Countering state-sponsored proxies: Designing a robust policy – Hybrid CoE Paper 23
Countering state-sponsored proxies: Designing a robust policy
Dr Vladimir Rauta – February 2025
Subversive activities by state-sponsored proxies – military and non-military non-state actors (NSAs) – are a staple in the strategic toolbox of grey zone operators.1 They are neither new, nor rare. What is more, sponsor-proxy relations are on the rise.2 By 2021, Russian-armed proxy forces in Ukraine had laid waste to the Donbas, causing thousands of fatalities, both civilian and military. In February 2022, Vladimir Putin used the proxy rebels as a pretext for escalating the simmering, low-intensity conflict into Europe’s first land war in a generation. In 2024, NATO countries witnessed a sharp increase in the number of Russian-sponsored attacks carried out by proxies.3 While these proxy attacks varied in nature, targets, locations, and perpetrators, they were consistent in one key respect, namely their strategic goal of undermining the coher- ence and unity of efforts to provide military and security assistance to Ukraine.4
The attacks occurred within the broader context of Russia’s commitment to destabilize European democracies and undermine the rules- based international order. They prompted the newly appointed High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Kaja Kallas, to accuse Russia of waging a “shadow war” against Europe.5 While ultimately unable to provoke large-scale strategic “disruption, the series of attacks by proxies across Europe presents practitioners with a key question: Given the likelihood of state- sponsored NSA attacks in the future, how should states approach strategies for counter- ing proxies and their state sponsors?
This paper addresses this question by focusing on how targeted states act to prevent and respond to subversive proxies and their sponsoring states. Given that adversaries sponsoring proxies make an intentional choice to limit their scope of engagement, targeted states face cru- cial choices of their own. This is unsurprising, as the grey zone creates a playing field in which countermeasures by targeted states are often caught between responding accordingly and proportionally, or restraining responses to avoid escalation. While this issue has received less attention in the public and academic debate, the practitioner domain has produced manuals and toolkits within national and international frameworks that map deterrence playbooks
for hybrid threats.”
“This paper applies the body of work on deterrence designed and developed by the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats (Hybrid CoE) to the problem of state-sponsored NSAs: first, the publication Deterring Hybrid Threats: A Playbook for” “Practitioners,6 and second, a series of reports, papers, and strategic insight analyses.7 Specif- ically, this paper directly addresses the future issues identified in Hybrid Threats from Non- State Actors: A Taxonomy, the most compre- hensive practitioner attempt to date to map NSAs typologically.8 First, the paper presents an overview of non-state actors as proxies. Second, it discusses the prevalence and variation of NSA-state relationships as a corrective to aca- demic and policy approaches that take a narrow and simplistic view of NSA sponsorship. Third, it shows how a more robust understanding of the phenomenon allows for a more nuanced engagement with the deterrence playbook. To this end, the paper focuses on the situation, self, solutions, and synchronization that the published playbook defines and presents under the moniker of the ‘4S model’.”
“With these aims in mind, the paper invites policymakers to refine the application of the 4S model. The key takeaway is the need to approach state-proxy relationships with a strategy that counters all relevant actors simultaneously and systematically across the stages of the deterrence playbook – situation, self, solutions, and synchronization – through a combination of denial and punishment. In applying the 4S model to state sponsors and their proxies, the paper presents a robust set of recommendations for a change in policy practice to overcome the following limitations: (1) the under-evaluation of NSA-state sponsor relationships, which limits opportunities and scope for action; (2) narrow conceptual thinking about sponsor-proxy relationships that underestimates their complexity and diversity; and (3) short-sighted approaches that fail to articulate integrated strategies capable of situating the fight against individual sponsor-proxy rela- tionships within broader, long-term strategic
thinking.”
Access the report HERE.
