Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.

This is the fifth floor.

The fifth floor, you knowsson.

This is the fifth floor at Farnak Amidi Sobath. This is the fifth floor at the heart of global storytelling with BBC journalists from all around the world.

I'm your host, Faranak Amidi.

When we think of a war between countries, we usually think of physical acts of conflict, like shellings or drone strikes.

But over the past few years, governments and the media have been using the phrase war in the gray zone.

It refers to something that isn't an overt act of war, but it's not peaceful

cooperation either, actions that are meant to meddle with or sabotage a country in some way.

Many countries have accused Russia of this gray zone warfare. Grigor, Attenessian, of BBC Russian, has been exploring if, how, and why

Russia might be waging war in the gray zone. Welcome to the fifth floor, Gregor. Thank you.

So give us some examples of gray zone warfare. What kind of things are we talking about when we were talking

about gray zone warfare? So the clever definition of the gray zone warfare is an operational

space between war and peace. And this could be cyber attacks. So hacking or taking down

websites and even services, power grids. This could be stealing personal data. This could be trying

to meddle into elections. Information operations, so your bots and troughs and deep fakes recently.

And then sometimes even military action conducted through proxies, militias, with a level of

deniability.

And a lot of countries, as I mentioned, have accused Russia of this kind of war against other countries.

Can you give us some examples of instances that people accuse Russia of?

So to be fair, I think we should know that it's not only Russia, but Russia has been

particularly imaginative, and one can say successful in that.

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