Russia’s shadow war for Eastern Europe

The general’s warning was stark.

‘We are already behind here,’ Brigadier General Matthew Valas, commander of NATO headquarters in Bosnia, told the audience at the Sarajevo Security Conference in September.

Analysts, journalists and military officials had gathered in the Bosnian capital for three days of discussions about the biggest security threats facing Europe. Inevitably, the focus was on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and how that conflict might ripple out tFrough the rest of the continent.

The latest military escalation in that war has rekindled a popular fear last felt in the 1980s: that nuclear war could erupt between Russia and the West, or that the conventional conflict in Ukraine could leak out to other countries and trigger NATO’s Article Five, which pledges mutual defence. The Nordic countries and Germany are upping their military preparedness and furnishing their civilian populations with booklets detailing what to do should an attack come.

Yet, almost uniformly, the intelligence analysts and military officials gathered in Sarajevo agreed that Putin’s threats of nuclear assault are a red herring. In fact, they said, his most dangerous weapons are sabotage, misinformation and political meddling, mainstays of Soviet-era spy games that Putin has revived and honed for the modern era. Furthermore, the war has already begun and is well underway around Europe’s fringe – the places that were once part of Moscow’s sphere but have looked westwards since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

For Putin, that shift in loyalty and NATO’s eastern expansion was a causus belli – and one of the hottest frontlines is this new hybrid war in Bosnia, an early testing ground for his hybrid weapons. It is exactly the kind of fractured society that Putin likes to play on: a multiethnic and religious country where the wounds of the 1990s have not yet been healed, and communities live side by side without coexisting. Although on paper it is on the path towards EU and NATO membership, Moscow has in recent years made overtures to its Serb Orthodox minority and their leader, Milorad Dodik, helping to stoke threats of separatism that could, in the worst case, reignite the country’s conflict.

‘It took very little effort for Russia to slow the progress in Bosnia. And it wouldn’t take much more to do the same in any country looking towards the West,’ General Valas added.

Over the past few weeks, events in other countries around the fringe and beyond have added weight to the general’s words. In Georgia, where European and NATO integration is enshrined in the constitution, the increasingly pro-Russian incumbent party, Georgian Dream, won a new parliamentary term in October in an election that the opposition and the EU claim was marred by voter fraud. Georgia’s population is overwhelmingly pro-European, but Georgian Dream, which first came to power in 2012, has won support by playing on voters’ fears that a pro-EU government would drag the country into a Ukraine-style war with Putin. (That is no idle fear; a fifth of Georgia’s territory has been occupied by Russia since 2008, and Russian tanks are close enough to Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, that they could be on the streets there within hours). Since its re-election, it has suspended Georgia’s bid for EU membership, prompting thousands of people to flood the streets in protest, and looks set to nominate Mikheil Kavelashvili, a pro-Russian politician who once played football for Manchester City, for the presidential elections in December.

In Romania, a former Soviet satellite that joined NATO in 2004 and the EU in 2007, Calin Georgescu, an unknown and pro-Russian independent candidate, took the most votes in the first round of presidential elections in this month. The country’s supreme defence council alleged that there was outside interference, including through the social media site TikTok, which is accused of giving Georgescu preferential exposure. On 6 December Romania’s the constitutional court annulled the result and ordered a rerun; Georgescu claims that democracy has been ‘cancelled’

Romania’s position on the Black Sea has escalated its importance within NATO since Russia first began annexing Ukrainian territory in 2014. The Deveslu military base houses US troops and a NATO missile defence system – technology that Putin described as a threat to Russia when it was activated in 2016. (The system was initially installed in order to deter threats emanating from the Middle East.) In March 2024 work began on expanding the Mihail Kogalniceanu base on the Black Sea close to Constanta; once completed, it will become NATO’s largest military base in Europe.

In Moldova, a referendum to change the constitution in order to progress towards EU membership was passed narrowly after what Maia Sandu, the country’s pro-western president, described as an ‘unprecedented assault’ on its democracy. In the weeks before the vote Moldova’s authorities uncovered huge payments by Ilan Shor, a pro-Russian businessman who resides in Moscow, to persuade Moldovans to vote no or abstain from the referendum. Sandu said that at least 300,000 votes had been ‘bought’ by Shor; Russia denied involvement in the scheme.

In September, officials in Armenia said they had disrupted a Russian-backed attempt to unseat the government of prime minister Nikol Pashinyan. The country, once Putin’s closest ally in the southern Caucasus, turned away from Moscow after neighbouring Azerbaijan seized back the disputed region of Nagorno Karabakh in September 2023 – under the noses of Russian peacekeepers, who were supposed to be securing a ceasefire line. Armenia signed the Rome Statute to recognise the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and withdrew from the Russia-centred Collective Security Treaty Organisation in response.

European countries are currently experiencing a barrage of cyber-attacks and sabotage, which the Kremlin denies any hand in, but diplomats say are almost certainly Russian-backed. This month Jan Lipavsky, the Czech foreign minister, said that up to a hundred suspicious incidents this year can be traced back to the Kremlin. They include the destruction of undersea cables in the Baltic Sea, and fires at DHL depots in the UK caused by incendiary devices. Those who fear a wider war with Russia should know that the war has already begun.

Back in the Balkans, officials recognise the game plan. The region lies far from Russia’s borders, and although it is part of the Slavic sphere, it never made an easy ally for Moscow. During the Cold War era Yugoslavia was a non-aligned state whose leader, Josep Broz Tito, cut ties with Stalin in order to pursue an independent foreign policy. Moscow supported Serbia and its outpost minorities in Bosnia and Kosovo during the wars of the 1990s, but, amid the chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, was too weak itself to offer any tangible military backing.

Today, Russia has ascended as a major power with expansionist ambitions and the Balkans are, once again, a battleground for influence in Europe’s new Cold War. Turkey and Russia, both historic players in the western Balkans, are projecting influence using religious and cultural links, while China is leveraging debt diplomacy through infrastructure deals. Putin has galvanised Russia’s ties with Serbia through their shared Orthodox Christian faith, embellished narratives about Moscow’s support for Slobodan Milosevic during the wars of the 1990s, and the personal friendship between President Putin and Serbia’s President Vucic. Increasingly, the Kremlin is using Belgrade as a backdoor to stir ethnic tensions in Bosnia and Kosovo, both western-aligned countries with significant Serb minorities.

The games are also playing out in one of NATO’s newest member states. North Macedonia is a country of just under two million people, which gained independence from Yugoslavia in 1991. Its biggest religious group (although not a majority) is Orthodox Christians, but Moscow had little interest in the country until around a decade ago, when it began working in earnest to join NATO. Although it had begun the process in 1999 (and became an EU candidate in 2005), its path to both was blocked by Greece, its southern neighbour, which also lays claim to the name ‘Macedonia’ and to the country’s national hero, Alexander the Great.

In 2018 both countries’ parliaments voted on a proposal to change the name by adding ‘North’, and the Prespa Agreement was signed. Russia attempted to disrupt that process; Athens expelled two Russian diplomats and accused the Kremlin of working to ferment grassroots opposition to the deal in Greece. Nonetheless, the name change was passed in both parliaments, and in March 2020 North Macedonia became a NATO member.

Radmila Sekerinska, who was North Macedonia’s defence minister from 2017 to 2022, says that it was ‘a big blow to Russian attempts to keep the Balkans not aligned, and full of open disputes’.

The Kremlin’s focus has now shifted to sabotaging North Macedonia’s efforts to join the EU, she added. ‘Do you think they just give up after losing one battle? No. They focus on winning the war: the war of the narratives.’

After NATO, it appeared certain that the EU would open membership negotiations with North Macedonia.  This time, however, it was blocked by Bulgaria, an EU member state with a veto vote. Bulgaria complains about North Macedonia’s historic mistreatment of the Bulgarian minority, which makes up around 10 per cent of the population. Sofia demanded that Skopje change its constitution to recognise that issue officially before talks could begin, even though Sofia and Skopje had already signed a friendship pact in 2017, which included provisions on minority rights. Bulgaria eventually lifted its opposition after pressure from the EU – but Sekerinska said that the delay had an impact on public attitudes in North Macedonia, and that there were signs of Moscow’s hand. Russia has maintained deep influence in Bulgaria due to its Orthodox and Soviet links, and Bulgaria’s President Radev has delivered openly pro-Russian statements since 2022. In recent years, fringe parts of the Bulgarian media have stoked the ethnic dispute with North Macedonia, chipping away at its neighbour’s enthusiasm for aligning with the West.

‘People (in North Macedonia) feel that the EU did not deliver on its promises, and that has undermined its leverage. This has turned a huge opportunity for us, the region, and the EU into a negative narrative,’ Sekerinska says.

The Kremlin’s hybrid warfare tactics in the Balkans have been exposed several times in recent years. In 2016, the Montenegrin government foiled a coup plot, which included a plan to assassinate the then-prime minister, Milo Dukanovic; Podgorica accused ‘Russian state structures’ of being behind the plot, and indicted two Russian GRU agents, as well as several Serbian citizens. Russia has also been accused of organising coup attempts in Bulgaria in 2016.

In North Macedonia, it was discovered that much of the fake news produced in the lead up to the 2016 US election was being produced by local teenagers, who were paid large sums of money by recruiters to write anti-immigration content for American audiences. Today, there are dozens of local-language news sites across the region which regurgitate content from RT and Sputnik, the Kremlin’s main propaganda channels, and promote pro-Russian views on the war in Ukraine in particular.

‘The western Balkans is not the primary battlefield between the West and Russia, but it is one of the cheapest, and most convenient,’ Sekerinska says. ‘It’s an area where Russia does have experience, especially in certain countries. But when we give them an operational space, either by inaction or by mistakes, this is where their malign influence becomes really dangerous. They have not managed to create a pro-Russian narrative, but they have managed to undermine the pro-EU and pro-western ones.’

The generals say it is no longer enough to merely expose Putin’s influence games: the time has come to fight back. NATO set up its first hybrid warfare centre in Montenegro in 2019, in a bid to prevent organised misinformation disrupting the 2020 US elections. In 2023 the EU opened its European Cybersecurity Competence Centre in the Romanian capital Bucharest to coordinate the bloc’s fight against cyber-attacks. And while Russia may have found effective ways of undermining emerging democracies, it is also vulnerable itself, JD Maddox, a former CIA officer turned security adviser, told the audience in Sarajevo.

‘Moscow is also worried about the West’s ability to influence. It is setting up its defences,’ Maddox said. ‘Its economy is about to fall apart, its interest rates have spiked. Its sovereign wealth fund is dwindling and 40 per cent of its budget is going to the military. It has a new dependency on China. All these things can be used.’

Since then, the Russian rouble has crashed, adding further to the country’s internal instability. Putin may be threatening nuclear attack, but these troubles will not go away should he push the button. Neither is there any sign that he will be pushed from power, however. Western countries must learn how to confront him on the battlefield he is already playing. Not many people have insights into Putin’s character, but Kenneth Dekleva, a professor of psychiatry who has worked with the US state department to profile leaders, understands him better than most.

‘Putin operates from maximalist negotiating positions and the position of his own strength,’ Dekleva said. ‘He is a difficult negotiating partner because he hates weakness.’

Showing fear of a nuclear attack gives Putin exactly what he wants. Understanding and using his own weapons against him is the only way to fight back.