Most war operations are nonviolent - what you are thinking of is called kinetic warfare. What determins if it is a war or not varies by country policy but can usually be boiled down to whether there are militant operations involved or if a leader has publicly or nonpublicly declared it.

Agreed it's totally clickbaity and misleading, especially for reuters. I could see if it said cold war, otherwise I was concerned that something real had happened for a moment.