In addition to inadequate military capabilities and resource shortages, Russia’s cyber potential is arguablylimited by the geography of its physical layer. Historically developed around a burgeoning network of autonomous systems (AS) after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Internet (Runet) grew in a decentralized manner and in isolation from the global Internet.⁷ On the one hand, the Russification of annexed territories’ networks allows Moscow to control narratives and enforce censorship.⁸ However, as digital operations grow increasingly civilianized, limited access to Western democracies’ social media curtails Russia’sgrassroots offensive digital potential.⁹ Being digitally cut off raises the technical barriers of entry to hostilities forpopulations and private civilian companies. Lastly, Russia’s bureaucratic structure and internal division and rivalrydynamics between its intelligence agencies—mainly the Armed Forces’ Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) and the Federal Security Service (FSB)¹⁰—seem better suited to meet subversive objectives than coordinated, synchronizedones.¹¹ Beyond these challenges, Russia’s experience in Ukraine suggests the strategic impact of cyber means diminishes as the war stretches—thus challenging the legitimacy of cyber warfare as a “fifth pillar” of conflict and thelikeliness of an all-out, destructive cyber war. But has cyber war ever been part of the Kremlin’s strategic objectives?

Clearly, Russia’s performance has been measured against inadequate expectations. The first explanation lies in military thought and terminology: Russia’s military concepts almost rarely refer to cyber—instead focusing on information warfare.¹² Unlike the U.S.-influenced conception emphasizing the integrity, accessibility, and confidentiality of digital systems, Moscow’s approach encompasses both technical and psychological components and frames competition in the informational space as a constant struggle for the control of minds as much as of technicalsystems. For instance, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS)—flooding a network with superfluous requests to overload systems—and hack-and-leak operations— gaining access to sensitive data and then release it in the public domain—attempt to fragment Ukrainians’ trust in their government and increase its Allies’ war fatigue. ¹³ In short, the cyber war has begun—just notwhere and how Western analysts expected it.

Still, although crucial to shaping narratives during peacetime¹⁴, Moscow’s emphasis on information competition suffers from three structural limitations in times of conflict. First, the Russian strategy might not meet the speed, intensity, and control required to articulate cyber operations with kinetic developments. ^{15 16} Second, cyber operationsare poor tools of coercion¹⁷ and have so far little impact on warfighting¹⁸—falling short of tangible strategic value andinfluence on Ukrainian decision-making. ¹⁹ Third, attribution uncertainty and unverifiable signaling of capabilities complicate cyber deterrence. For Russia, self-attributing cyberattacks means exposing precious tactics, techniques, and procedures that could harm future covert operations. This explains why only hacktivist collectives conducting low-impact DDoS or defacement attacks—modifying the visual appearance of a webpage—have revendicated their activity on their Telegram channels. Ukraine faces a communication- capability trade-off, as backing up attribution claims wouldreveal the extent of their knowledge and its limits. In short, no belligerent has an interest in communicating, failing to influence Ukrainian decision-maker's strategic choices.

In their 1993 Cyberwar is Coming!, Arquilla and Ronfelt present cyber war as the 21^st century’s blitzkrieg. ²⁰ As artificial intelligence takes informational warfare into uncharted territory, Russia’s experience in Ukraine does not mean that cyber war will not take place.²¹ Rather, its syndromes and effects are unlikely to mirror anything we have seen so far, forcing expectations to evolve accordingly.