Moscow — A BRITISH inquiry announced this week that Alexander V. Litvinenko, a Russian security officer turned defector who died in a London hospital of polonium poisoning in 2006, was “probably” murdered on the instructions of President Vladimir V. Putin. That’s little surprise. For more than eight years the world has suspected that the Kremlin was behind the assassination. (Just as surely, Mr. Putin has denied his responsibility. His spokesman Dmitri Peskov denounced the inquiry as a “quasi investigation” and an expression of the “elegant British sense of humor.”)

In the years since Mr. Litvinenko’s dramatic death by radioactive poison, Russia’s government has engaged in an array of brazen acts: cyberattacks on Estonia in 2007, the invasion of Georgia in 2008 and covert operations to annex Crimea and destabilize Ukraine in 2014.

So was Mr. Litvinenko’s assassination the start of a new era of dirty tricks?

It may have seemed like a good idea at the time and probably in the immediate aftermath; the Russian government viewed it as a success that deterred others in the rich Russian émigré community of “Londongrad” from opposition activities. But the political price Moscow paid was considerable; it solidified the image of Mr. Putin’s Russia as a rogue state.

Mr. Putin might like to act as if Russia is a world unto itself. It’s not. Modern Russia is thoroughly integrated into global markets and institutions. It seeks foreign investors and partners abroad. Moscow’s elites vacation in Italy, bank in London and send their children to American universities. They can’t afford the repercussions of transnational assassination plots.

That’s why, since Mr. Litvinenko’s murder, the Russian security forces have moved on to a rather different tradecraft. “Wet work” — the Russian spy slang for murder — isn’t entirely a thing of the past, of course. A number of Chechens in Turkey believed to be supporting rebels inside Russia have discovered that. But even in those cases, there was none of the theatricality of a polonium poisoning.

Mr. Litvinenko’s killing, after all, was primarily about silencing critics and scaring opponents rather than eliminating one man. Moscow has realized that in the age of the Internet and 24-hour news cycles, there are safer ways of doing the same thing.

These days, if there is assassination to be done in the West, it is of character. The F.S.B. (the successor to the K.G.B.) and the other security services have moved into the world of information operations, and Russian media and public affairs specialists now rank alongside spies and assassins as weapons of the state. Glossy foreign-language media outlets, serried ranks of paid Internet trolls and hackers and mysteriously well-funded political fringe groups do the Kremlin’s bidding.

That’s not necessarily a reason to celebrate. While it’s true that no one dies from a hacked website, this campaign to dismay, divide and distract the West may be more destructive than any one assassination.

One of Moscow’s aims is deepening divisions among its rivals. As in the Cold War, the crucial battleground is in Europe. The Kremlin knows that it will win if the European Union breaks apart or becomes unmanageable — or if Europeans become disillusioned with the NATO alliance. To this end, Moscow eagerly supports extremist parties, divisive groups and separatist movements across the Continent. France’s “Euroskeptic” National Front party, for example, has received Russian money.

Meanwhile, the F.S.B. reportedly recruits and directs hackers to set off cyberattacks when it wants to punish or silence Russia’s rivals. When the European Parliament and Commission began to criticize Moscow’s takeover of Crimea in April 2014, for example, its systems were hit by networks of computers running a Russian-designed program called BlackEnergy. At the end of 2015, the same malware hit Ukraine’s energy companies, leaving some 700,000 homes without power. It is not just foreigners who are targets. On the day of Russia’s 2011 parliamentary election, coordinated cyberattacks crashed the websites of much of the country’s liberal media outlets. Internet trolls have reportedly been paid to smear the opposition leader Alexei A. Navalny. The moral seems clear: Mess with Moscow and bad things will happen.

The problem is that liberal countries with open economies, democratic politics and a legal presumption of innocence are far less able to resist these offensives. Money and misinformation move equally fast in the modern world. Proving that an extremist political group or a glib lobbyist is backed by Moscow is often impossible. Indeed, part of the genius of this new model of subversion is that it often can be done in plain sight, coyly wrapping itself in the mantle of free speech.

After Mr. Litvinenko’s murder, Britain expelled Russian diplomats, limited visas for Russian officials and stopped intelligence sharing and police cooperation. After a hacking attack on American banks in 2014 that the F.B.I. and other agencies suspect was orchestrated by Moscow to punish the United States for placing sanctions on Russia, Washington did nothing but call for investigations and encourage financial institutions to take cybersecurity more seriously.

This is the new world of covert war. There are no bodies and no smoking guns, no polonium trails and no easy answers.