Tarik Solmaz
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has undermined the prevailing premises in the West about the character of contemporary warfare. Over the past decade, the Western world, generally speaking, had seemed to be convinced that actions that fall below the threshold of the outright act of war will be the most dominant form of conflict in the 21st century. As such, Western states and institutions had primarily focused on countering measures short of conventional war. The focus on ‘sub-threshold threats’ emerged primarily in reaction to Russia’s ‘unconventional’ operation against Ukraine in 2014.
Briefly speaking, in 2014, Russia achieved its strategic objectives in Ukraine by combining covert and indirect military actions such as employing masked soldiers called ‘little green men’, deploying private military contractors, and empowering local paramilitary forces, with a diverse range of non-military instruments, including coercive diplomacy, cyber-attacks, propaganda, disinformation, and economic pressure, without actually engaging in an overt war with Ukraine's armed forces.
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