Same Putin Playbook, Same War, Different Deniability
This week over 1,000 buildings in Kyiv lost heating. Russia had launched nearly 1,100 strike drones, 890 guided aerial bombs, and over 50 missiles against infrastructure in Ukraine.
Temperature: minus 10 Celsius.
Impact: Over 500,000 civilians in danger from Russian attacks.
Zelenskyy called it “conscious, cynical Russian terror against the people.”
In Berlin, timed for the same winter cold spell, Russia targeted heating and energy systems. Their Vulkangruppe attacked civilian dependence on critical infrastructure in freezing weather.
The operational logic is identical. The difference is how Putin architects deniability.
The Strategy Has a Name
What Russia is executing across both theaters is “coercive degradation”. It is a systematic destruction of civilian trust in infrastructure to break political will without triggering direct military response. The target appears to be infrastructure itself. The target is actually trust in democracy, undermining confidence that a representative government can protect its citizens.
In Russian military doctrine, this falls under “reflexive control”: shaping an adversary’s decision-making by controlling the information and conditions they use to make decisions. When German citizens lose heat in winter and their government lacks a coherent explanation, they begin to question their safety. That questioning is the objective. It of course also matters that Russia has radical right-wing politicians working for them in Germany, pre-maturely declaring the enemy can’t be Russia.
The Gerasimov doctrine explicitly prioritizes non-military means of achieving military objectives. The ratio he proposed: 4:1, non-military to military.
Infrastructure sabotage in any NATO territory is the non-military component. Missile strikes in Ukraine are the military component. We see this play out a single campaign, where different tools are calibrated to what each theater will tolerate.
Russia can’t invade Germany, yet. But they can have the German CDU party and interior minister sow political fear and doubt after Russian assets destroy critical infrastructure.
The Deniability Gradient
Russia operates on a sliding scale of attribution:
- Ukraine: Overt military strikes. Denial is performative – everyone knows, Russia doesn’t care. The message is raw power.
- Germany: Covert sabotage. Plausible deniability maintained. Attribution is slow, contested, buried in bureaucratic process. The message is vulnerability.
- Undersea cables, pipelines: Technical deniability. “Accidents happen.” Years of investigation, sporadic arrests of Russians, no consequences. The message is impunity.
This gradient is the core feature of hybrid warfare, as I discussed earlier with the CIA Snow Globe methodology. Russia calibrates pressure precisely to stay below the threshold that would trigger unified NATO response while still inflicting costs. Each level of deniability corresponds to a different political tolerance in the target population.
Germany should know better than to delay infiltration and disruption of Vulkangruppe’s ties to Russia.
Winter as Weapon
Russia has weaponized winter for centuries, and celebrates it as one of their tactical advantages. Hitler and Napoleon both were wrecked. What’s new is the precision application across multiple countries simultaneously, calibrated to each target’s political tolerance and attribution capacity.
The seasonal window is extremely strategic. Infrastructure attacks in July reveal the many Russian weaknesses. Infrastructure attacks in January are signature Russian, psychologically damaging and potentially lethal. Russia synchronizes its offensive operations with weather that multiplies impact of their least efforts. The same sabotage in summer that would be laughed away, becomes a crisis instead when timed for hospital and school pipes to freeze and heating fail.
This isn’t opportunism. It’s diabolical operational planning. The winter offensive against Ukrainian infrastructure intensifies every year in the same months. The sabotage operations in Germany follow the same calendar. The pattern indicates Russian centralized planning exploiting weather vulnerabilities.
The Strategic Objective
The goal, as always with the Russians, is to fracture political cohesion, inject weakness into an enemy through disruption of representative government. In terms of NATO states, Russia aims for three things:
- Vulnerability: NATO members cannot protect their own critical infrastructure
- Impunity: Russia can impose costs without suffering consequences
- Linkage: Supporting Ukraine means accepting domestic attacks
Every German citizen who loses heat this winter is meant to ask: should I support the AfD (Nazi) party because I’m scared and they talk tough about the enemy? Every unanswered sabotage operation reinforces the message that your government needs a “strong man” to keep you safe.
This is the same logic as the terror bombing campaigns of the 20th century, updated for hybrid warfare. The innovation is plausible deniability for achieving the political effects of strategic bombing without the political costs of attribution.
Why Germany Won’t Say It
German authorities continue treating infrastructure attacks as a string of isolated criminal incidents rather than a coordinated Russian campaign. This unfortunately means that while German intelligence services understand exactly what’s happening, their hands are tied by political paralysis.
Naming Russia as the attacker would require a very different response. A response would require political will. Political will would require explaining to the German public that the AfD (Nazi) party has been involved in Russian sabotage operations, covered up by the CDU party in an attempt to win AfD voters back. Easier to investigate an incident separately, or not at all, and let attribution fade into bureaucratic process, and hope the pattern remains invisible to the public.
This is what Russia pays for and counts on.
The deniability gradient works because Western politicians cooperate and even collaborate with it. They try to spin a fiction of isolated incidents to use for political gain, because acknowledging the sustained attack would require action they’re not prepared to accept and take.
The Test
Ukraine can name its attacker. We see Zelenskyy call it “conscious, cynical Russian terror” because the missiles leave no room for ambiguity, and he is a leader.
Germany plays dumb, or incompetent, and creates a leadership vacuum by refusing to admit its attacker. 15 years of Vulkangruppe attacks and yet supposedly not a single clue linking it to the Moscow Vulkan contractors to FSB (known for Sandworm). Germans are making a choice to let the CDU/AfD dynamic play out and swing politics hard right, rather than force attribution that would expose it. That’s a choice. The sabotage leaves just enough room for official doubt, and German political culture fills that space with paralysis enabling a radical right-wing minister to point the wrong direction. I think we all know how this turned out in Germany before.
Weaponizing winter works the same whether you use missiles or ministers. The only question is whether German intelligence will leak and citizens will start to recognize the pattern before the next heating season, and whether recognition would change anything.
Russia is still betting the AfD (Nazi) party will continue to normalize sabotage. So far, that investment is paying off.
