ISBN: 978-1666962239, Lexington Books, October 2024, 336 pages, $123.99 (Hardcover)
Reviewed by: Arman Mahmoudian, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, United States
John A. Pennell’s Assessing Russia’s Actions in Ukraine and Syria, 2014–2022 is, at its core, a book about what really has and has not changed in the way wars are fought. Pennell is a retired U.S. senior Foreign Service officer (Minister-Counselor rank) with more than two decades of executive-level experience overseeing U.S. cooperation programs across Africa, Eurasia, the Indo-Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East, with a career-long focus on strategic competition, irregular warfare, and information operations. Using Russia’s interventions in Ukraine and Syria as his main cases, Pennell tries to answer a deceptively simple question: are we witnessing a new kind of warfare, or an old logic dressed in modern clothes?
His answer leans firmly toward continuity. Pennell pushes back against the now-standard Western habit of treating Russian “hybrid warfare” as something radically unprecedented. He shows that Russian theorists themselves often reserve the term “hybrid” for what they see as Western campaigns against Russia, not for their own conduct. Rather than accept the buzzword at face value, Pennell reaches for concepts like “new-generation warfare,” “political warfare,” and “full-spectrum conflict” to capture what Moscow is doing. Those labels matter, and they place his analysis inside the broader scholarly debate on the “changing character of war,” where the key tension is between enduring political violence on the one hand and shifting methods and technologies on the other.
The book’s key claim is that the nature of war—violence, friction, political purpose—has not fundamentally changed, but its character has. New digital tools and transnational information flows create fresh ways to pursue old goals, and Pennell is careful not to mistake those means for a new kind of war altogether. Eastern Ukraine crystallizes this point: a landscape of trenches and massed artillery that could have come from World War I, overlaid with cyberattacks on infrastructure and the use of drones—the very old and the very new operating side by side.
One of the book’s major strengths is how systematically it fills gaps in the existing literature. Instead of looking at Ukraine and Syria separately, or focusing only on spectacular episodes, Pennell insists on examining the totality of Russia’s actions across both theaters. This dual-case approach lets him trace how tools and habits travel from one conflict to another. It also brings into view a range of underreported instruments of Russian statecraft that rarely get serious treatment in more conventional military studies: information operations, economic leverage, religious and cultural influence, and other non-kinetic tactics that sit uncomfortably at the edge of what many analysts still think of as “war.”
The Ukraine chapters show just how much of Russia’s behavior rests on long-standing patterns. Despite all the talk of novelty, the Kremlin’s playbook in Crimea and Donbas looks very familiar when laid against Soviet and even pre-Soviet practices. Moscow blends conventional and unconventional methods, but the mix is not accidental. Local proxies, covert special forces, the “little green men,” heavy propaganda, and intense political pressure all echo the repertoire Russia has historically used to shape its “near abroad.” Pennell underlines that regular military force is only one element of the campaign. It is important, sometimes decisive, but it is tightly integrated with a wider ecosystem of influence.
He walks the reader through concrete examples: separatist militias in Donbas cultivated as proxy forces; cyber operations targeting Ukrainian infrastructure; disinformation designed to undermine Kyiv’s legitimacy and sow doubt abroad all wrapped in layers of plausible deniability. What emerges is a picture of a state that prefers to operate in the gray zone between peace and war, where it can achieve real political effects while complicating any straightforward Western response.
A particularly valuable part of Pennell’s treatment of Ukraine is his attention to Russian threat perceptions. He makes clear that, in the Kremlin’s own narrative, these campaigns are not framed as aggression but as defensive countermeasures against a West allegedly bent on orchestrating uprisings and conflicts along Russia’s borders. Whether or not one finds that credible, Pennell treats it seriously as a driving mindset. That focus on great-power insecurity and strategic status quo bias complicates simple stories about pure expansionism and helps explain some of the risk-acceptant behavior we see on the ground.
Syria, in his account, plays a different but complementary role. There, Russia is not intervening on its doorstep but projecting power into the Middle East to keep the Assad regime afloat. Pennell argues that this intervention served as a testing ground for capabilities that were then adapted and redeployed elsewhere. In Syria, the Russian armed forces introduced and refined more advanced weapons systems and modern combat aircraft, employed precision-guided munitions, and experimented with “operational innovations” in combat. They assessed the impact of drones and electronic warfare and paired intensive information campaigns with air and artillery strikes.
Crucially, Syria gave the Russian military an avenue to try out not just new hardware but new ways of fighting: integrating airpower with local ground partners, coordinating with non-state actors, and waging a global media campaign to shape perceptions of the intervention. Pennell suggests that lessons from this theater about how to support proxies, how to pace strikes, and how to manage international messaging later fed back into Russia’s approach during later phases of the Ukraine conflict. At the same time, he is careful not to romanticize Russian performance: some of these innovations produced mixed results, and several initiatives faltered despite their high-tech sheen.
By setting Ukraine and Syria side by side, Pennell shows how Russia’s toolkit in the 2010s layers “new and old tools” in a cumulative way: enduring strategic aims and an authoritarian playbook carried forward, now executed through cyber operations, higher-precision weapons, drones, and more sophisticated propaganda. That comparison grounds his larger theoretical point about continuity and change in war. The strategic and technological environment has undeniably shifted, especially in the information domain and in the use of non-state actors, but for him, these shifts mark an evolution in how wars are fought, not a transformation of what war is.
On the level of craft, the book is a serious piece of work. It is empirically dense, drawing on Russian language military writings, Ukrainian accounts, and on-the-ground reporting. The inclusion of field interviews with participants and experts adds a layer of evidence that most academic treatments simply do not have. Pennell does not confine himself to Western secondary sources; he engages directly with Russian military thinkers and dedicates a chapter to “Russian perspectives,” trying to reconstruct how they themselves conceptualize modern conflict. He then sets that against Ukrainian perspectives and field knowledge so that Ukrainian experiences are not reduced to mere data points in someone else’s story. That plurality of viewpoints gives the book a grounded, almost three-dimensional feel.
Stylistically, the book manages a tricky balance. The argument is clearly structured and theoretically informed, and the writing remains readable. Pennell has a knack for tying concrete episodes back to his broader framework without getting lost in jargon, and for most of the way he avoids the formulaic tone that often weighs down works on “hybrid war.” The price of this ambition is that it is not a quick or light read; the reader is asked to stay with a comparative, theory-heavy narrative that spans nearly a decade and two very different theaters. But for those willing to do that, the payoff is substantial.
Taken together, Pennell’s main argument—that Russia’s recent wars represent an evolutionary continuum of conflict rather than a clean break—comes across as well substantiated and genuinely thought-provoking. The study feels both like a reference work and like an original contribution to how we think about Russia’s way of war. It will be most useful to readers in security studies, policy analysis, and military planning who want to move beyond slogans and understand how Moscow blends old reflexes with new tools. For anyone trying to make sense of what Russia has been doing in Ukraine and Syria, and what that says about war in the 21st century, this book is a demanding but very rewarding guide.
