Russian hybrid warfare
Based on Wikipedia: Russian hybrid warfare
The War That Isn't Called a War
On Christmas Day 2024, an undersea power cable connecting Estonia and Finland went dark. Finnish authorities quickly identified a suspect: the Eagle S, a tanker ship sailing from Saint Petersburg to Egypt. When coast guard officers boarded the vessel, they discovered something peculiar. The ship's anchors were missing.
The working theory? The Eagle S had deliberately dragged its anchors across the seabed, severing the cable in what looked like an accident but almost certainly wasn't. The ship, investigators determined, was part of Russia's "shadow fleet"—a network of aging tankers used to evade Western sanctions on Russian oil.
This wasn't an isolated incident. It was one move in a much larger game—one that Russia has been playing for years across Europe and beyond.
What Exactly Is Hybrid Warfare?
The term sounds like military jargon, but the concept is ancient. Hybrid warfare means attacking your enemies without ever declaring war. It's the art of destabilization through plausible deniability.
Think of it as death by a thousand cuts. Instead of tanks rolling across borders, you get mysterious GPS jamming that forces commercial airlines to reroute. Instead of bombing campaigns, you get disinformation flooding social media before elections. Instead of naval blockades, you get "accidents" that sever undersea cables.
The brilliance—if you can call it that—lies in the ambiguity. When Russian soldiers without insignia appeared in Crimea in 2014, seizing control of the peninsula, Moscow could simply deny involvement. The Western press dubbed these anonymous troops "little green men," a darkly whimsical name for what was, in effect, an invasion.
Here's what makes Russia's approach distinctive: according to the Institute for the Study of War, Russia doesn't see hybrid warfare as merely a collection of tactics. The Russian Armed Forces define it as a genuine type of war—the future of military conflict itself. While Western nations debate whether these activities cross some threshold, Russia openly discusses them in military journals as the next evolution in how nations fight.
The Greatest Hits: 2014 to Present
The annexation of Crimea was just the beginning.
In 2016, Russian operatives launched massive disinformation campaigns targeting both the American presidential election and Britain's Brexit referendum. The goal wasn't necessarily to install specific candidates or achieve specific outcomes—though that would be a bonus. The deeper aim was to corrode trust. To make citizens doubt their institutions, their media, their neighbors.
That same year, the Russian Northern Fleet made a very public voyage to Syria. The aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov and the battlecruiser Pyotr Veliky sailed past European coastlines on their way to support Bashar al-Assad's forces around Aleppo. Military analysts call this "Heavy Metal Diplomacy"—using raw displays of military power to intimidate without firing a shot.
Then came 2022, and everything escalated.
After the Invasion: Europe Under Siege
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the hybrid attacks on other European countries intensified dramatically. Western intelligence services accuse Russia of sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines—the undersea gas lines connecting Russia to Germany—in September of that year. The explosions effectively destroyed a key piece of European energy infrastructure, sending prices soaring and winter anxiety spiking across the continent.
But the attacks go far beyond dramatic explosions.
Consider what's been happening in the skies over the Baltic states. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have reported constant GPS jamming since the invasion began. In May 2024, the disruption became so severe that Finnair had to pause flights to eastern Estonia entirely. Navigation systems on commercial aircraft were simply failing. Estonia summoned Russia's embassy chief to demand answers, though everyone knew the summons was mostly theater.
The jamming isn't random interference. It's targeted harassment—a way of reminding these small North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member states that Russia can reach them whenever it wants.
The Weaponization of Everything
What makes hybrid warfare so insidious is that almost anything can become a weapon.
Take migration. Finland, Poland, and Sweden have all reported a suspicious pattern: migrants from third countries arriving at their borders in large numbers—but not through normal routes. They're arriving through Russia and Belarus. The migrants themselves aren't the enemy; they're being used as tools to overwhelm border systems, strain resources, and inflame domestic political tensions about immigration.
Or consider religion. The Russian Orthodox Church, it turns out, has been functioning as an intelligence platform. In 2024, Swedish security services concluded that a newly built Russian Orthodox church in Västerås wasn't just a house of worship. The church happened to be located near an airport used for Swedish military exercises and other critical national infrastructure. The Kremlin, Swedish intelligence determined, uses the Russian Orthodox Church as a cover for espionage operations across Scandinavia.
Even vandalism has been weaponized. In October 2025, French intelligence revealed that a Holocaust memorial desecration in May 2024—committed by four Bulgarian nationals—wasn't a random hate crime. It was a paid operation, part of Russia's long-term strategy to "sow division, spread false information and stoke social tensions." The perpetrators were proxies, recruited and paid to inflame old wounds in French society.
The Cable Wars
But it's the underwater infrastructure attacks that have most alarmed European defense officials.
Modern civilization depends on undersea cables far more than most people realize. These cables carry internet traffic, financial data, and power between nations. They're essentially the nervous system of the European economy—and they're shockingly vulnerable. Miles of unguarded cable lying on the ocean floor, impossible to patrol, easy to damage with a well-placed anchor or a simple accident that isn't really an accident at all.
In November 2024, two undersea cables in the Baltic Sea were severed within hours of each other. Investigators focused on a Chinese-flagged vessel called the Yi Peng 3. The ship, they discovered, was allegedly captained by a Russian, and it had passed directly over both cables at roughly the times they were cut.
The deputy head of NATO's Allied Maritime Command had been warning about exactly this scenario for months: Russia and other hostile actors were actively targeting the underwater cables that connect Europe's energy and communications networks.
Then came Christmas 2024 and the Eagle S incident. Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna was blunt in his assessment. The cable cutting must be regarded as an attack against "vital infrastructure," he said. Russia's shadow fleet wasn't just evading oil sanctions—it was being used as a weapon.
The Response: Deterrence and Its Limits
NATO has noticed. In May 2024, the North Atlantic Council issued an unusually direct statement expressing deep concern about activities attributed to Russia on alliance territory. Investigations, they noted, had resulted in criminal charges against multiple individuals connected to "hostile state activity."
Jens Stoltenberg, then NATO's Secretary General, was defiant: sabotage, disinformation, violence, cyber attacks, and electronic interference would not "deter us from supporting Ukraine."
But here's the challenge. How do you deter something that's designed to stay just below the threshold of war?
NATO's Article 5—the famous "an attack on one is an attack on all" clause—was written for conventional war. If Russian tanks rolled into Estonia, the response would be clear. But what about GPS jamming? Underwater cable cuts by ships that happen to be sailing past? Church construction near military bases? Vandalism by Bulgarian proxies?
Bruno Kahl, Germany's intelligence chief, voiced the concern directly in November 2024: Russia's extensive use of hybrid warfare "increases the risk that NATO will eventually consider invoking its Article 5 mutual defense clause." In other words, these sub-threshold attacks might eventually add up to something that demands a full military response—but nobody is quite sure where that line is.
In March 2025, UK officials testified before the Defence Committee that stronger deterrence was urgently needed. Paul Wyatt, Director General of Security Policy at the Ministry of Defence, noted that adversaries were seeking to do harm "in a manner they judge is below the Article 5 threshold." They're probing, testing, seeing what they can get away with.
The Baltic States Sound the Alarm
No one feels this pressure more acutely than the Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. These three small countries share borders with Russia and have vivid memories of Soviet occupation. They've been NATO's most persistent voices calling for action.
Their argument is simple and terrifying: if Russia wins in Ukraine, the hybrid attacks on NATO's eastern flank will escalate. The Baltic states, they believe, will be next. Not through a full invasion—at least not initially—but through an intensification of everything we've already seen. More cable cuts. More GPS jamming. More migration pressure. More infiltration. More chaos.
In December 2025, Lithuania declared a state of emergency after Belarus launched hundreds of balloons toward its territory. The balloons themselves were seemingly harmless. But Lithuanian officials warned they could be used to probe for gaps in air defenses, testing how the country responds, gathering intelligence for future operations.
Poland has taken perhaps the most dramatic step. In October 2024, Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski withdrew consent for Russia's consulate in Poznań to operate. His justification was explicit: Russian hybrid warfare targeting Poland and its allies, including cyberattacks and "assaults" at Poland's eastern border. That border, notably, is also the boundary of the Schengen Area—the zone of free movement that encompasses most of the European Union. An assault on Poland's border is an assault on Europe's border.
Proxies and Professionalism
One revealing aspect of Russia's hybrid campaign is how it has evolved—or perhaps devolved.
In October 2024, Ken McCallum, the head of Britain's MI5, offered a stark warning. Russian military intelligence, he said, was actively working to "generate mayhem" on European and British streets. But here was the interesting part: they were using proxies, and this "further reduces the professionalism of their operations."
In other words, Russia isn't just outsourcing sabotage and violence—it's outsourcing it to amateurs. The Bulgarian vandals desecrating Holocaust memorials. The shadow fleet captains cutting cables. The migrants being pushed toward borders. None of these are trained intelligence officers. They're expendable assets, recruited for specific operations, often unaware of the full picture.
This creates a certain sloppiness. Ships get caught. Operatives get arrested. The connections to Moscow become traceable. But that may not matter to the Kremlin. The goal isn't elegant espionage. The goal is chaos. And chaos doesn't require professionalism—it just requires enough moving parts to keep your adversaries off balance.
The Future Is Already Here
What happens next?
According to Russian military doctrine, hybrid warfare isn't an aberration or a temporary tactic. It's the future of conflict. The Russian Armed Forces openly discuss ongoing operations as hybrid wars, and they see this approach as the direction of military development itself.
This suggests the attacks will continue regardless of what happens in Ukraine. The infrastructure is in place—the shadow fleets, the intelligence networks, the proxy recruiters, the disinformation operations. Even if the war in Ukraine ended tomorrow, there's no reason to believe Russia would dismantle these capabilities.
For Europe, the challenge is existential in a quiet way. Liberal democracies are built on trust—trust in elections, trust in information, trust in institutions. Hybrid warfare targets that trust directly. Every cable cut, every GPS jamming incident, every piece of disinformation erodes the confidence that makes democratic societies function.
The war that isn't called a war may, in the end, be the most dangerous kind.