Description
How does Russia delegate war? States operating below the threshold of open armed conflict pose a unique challenge to their targets through the employment of proxy actors. The deniability of their actions and their embrace of risk averse strategies creates an uneven playing field which constrains the range of responses for targeted states. In addition, Russian proxies operate on the full the spectrum of war, making Russian proxy warfare expansive, cross-domain, and multi-actor. In this paper, we argue that closer attention needs to be paid to how Russia delegates war to irregular armed actors and to the relationship between such actors and the regular Russian military. We lack a detailed understanding of what conflict delegation entails and under what conditions it takes place, which is particularly puzzling since at the core of the proxy war debate is delegation to proxies by adversary states like Russia. In this paper, we outline the logics underpinning Russian proxy war strategies and illustrate these in a comparative assessment.
