves of gullible opinion in Europe and the US.

Weapons, training and intelligence provided to Ukraine are holding off a Russian military victory but, on their own, will lead to a frozen conflict with Russia in indefinite possession of over 15 per cent of Ukrainian territory. That would amount to a victory for Russia. It already occupies 20 per cent of Georgia and 12 per cent of Moldova, and is swallowing Belarus into its “union state”.

Military support alone cannot produce a Ukrainian victory, much less victory in the bigger struggle over the liberal global order. If we wish to preserve this order, we must master the dark arts of the grey zone, using a full arsenal of sub-threshold tools based on the non-military elements of strategic power.

The portrayal of Vladimir Putin as a war criminal, and support for the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant, show how the west can do this. As a result of the ICC warrant, Putin was forced to cancel a trip to South Africa’s meeting of the Brics countries. In July, only 17 African heads of state out of 54 attended Putin’s Russia-Africa summit, as opposed to 43 that attended in 2019, limiting his ability to exert influence. To exploit this success, western countries should continue to ostracise Putin and mobilise their full information firepower to portray Putin as the criminal that he is.

The enduring relevance of the grey zone should not be dismissed. On the contrary, it is there that victory will be won in Ukraine and in the wider conflict over the future global order.