‘Russia’s hybrid war is all about the political consciousness of Europe’

Maarten Muns

The British historian Mark Galeotti specializes in transnational crime and Russian security affairs. In 2022, just before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he published The Weaponisation of Everything. A field guide to the new way of war. A book on hybrid warfare that, as Galeotti himself writes, Vladimir Putin should have read before he started his war in Ukraine.

Why did you write that Putin should have read your work?

“Putin wanted to keep Ukraine in Russia’s sphere of influence. But there were other ways to realize that apart from a massive, and ultimately failed invasion. In early 2022 he build up Russian forces on Ukraine’s borders. And while they were sitting there, there was growing dissatisfaction and concern inside Ukraine. International investment was flocking out of the country, because nobody wanted to invest in a country that could be invaded. Western governments were pushing Zelensky to make concessions. So if Putin was really the geopolitical mastermind that he was sometimes called, he would have allowed that situation to continued. Because with very little costs, he could have brought Ukraine to kneel. But he got impatient, received wrong information from his intelligence services, and decided to send in the troops. That was his catastrophic mistake.”

In your book, The Weaponisation of Everything, you write that there are actually two wars going on at the moment. One is a very 20^th century style shooting war in Ukraine, the other is a very 21^st century hybrid war against the West. What is the difference between both wars and what are the objectives in Russian eyes?

“In the shooting war in Ukraine, the objectives are constantly being redefined by the battlefield. Putin tries to get the most out of it he can get. He thinks that time is on his side. That is why he keeps pushing on. If he can hold Crimea and the land corridor to Crimea he considers that a win. Considering the other war, Russia’s hybrid war against the West, you have to understand that we in the West are currently Ukraine’s major point of failure. Ukraine is heavily dependent on the West for both its economy and military support. Putin regards us as a collection of weak democracies that could easily be distracted, and that it is not that difficult to hijack the news cycle. Putin understands that unity is our strength so he tries to undermine our unity and our will to continue supporting Ukraine.”

“So this hybrid war is all about the main political consciousness of Europe. In fact they are trying to persuade Europe in thinking that it is not worth supporting Ukraine. We increasingly see them looking at the ‘weaponization of inconvenience’. They are telling the Europeans: don’t think that this is an easy war for you. This war is coming to you, it is affecting you in all kinds of ways. Public transport will be sabotaged or internet will be slow when you try to stream a film for instance.”

What was the reason for Putin to start his war in Ukraine in the first place?

“From Putin’s point of view, the world is a zero sum game. He thinks in 19^th century terms. That was not only the time of great power conflicts, but also the heydays of colonialism. The world essentially was divided between those countries who gave the orders and those countries where the only real question was who gets to own them. From that point of view, Ukraine is one of the latter countries. Russia had to own it, because if Russia didn’t own it, someone else would. From Putin’s perspective, the Maidan Revolution in 2014 was not a spontaneous uprising of a people who wanted Ukraine’s future to be with the West, but rather a CIA or MI6 plot to literally steal Ukraine from Russia. For Putin, Ukraine is not a real country. Ukraine, especially the East and South East of Ukraine, belong to Russia. And for someone who clearly thinks about his place in history, how could he be the czar who lost Ukraine? When you couple that with the view that he genuinely believed that Ukrainians would not resist, that he could easily move into Kyiv, replace the government and pull out again, it made a lot of sense for him to invade. Because then he would have reunited the three great east Slavic states: Russia, Belorussia and Ukraine.”

“And as a final point, Putin was for a while bored and unhappy with his duties of being president. But this is not a system in which it is ever safe to step down, because then you have to transfer control over power and legacy to a successor. It might be that he thought that after a triumph in Ukraine it could finally be safe to retire and enjoy his wealth without needing to worry about demographics, agriculture reforms and all other kinds of boring duties of a president.”

You write that Putin tried to undermine the unity and the power of the West in various ways, also before his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. What has changed since then?

“Things have changed since then. Especially when you look at how risk tolerant Putin and his intelligence agencies have become. The objectives haven’t changed that much, but the tactics have. Putin’s own language has also changed. He still calls the war in Ukraine not a war, but a ‘special military operation’. But in his speeches he clearly states that Russia is fighting a war with the West. As far as he is concerned, Ukraine is just one front in this much wider conflict. And obviously, when you are fighting a war you take more risks. We have started to see cases of sabotage in Europe, as well as a stepping up of cyberattacks on our digital infrastructure. There were also reports that the Russians planned to assassinate Armin Papperger, the head of Rheinmetall, the major German arms manufacturer that wanted to build an arms factory in Ukraine.”

“Cyber-attacks, arson attacks and bomb attacks have also increased. And there are reports of derailed trains in Scandinavia. These are things that could cause deaths, and are actually physical attacks on the ground in Western countries. That is something that is new. A year and a half ago, we wouldn’t have seen that. In part, this is a reaction to something that we did. We kicked out all the Russian spies. That made absolute sense, but now the Russians have started to hire radicals, gangsters and criminals to do the dirty work for them in Europe. They are in a sense ‘outsourcing’ their hybrid war against Europe.”

“I don’t believe that the Russians are able to attack Europe in four years, as the German intelligence services recently warned. But the sad truth of the matter is that these threats are the new normal, at least as long as Putin is in power. Even as the Ukraine war is settled one way or the other. Because as far as Putin is concerned, that that was only one front in this war. So we need to urgently adapt to this new ways of working. All NATO members must invest more in their defense capabilities, but also in policing, intelligence and counter intelligence. Because the ability to conduct counter hybrid actions varies greatly from country to country. Some invest massively, and some invest catastrophically little. And in an alliance system, a weak link weakens the whole structure. We need to have this debate, and to look towards the future, also to what is to come from other actors, besides Russia.”

One of the visible things that Russia is doing is mapping underwater infrastructure in the North Sea. What is their objective with this kind of operations?

“For now they threaten us, and force us to allocate resources so that we can’t use them elsewhere. Putin knows that democracies have a limited bandwidth, that there are only limited things that they can do at the same time. You if you create a threat here, the you distract them from their attention there. Also consider their talk that they might provide weapons to the Houthi rebels in Yemen. We don’t know if that is true, but only by raising the speculation that they would, they get us worried and distracted. So in that sense, mapping the underwater cables is the same process at work, but closer to home.”

“I don’t exclude that they might one day decide to attack these infrastructures. In part that will depend on their calculation of the costs and benefits to be gained. They don’t want to create too much of a backlash, and get people to become too angry. So now they prepare the ground for if the orders are ever given to cut an internet cable or blow up a pipeline. But if that happens, it would certainly happen as an apparent accident. A fishing ship whose anker happens to hit a cable. Or an oil tanker that is out of control and plows into an oil rig. The Russians are very good at this ‘implausible deniability’. So they say, that was not us, but with that knowing wink, saying ‘but you know that this was us, but you can’t prove it’.”

That makes it even more important to try to deter and prevent hybrid attacks. Do you think a major cyberattack should count as an Article 5 under the NATO treaty?

“The main discussion point is about the threshold. NATO has already written in that a major cyber-attack could be considered as an Article 5 issue. I think that is right thing to do, if we look at effects rather than means. Something that cuts out power in a large area in the mid of winter is every bit as devastating as a chemical weapons attack, in some ways. But the issue is precisely that the Russians know this. The Russians are not looking for a major conflict with NATO. Putin thinks of NATO at not much more than America’s Warsaw Pact. So in that way the Russians are very careful with Article 5. So they make sure that they operate below the threshold with lots of small attacks, instead of one large attack.”

What is the threshold, or what should the threshold be? 

“The discussions about this question, at least the ones in which I was involved in, never reached a conclusion. The only way of thinking about this is in equivalence terms. So, to ask the question if there is any difference between a cyber-attack that takes down a power station or an Iskander missile doing it? This seems to be where we are heading. But you cannot make this in some kind of legal document, that just doesn’t work. Article 5 is not a solid document. All it says is that there will be an appropriate response to an attack. But NATO acts only on consensus, so there are no rigid guidelines, and a lot of room for discussions and political decision making in there.”

Do you think that we should at least be more clear in communicating our red lines to Russia, also in the hybrid domain?

“Yes, absolutely. We have relied for far too long on this idea of strategic ambiguity. Saying, if you do something to us there will be consequences, without spelling out what these consequences might be. And that approach has failed dramatically. So we need to be a lot more direct. Not publicly so, but through conversations on backchannels. So, for instance, we are aware that you considering the following actions, we want you to know that if you do, we will not wait for forensic confirmation of attribution. Instead, our reaction would include the following actions. Communicated quietly behind the scenes, but above all with clear determination. Otherwise, Putin will continue not to take us seriously. And although communication is limited now there are still channels available, for example through the secretary of the Russian security council, through ambassadors or with the help of third parties, like Turkey, the UAE or India. So we can’t say that there are no channels left for communicating our red lines.”

Photo: Wikimedia Commons / TeleGeography