In order to analyse Russia's actions and to anticipate their next moves, it is necessary to study how they understand the current situation and what kind of strategy they are planning next.
The first part of this analysis set out the Russian worldview in Andrei Bezrukov’s essay “The New War and What We Must Do”. The Russian hardliners consider the war in Ukraine as an existential contest with a declining West, and they rule out any settlement resembling a Russian defeat or a draw.
This second part considers the strategy suggested by Bezrukov and his analysis regarding modern conflict. He presents his blueprint for how Russia intends to endure a prolonged strategic confrontation with the West, which he suggests might last for decades.
His ideas proceed from a premise that earlier wars were fought to seize and hold territory with mass armies, but in the current conditions offensive wars will not provide a clear victory for any state. No country has the resources to build the required forces equipped with modern armaments to defeat its primary adversaries decisively. Russia cannot defeat the West in direct war. But the West is not capable of defeating Russia in an open war either.
The contest is therefore not about achieving victory on the battlefield. It is about who can endure and outlast their opponent. Bezrukov’s vision of warfare is a permanent, multi-domain, low-intensity confrontation, in which the pressure is directed against the economies, infrastructure and populations supporting the war effort.
Bezrukov’s suggested strategy for Russia is two-fold. First, strengthen Russia’s deterrence to dissuade the Western countries from attempting a decisive strike and to ease the campaign of pressure against Russia. Second, increase the endurance of Russia’s society, economy and infrastructure. Russia needs to be able to absorb large-scale damage without being defeated. According to Bezrukov the combination of these factors would allow Russia to outlast the West, which he believes is in a permanent decline.
The most important insight from the essay is that Bezrukov does not suggest a direct escalation or an offensive against the West. He does not believe that Russia could win an open confrontation or a direct war. Instead, he recommends an increasingly threatening deterrence posture against the West to prevent escalation. This is achieved through strengthening Russia’s conventional long-range strike capabilities to hold Western economies and infrastructure at risk.
The New War and the Pressure on Russia
Bezrukov provides his analysis of modern conflict. In current conditions no state can field the mass armies that a decisive victory would require. Therefore, the realistic aim of war has become the destabilisation of the adversary: the erosion of its resource base until it can no longer resist. War of this kind is permanent rather than decisive, lower in intensity but continuous, and waged across every domain, from cyber and information to trade, finance and diplomacy. It is fought not to conquer and hold territory but to collapse the opposing side’s capacity to sustain a long confrontation, exhausting both its resources and its will to resist. This warfare is directed at the foundations of national power: the economy, the technological and industrial base and, above all, human capital.
War of this kind is permanent rather than decisive, lower in intensity but continuous, and waged across every domain, from cyber and information to trade, finance and diplomacy.
With the declining demography of developed nations, Bezrukov argues that people have become the decisive and finite resource, and that scientists, engineers, commanders and decision-makers cannot easily be replaced. This is why he expects the deliberate targeting of a state’s most valuable individuals, a pattern Bezrukov argues is visible already in the Israeli and American campaigns against Iran.
In Bezrukov’s worldview, the threat directed against Russia amounts to a strategy of slow strangulation. He expects the campaign to be kept below the threshold of open war while Russian fatigue accumulates and resources are drained. Bezrukov characterises the Western approach as a combination of the “wolf pack” (волчья стая) and “a thousand cuts” (тысяча порезов): pressure on Russia’s borders through proxies, drone attacks, blockaded trade routes, the sabotage of tankers and high-profile killings. In his interpretation, this is a method of small, sub-threshold steps he calls the slow boiling of the frog (медленное варение лягушки). This is a sequence of gradual actions, each one individually too minor to warrant a hard response, which together gradually wash away Russia’s red lines (размывание красных линий).
From a Weakening Nuclear Deterrent to Conventional Deterrence
Bezrukov considers the Russian deterrence as having been significantly weakened. In his reading, only those who can impose serious costs are treated with caution, and a credible capacity to inflict damage, especially by conventional means, would change how the Western countries approach Russia.
Bezrukov believes Russia’s existing deterrent is losing its force, because nuclear weapons are not a credible deterrent against the campaign of pressure, which never escalates to an open war. He argues that nuclear weapons are still deterring the West from open war, and Western leaders are working to keep the conflict from escalating to the point where Russia would consider it necessary to use nuclear weapons.
He identifies two ways in which the Russian deterrent is being hollowed out. The first is a direct effort to neutralise it. He expects the United States to pursue a space-based ballistic missile defence system capable of tracking and destroying Russian missiles in flight, a concept he judges to be approaching feasibility. The second is a claimed disarming strike on command centres and nuclear delivery systems using drones and sabotage groups pre-positioned inside Russia. He names the operation “Spiderweb” (Паутина) as the prototype. In Bezrukov’s argumentation, either of these could have the capability to neutralise the Russian nuclear deterrent, although he admits their difficulty and complexity, and expose Russia as vulnerable to a strategic first strike.
He believes the second way of eroding the Russian deterrence is based on the nature of the pressure applied against Russia. Because each step in the campaign is individually too minor to justify a nuclear response, the nuclear capability does not do enough to deter it. Therefore, the Western countries are able to act against Russia below the threshold of open war, through supporting Ukraine and in some cases directly, since he is in his essay accusing the Western countries of sabotaging the Nord Stream in the Baltic Sea. He says this is possible, because the Western countries are confident Russia cannot escalate.
The conclusion he draws is that nuclear deterrence, while still necessary, is no longer sufficient. His line of argumentation implies that the nuclear arsenal has become effectively unusable at the level where the strategic confrontation is being conducted, because using it would carry too significant risks in relation to the individual steps taken against Russia.
His suggestion is to add a second tier of deterrence below the nuclear threshold. He suggests that Russia should adopt, alongside mutual assured destruction at the nuclear level, a concept of “inflicting unacceptable damage” (нанесение неприемлемого ущерба) by conventional means. The phrase is not incidental, because “unacceptable damage” is common terminology in Russian nuclear-deterrence doctrine. In his view, extending the concept to conventional long-range strike gives Russia a threat it could more realistically use against the Western countries.
Bezrukov highlights gas carriers, gas-receiving terminals, private satellite constellations and the data centres of Western financial companies as high-priority targets.
Notably, Bezrukov names the specific Western assets that need to be held at risk. Bezrukov names gas carriers, gas-receiving terminals, private satellite constellations and the data centres of Western financial companies as high-priority targets. This is a posture designed to inflict as much economic damage as possible in a potential conflict, which Bezrukov considers necessary to enhance Russia’s deterrence posture. This is also connected to his vision of modern conflict, which is directed at eroding the economic and industrial capacity of the adversary.
Hardening Infrastructure and Command
In addition to an extended conventional deterrence posture, Bezrukov considers necessary the hardening of Russian society, economy and infrastructure against long-range high-precision strikes. The precondition, he argues, is mental. Russia must accept war as its normal condition and become, in his phrase, a “warring society” (воюющее общество) for a decade or two, organising its economy, institutions and people around endurance rather than expecting a return to peacetime conditions.
Since modern infrastructure cannot survive a war in which drones strike with precision at long range, he argues that power generation, fuel storage and data centres should be moved underground or hardened, that transport and energy should be built as distributed networks rather than being concentrated in large nodes, and that critical industrial production should be duplicated in remote regions. Foreign communications equipment and software should be replaced with domestic systems built on a principle he glosses as secure-by-design, and the country ringed with a layered, multi-technology air defence. The logic throughout is consistent: a system whose assets are buried, dispersed and duplicated can absorb damage without collapsing.
The same principle governs his approach to command, and here the design contains an internal tension. Bezrukov expects the adversary to try to overload Russia’s centralised “vertical” of decision-making in a conflict situation, aiming to generate simultaneous crises across many domains and paralyse Russia’s decision-making. This would prevent Russia from being able to mount a coordinated response. This is expected to be conducted as a campaign of cyber strikes on communications and critical infrastructure, launched together with an information campaign and sabotage activities.
His answer is a combination of two impulses: a strong supreme coordinating body, a Stavka (Ставка), paired with the decentralisation of execution and the delegation of initiative downward. Coordination would be concentrated at the top, while execution and initiative are dispersed. A system of that kind, he concedes, works only where there is mutual trust, and where officials place service to the state above personal and departmental interest. The criterion of success in a long war of attrition is the capacity to withstand repeated strikes without losing control.
The Central Role of Intelligence Work
Bezrukov places intelligence at the centre of the new war. Information and agent work, he argues, have moved to the forefront in the strategic competition, and the quality of their organisation is now the single most important factor in success. At the military front, effectiveness depends entirely on situational awareness (владение обстановкой) and target designation (целеуказание); and on the strategic level, he believes that without a correct assessment of the adversary’s situation and intentions as well as a seamless decision-making process, Russia can neither hold the initiative nor dictate the course of the conflict. He suggests that the coming years will demand serious attention from the country’s leadership to the special services, and serious investment in them.
He sets out ambitious goals for Russia, which would require significant command-and-control reforms. He suggests that the available reconnaissance and intelligence data streams should be fused together to create a common operating picture, to enable proactive decisions. This should include the internet, space-based assets and even agent networks. This is practically the Russian version of the AI-enabled all-source fusion, which he describes the United States as developing. This vision for Russia seems aspirational and is not likely to be realised in the near future.
Another track of reforms is connected to the human factor, which he argues is and always will be primary in intelligence work, and without rigorous selection, uncompromising standards and a distinct professional culture, the special services degenerate into just another bureaucracy using power for its own ends. To draw talented young people into the work, he adds, Russia should abandon the reflex of “tightening the screws” (закручивание гаек), the instinct to crack down and maintain excessive control, in favour of raising the quality of personnel and agent work.
The sharpest of these measures points inward. Because he expects the West to try to subvert Russia from within, he calls for rebuilding the domestic agent apparatus: reviving a dense network of local district officers (участковые), raising their pay, cutting paper reporting, and concentrating on the cultivation of voluntary informants and agents inside the population groups he judges susceptible to enemy influence, migrant diasporas among them.
He is treating significant portions of the population as potential subversive agents, who should be monitored and controlled. This is a reflex which is likely to lead to paranoia, distrust and mutual suspicion.
Here the design turns against itself. A standing network of informants spread through the population is an instrument of suspicion, premised on the assumption that significant parts of Russian society are unreliable and open to adversarial penetration. Yet trust is the central element of the command system he proposes, with its decentralisation of decision-making and emphasis on initiative. This only works if there is mutual trust and officials who place the state above their own interests. At the same time, while he emphasises cohesion and trust, he is treating significant portions of the population as potential subversive agents, who should be monitored and controlled. This is a reflex which is likely to lead to paranoia, distrust and mutual suspicion.
Concluding Thoughts
Andrei Bezrukov is one man, but an influential one: a member of the presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defence Policy (SVOP), and an active participant in Russia’s foreign and security policy establishment. The strategy he outlines is best read as representative of a strong current in Russian strategic thinking, one that expects a long confrontation with the West rather than a direct conflict or an early settlement in Ukraine.
The strategy he outlines is best read as representative of a strong current in Russian strategic thinking, one that expects a long confrontation with the West rather than a direct conflict or an early settlement in Ukraine.
What that current does not advocate is worth noting. At no point does Bezrukov recommend an offensive, or an escalation, as a viable course against the West and NATO. He confines himself to deterrence and to measures that sit below the threshold of open war, rather than to direct military confrontation. A conventional invasion of NATO territory is not the strategy he proposes. Notably, it is not a course recommended even by one of the more hawkish voices in the Russian establishment. The posture he describes is built around avoiding a direct clash with NATO, not seeking one.
In his view Russia cannot win a direct war against the West, so it seeks instead to deny the West a decisive strike, to restore deterrence by holding Western economic and infrastructure targets at risk with conventional long-range weapons, and to harden Russia’s society, economy and infrastructure to the point where it can absorb heavy damage and heavy casualties without being defeated. The purpose is not victory in any conventional sense. It is a strategy of survival and endurance, based on a single expectation: that the West, set against the backdrop of a global power transition, will exhaust its cohesion and decline before Russia does. The stakes he attaches to this are high. Without mobilising for victory, he warns, Russia’s own survival will be called into question.
That expectation is also the strategy’s core weakness. Its entire logic depends on the West being in irreversible decline within a timeframe Russia can outlast. If the premise does not hold, the Russian strategy of endurance has no victory condition; it becomes endurance for its own sake, with no account of how the confrontation ends. A strategy whose success depends on the adversary fracturing over time is not a coherent plan but rather a wager, resting on the hope that the West’s decline and collapse under the weight of its own contradictions are inevitable.
Another weakness in Bezrukov’s analysis is that it expects the Russian population, society and economy to mobilise for a long confrontation and become a “warring society”. This pillar of the strategy is also dependent on hope. There is no credible path for Russia’s societal transformation towards this objective. The Russian elites will likely be incapable of convincing the wider Russian population of the necessity of this transformation.
Here his essay works against itself, because the endurance it demands requires precisely what Bezrukov elsewhere says Russia lacks: mutual trust, the decentralisation of initiative, elites who place the state above their own interests, and a system able to reform against elite resistance. He is therefore asking the most entrenched elements of the Russian system to carry out its most demanding transformation. He is asking a population never consulted on the confrontation to accept it, along with its costs and casualties, as the normal condition of life for a generation. ֍
Notes
Andrei Bezrukov, “The New War and What We Must Do” [Новая война и что нам делать], Russia in Global Affairs [Россия в глобальной политике], vol. 24, no. 4, July/August 2026, pp. 32–49 (in Russian). DOI: 10.31278/1810-6439-2026-24-4-32-49.
This is Russian nihilism straight out of the 19th century. How would they expect to outlast the much richer and technologically advanced West in a war of attrition?
Russia has the combined population of Germany and France and before the war had the GDP of Italy. It’s incomprehensible to me how the Russian leadership coulf ever hope te win an attrition contest. Peak megalomania!