Russian uses of aysmmetric tools – from information warfare to counterspace – have been tested by the war in Ukraine, demonstrating innovation but also vulnerabilities. In ongoing competition with Russia, the West must work to further degrade Russian technological and informational capabilities.
Russian military strategy involves significant use of asymmetric tactics and capabilities. Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale war with Ukraine in early 2022, the utility of these asymmetric approaches in above-threshold conflict has been tested – revealing areas of ongoing strength, but also of weakness, degradation and future uncertainty. In its prolonged competition with Russia, the West must pursue policies and strategy to further weaken the Kremlin’s asymmetric capabilities, raise the costs associated with their maintenance and use, and undermine Moscow’s ability to regenerate and adapt these capabilities for future conflict and competition.
State of play of Russian asymmetric enablers
Asymmetric approaches have long been a core element of Russian military strategy, utilized both in full-scale warfare and in ambiguous or sub-threshold forms of ‘hybrid’ or ‘grey zone’ conflict and competition. Moscow seeks to exploit under-recognized vulnerabilities of stronger adversaries, including through leveraging novel techniques or weapons, and employing surprise, deception, covert action and innovation to disrupt adversaries’ decision-making and resolve, and to achieve desired strategic outcomes while minimizing the costs to Russian forces.
Moscow’s asymmetric techniques and enablers – often thought of in relation to confrontation with the US and NATO – seek to offset conventional superiority or areas of greater technical sophistication on the part of an adversary by exploiting vulnerabilities in its society, government, military strategy and capabilities. The Kremlin’s broad array of asymmetric tools includes, for example, its information and influence, cyberwarfare, electronic warfare (EW), and unmanned and autonomous and counterspace capabilities, as well as advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to support these.
For years, the Russian armed forces have pursued research and development, prototyping and testing in these areas critical to their vision for modern asymmetric and information-centric warfare. These programmes have been applied, tested and adapted during the full-scale war in Ukraine since February 2022. Moscow has leveraged asymmetric enablers to facilitate its military effort, though these uses and their effects have not always been as visible or dramatic as some observers expected. As in the conventional domains, observations of Russian uses of asymmetric capabilities in Ukraine suggest that Moscow began its invasion prepared for and expecting a short, intense war and rapid victory, but that the Russian military adapted as the war continued. Two recurrent themes across multiple areas have been the failure of Russia’s early attempts to use surprise and domain dominance to shatter Ukraine’s defences, and the ongoing cycles of reciprocal Russian and Ukrainian innovation and adaptation that have characterized later attritional stages of the conflict.
Russia’s use of its cyber and information warfare capabilities in the context of the war offers an illustrative example. The first wave of cyberattacks – which occurred shortly prior to and alongside the opening barrage of precision-strike firepower – involved sophisticated operations. These attacks targeted critical capabilities and supported an early-war effort to overwhelm and paralyse Ukraine’s defences. Despite this, some analysts in the early stage of the war pointed to the lack of obvious ‘cyber shock and awe’ and scrutinized the supposed absence of Russia’s formidable cyber and information warfare capabilities.
As the war has progressed and observations based on richer data have come to the fore, it has become clear that Russian cyber-aggression has been significant, but that Ukraine has also been well defended. The years of prior cyber and information attacks had given Ukraine significant lead time in which to improve its cyber defences. Western partners also heightened their efforts to provide Ukraine with assistance in the forms of intelligence sharing, ‘pre-bunking’ of false Russian narratives, ‘hunt forward’ efforts to assist in identification of threats, and private sector support for protection of critical data, online services and communications.
But Russia has continued to innovate and adapt. As the conflict has continued, Russia’s ongoing cyber offensives have often been characterized as operating at a high tempo and continuing to evolve. Moscow has also continued to mount large-scale information and influence campaigns aiming to undermine support for Ukraine and exacerbate potential tensions within Ukrainian society. While early analyses of the information contest suggested that Ukraine was largely prevailing with Western audiences, the picture may be changing: two years into the war, Russia’s successes in leveraging war fatigue, anti-immigrant sentiment, and domestic and transatlantic tensions among Kyiv’s key supporters warrant critical attention.
Russia’s ongoing cyber offensives have often been characterized as operating at a high tempo and continuing to evolve. Moscow has also continued to mount large-scale information and influence campaigns aiming to undermine support for Ukraine and exacerbate potential tensions within Ukrainian society.
Russia’s use of EW and unmanned system capabilities during the war has shown a similar dynamic of surprising early lack of relative advantage followed by rapid and ongoing adaptation. In the first months of the war, commentary in the West often focused on Ukraine’s remarkable relative success – compared to Russia – in the use of drones. Ukraine’s surprising degree of EW success in jamming Russian drone systems was also noted. These were unexpected outcomes given Russia’s reputation for strong EW capabilities, its recent focus on both EW and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technologies, and the broader expectation of Russian air power dominance.
As in other areas, some Western analysts have suggested that these early weak showings might have been a result of expectations of rapid success – that Moscow might have initially viewed full EW deployment as unnecessary. But initial setbacks also pointed to gaps in Russian capabilities and the evolving nature of modern drone and EW warfare. The vehicle-mounted EW systems that Russia did deploy were relatively large and slow, and unable to keep up with more mobile units. Russia also appeared to lack several key categories of drones, and suffered from long lag times when using drones for artillery firing, making UAVs less useful in targeting mobile Ukrainian units. To fill some gaps, Russian volunteers bought cheap Chinese-made commercial drones and the Russian government purchased Iranian drones and loitering munitions.
By 2023, the battlefield dynamics had changed considerably. Russia was using hundreds of smaller and more mobile EW units at its front line to interfere with Ukrainian radar, GPS and other satellite connections, and to support target identification during Ukraine’s counteroffensive. Similarly, while at first making less effective use of drones, Russia has used UAVs extensively as the war has continued, including for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), targeting and direct attacks. Russia has targeted both Ukrainian military units and critical infrastructure with attack drones, apparently seeking to create dilemmas for and deplete Ukrainian air defences. The relative advantage in both EW and unmanned systems has shifted repeatedly between Ukraine and Russia during the conflict, as each side goes through cycles of innovation and adaptation. These developments have contributed to intense dynamics of both aerial and maritime contestation, have increased the challenge of massing forces, and have ratcheted up attention to the potential role of greater automation.
Russian counterspace capabilities have also been demonstrated to an extent in Ukraine, though it is not clear if these have been as effective as desired by Moscow in all areas of battlefield significance. Starting well before the war, Russian ‘inspector satellites’ have made repeated close approach manoeuvres and have loitered in proximity of other geostationary satellites. This suggests they have been used for signals intelligence collection. Russia has also used jamming and cyberattacks to interfere with satellite-enabled systems used by Ukraine, including GPS, command and control, and communications systems. While Russian officials have threatened that foreign commercial satellites involved in armed conflicts will be treated as legitimate military targets, repeated Russian attempts to jam SpaceX’s Starlink terminals have met with limited success.
But Russia continues to develop and to wield the threat of new systems. Before the war, Moscow successfully tested a direct-ascent anti-satellite (ASAT) weapon against one of its own low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites. Russia has also touted its development of laser weapons that can dazzle, blind or destroy satellites, though it is less clear to what effect these capabilities have been used in the conflict. In February 2024, reports suggested Russia was developing a space-based nuclear capability – a nuclear weapon rather than a nuclear propulsion system. Such a weapon could aim to scale up ASAT capabilities to attack (or hold at risk) more resilient large constellation systems of hundreds or thousands of satellites (such as those of Starlink).
Prospects for asymmetric enabler adaptation and evolution
The Kremlin’s future ability to effectively leverage asymmetric enablers faces several important challenges. Not least among these will be the country’s diminished technological capacity. While Russia’s high-technology sector once showed promise as a source of ‘economic modernization’ benefiting from Russia’s notable technical talent, growing international collaboration and homegrown entrepreneurship, the state’s policies have repeatedly undercut this potential. Steadily increasing political repression throughout the 2010s, and the effects of economic sanctions imposed as a consequence of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, have led to losses in investment and human capital.
Since 2022, the already high emigration rate among Russia’s tech workers has turned into a mass exodus, driven by surging repression, military mobilization and economic precarity. Multinational IT companies have also left Russia, while US and EU export restrictions have limited Russia’s access to critical technologies. Despite government attempts to address these challenges through initiatives that include import substitution, compulsory licensing and IT workforce retention incentives, Russia’s tech sector is unlikely to develop indigenous capacities overnight in areas where it has long depended on Western imports. This lack of self-sufficiency might prompt Russia to rely on China for microchips, machine tools and other critical components – but this supply is itself potentially vulnerable to international pressure and secondary sanctions.
All that said, imminent degradation in Russia’s capacity to leverage asymmetric enablers to significant effect is by no means a foregone conclusion. So far, Russia has been able to circumvent the worst effects of Western economic measures, relying on illicit imports, domestic war production, and closer trade ties with China, Iran and North Korea.
What is more, Russia’s asymmetric techniques are not all dependent on cutting-edge technologies. Extensive information and influence operations conducted by Russia against Ukraine’s Western partners may already be contributing to heightened perceptions of escalation risk and flagging support for the war effort in these countries. Russian sub-threshold activities outside Ukraine may become more brazen as the war continues or after. These methods may serve as an offset during a period of reduced conventional capability in which Russia focuses on force regeneration, or they might be leveraged more aggressively by a Kremlin emboldened by battlefield success.
Russia also has its own vulnerabilities on the information front, however. Despite its increasingly tight control over the domestic information environment, and despite new extremes of repression since the start of the war, the Kremlin is performing a careful balancing act between mobilization and demobilization to maintain both domestic regime stability and adequate public support for the war effort. The 2023 Wagner Group mutiny (and subsequent apparent assassination of Yevgeny Prigozhin) and the imprisonment of (but relatively short sentence received by) ultranationalist Igor Girkin (aka Strelkov) are symptomatic of the balancing act and attendant risks. So, too, are the groundswells of citizens who participated in the funeral of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and in the ‘Noon Against Putin’ voting action on the last day of the March 2024 presidential election.
Despite its increasingly tight control over the domestic information environment, and despite new extremes of repression since the start of the war, the Kremlin is performing a careful balancing act between mobilization and demobilization to maintain both domestic regime stability and adequate public support for the war effort.
While opinion polling shows mass public support for the war as ‘relatively weak and unenthusiastic’, the regime relies heavily on Russia’s heterogeneous nationalist community as a base of support. Thus, even while clamping down ferociously on other forms of independent or oppositional discourse, the Kremlin has taken a more tepid approach to critical pro-war commentary, allowing the flourishing of the ‘Z-universe’ of extreme military bloggers and nationalist Telegram channels. The Kremlin’s lack of hermetic control over the information environment means it must constantly manage the tension ‘between framing and reality’. The regime faces challenges when this dissonance grows suddenly, such as through embarrassing battlefield setbacks or intelligence failures.
While the war’s consequences have exacerbated Moscow’s existing challenges and created new ones, the course of the conflict has also raised important strategic considerations regarding the role of asymmetry in the changing environment of modern warfare. It raises doubts, for example, about the viability of strategies focused on achieving rapid ‘fait accompli’ victories through sudden and overwhelming first waves of attack. It also challenges some prior understandings of domain offence–defence balances, indicating areas in which strategies of denial and persistence might be viable against or even favourable over those of superiority. The war likewise raises questions about strategies designed primarily around reliance on exquisite high-end weaponry, often appearing to favour rapid iterations of innovation and adaptation involving the fielding of larger quantities of cheap but expendable ‘mass’.
The high-tempo cycles of innovation and adaptation and the critical support provided by private companies during the conflict further underscore the importance of rapid acquisition cycles and of public–private partnerships. Russia, while proving itself to be adaptable, has not always shown the same degree of flexibility and innovation as Ukraine has. Russia appears to face more challenges around bureaucratic rigidity, organization and speed of response. Likewise, the country’s top-down defence innovation ecosystem and its undernourished private sector pose challenges for future adaptation.
Lessons and policy implications for Western planners
However the war in Ukraine progresses, Russia is likely to continue to leverage its asymmetric capabilities – both below and above threshold – in what it regards as an ongoing and protracted competition with the West. This poses significant risks. But its capacity to do so effectively is also not guaranteed. Western policymakers must take steps to limit this viability. These measures should include the following:
Take steps to intensify the degradation of Russian technological capacity, without becoming narrowly fixated on technological advantage as a solution to every problem. The US and its allies and partners must work together to tighten enforcement of sanctions and export controls, denying Russia access to critical components, supply chains and revenue. These efforts should address sanctions evasion, money laundering, and Russia’s still lucrative exports of natural resources and weapons. The US and allies should also further encourage brain drain from Russia’s technology sector, using ‘loosen[ed] visa regimes’ and messaging campaigns to ‘welcome and incentivize’ the long-term movement of tech talent out of Russia and the resettlement of such talent in Western countries. Given understandable concerns and animosities in a time of war, these efforts to enable some forms of emigration from Russia have not been universal or well synchronized, but they are nonetheless crucial and should be accompanied by efforts to provide critical support to Russian oppositional civil society, including actors working within Russia and from exile.
Take steps to mitigate known and likely vectors of Russian cyber and informational aggression, while working to exacerbate Russia’s own informational vulnerabilities. Western countries must prioritize the detection and mitigation of Russian efforts to use sub-threshold means to undermine alliance cohesion and stymie effective Western collaboration and coordination on matters of strategic importance – such as on aid and continuing support to Ukraine. As part of this effort, Western countries should increase relevant intelligence sharing and cyber cooperation. They should leverage these capacities to degrade Russian cyber options, ‘pre-bunk’ disinformation narratives, and diminish Russian effectiveness in sub-threshold power projection. Efforts should also be taken to magnify the challenges the Kremlin faces in managing Russia’s own domestic information space, where possible using intelligence revelations to force the Russian leadership to account for errors and failures. While the regime’s current brutal authoritarianism leaves little room for overt domestic dissent, the war is far from universally popular in Russia. Major setbacks for Russia in the conflict will create dilemmas for a regime that is likely uncomfortably aware that with growing repression comes risk of greater authoritarian regime brittleness.
Most critically, continue support for Ukraine. The single most significant factor in contributing to Russia’s inability to reconstitute and leverage its asymmetric capabilities effectively in coming years will be ongoing Western support for Ukraine. Western countries must continue to collaborate to provide arms, ammunition, financial support, assistance to refugees and moral solidarity for the Ukrainian war effort. Denying Russia an easy, cheap victory and forcing it to continue in a long attritional struggle will further degrade all elements of its war-making capacity, including its ability to invest in and produce cutting-edge technological enablers. Critically, these efforts will also further undermine the viability of the Kremlin’s informational strategy both at home and abroad. They will diminish its ability to effectively introduce turbulence within Western democratic systems. Ultimately, they may also weaken the Putin regime’s long-term hold on power.
Note: The views expressed in this chapter are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the National Defense University, the U.S. Department of Defense or the US government.
