The silent war – Exposing Russia’s hybrid threats to democracy: Eerik Kross and Greg Mills
Key topics:
Russia uses hybrid warfare to destabilise democracies worldwide.
Propaganda, assassinations, and cyberattacks spread fear and doubt.
Democracies must unify, act, and build resilience against authoritarianism.
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“A wolf circling sheep” is how Christopher Steele once described Vladimir Putin’s relationship with the West.
Steele’s own case has itself become part of the Russian president’s cognitive warfare strategy. The former MI6 officer compiled the 2016 dossier alleging that Donald Trump had been cultivated and supported by Moscow for years before his first presidential victory.
Yet just as the dossier likely contained Russian disinformation – crafted to split readers between those demanding more and those dismissing the entire text – Putin has pursued the broader strategy of injecting toxic doubt into Western minds. He has sown uncertainty not only over America, but across every country and in every domain where trust and unity matter most.
Since then, the world has tilted in favour of autocracies and their malign agendas, in which the disruption of the rules-based international order and the frequency of geopolitical upset, including this transatlantic rift, have become a reality. Democracy remains in retreat in the face of authoritarianism.
“Violence and the repression of political opponents during elections, ongoing armed conflicts, and the spread of authoritarian practices contributed to the 19th year of declining freedom,” concludes Freedom House, which has been tracking the state of freedom since its creation in 1941.
Russia is a main protagonist in a new pattern of conflict, defined by the term “hybrid warfare”, a format which allows the Kremlin to overcome its power asymmetry to destabilise Europe, build alliances worldwide, including in Africa, and pursue its imperial ambitions in Ukraine by undermining support for Kyiv.
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But others are learning from Moscow’s experience – and the West’s response – not least on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. These lessons should be learnt quickly, particularly in the fight for democracy and against authoritarianism.
“Hybrid warfare”, otherwise known as the “grey zone”, describes a spectrum of actions, from political warfare at one end to conventional conflict a la Ukraine at the other. It is usually non-violent, loitering just below the threshold which would trigger a military response or at least punitive sanctions. The frog is heated slowly enough as not to risk it hopping out of the pot.
This form of warfare blends traditional and irregular tactics, uses of state and non-state actors, espionage, money laundering, sabotage, and undermining industrial capacity, and usually relies on information and cyber warfare more than kinetic operations. This represents the fuzzy space that exists between conflict and peace in international relations.
“Threat of force”
As the Taiwanese strategist and retired admiral Lee Hsi-ming has observed, “grey zone conflict is characterised by using the threat of force to create fear and intimidation.” In the case of Taiwan, this form of coercion is aimed at deterring the possibility of a declaration of independence by Taipei and to prevent others from supporting Taiwan’s case.
This system of warfare represents both an echo of the past and a precursor to future conflict. It reminds us that the more things change the more they stay the same, especially when it comes to Russian foreign and security policy.
In 1584, the Estonian chronicler Batthasar Russow penned an account of how the Russians conquer lands: “All the Muscovite’s military might,” he wrote, “is based not on great bravery, courage, strength or force, but rather on opportunism, treachery, cunning, threats and intimidation. In this fashion, he has conquered and captured many lands and fortresses, but whenever people offered some resistance, he accomplished nothing.”
Vladimir Lenin referred to Moscow’s enduring strategy with the West as a “state of partial war”. Well before Vladimir Putin’s time, this included deception, subversion, disinformation, psychological warfare, and funding of domestic actors elsewhere, with the aim of sowing and exploiting divisions among Western societies.
The tempo of recent events suggests that Russia has stepped up its attacks, probing NATO defences with drones and supersonic fighters, hacking key infrastructure systems, and carrying out assassinations with a degree of brazenness if not a certain clumsiness. The Novichok attack against the former Russian GRU intelligence officer Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in 2018 followed from the murder of ex-FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko 12 years earlier by slipping a Micky Finn of polonium into his tea in London’s Millennium Hotel.
A defected FSB (the successor to the KGB) agent, Litvinenko, had coined the term “mafia state” to describe Putin’s regime. In 2013, exiled businessman and former Putin backer Boris Berezovsky was found hanged in his London flat.
State murders
These numbers pall by comparison to state murders in Russia – of journalists and other political opponents, including Forbes Russia editor Paul Klebnikov and Anna Politkovskaya, along with Sergei Yushenkov, the leader of the anti-Kremlin party Liberal Russia in front of his Moscow home, lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, the reformist regional governor Boris Nemtsov,and in February last year Aleksei Navalny, the imprisoned opposition politician. The volume and frequency of these attacks have the effect of numbing audiences to their occasion, risking the frog’s eventual demise.
Again, during the Soviet period, political assassinations were de rigueur, both as a means of removing opponents and signalling the long memory of the Soviet state. Stalin took this to an art form. His bitter ideological rival Leon Trotsky was killed with an ice-pick in Mexico in August 1940, while the Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov was knocked off with a ricin-tipped umbrella while waiting on Waterloo Bridge to take a bus to his job at the BBC in September 1978.
Stalin officially purged 777,975 people for political charges from 1929 to 1953, including 681,692 in 1937–38, the years of the Great Purge. Unofficial estimates put the figure as high as 1,2 million.
The brief post-Cold War period between 1990 and Putin’s Munich Security Conference speech in 2007 remains the exception to this pattern of violent Russian behaviour. At Munich, the Russian leader attacked America’s domination of world affairs and criticised NATO expansion, meddling in Russian elections and nuclear treaty violations, stating that Russia would no longer accept a “unipolar world”.
Use of propaganda
There are other constants, including the use of propaganda. As General Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s Chief of the General Staff, has commented, it is a “most promising type of weapon”.
During the Cold War, Moscow relied on its AGITPROP (agitation and propaganda) department as the conduit for disinformation. In a pre-digital age, this relied on cultural exchanges, films and theatre. Today, this means of propaganda happens through RT and Sputnik and X, along with other forms of social media.
The message is kept simple, even though the content may be fake, and repeated ad infinitum till it drowns out much else.
The threat of military action remains, even though the Russian military machine is a ghostly impersonation of its Soviet predecessor. The contemporary kinetic aspect ranges from conventional war in Ukraine to private military assistance to African states. Such armed non-state actors are, according to Freedom House, contributing to a less free, less safe world, not least in the Central African Republic, Sudan and across the Sahel through Mali and Burkina Faso.
Money continues to play its part in political interference, not necessarily buying allegiance, but silence to opposition. There is a more sinister aspect, where Western leaders prefer authoritarianism over democracy, favouring a metric of the pace and extent of wealth accumulation rather than individual rights.
Supporting oppositions is not new either. These are the same tactics followed also by others. As Lenin had observed, “There are no morals in politics. There is only expedience.” What is new, however, is the shift from supporting opponents on the left to right-wing populists, the aim remaining the same, however: to radicalise political debate and thereby distract and dissipate opposition elsewhere to Russia’s foreign forays.
In the same way that the Soviet Union sought to sponsor proxy regimes in the Cold War, there is a clear playbook to support like-minded authoritarianism. Where regimes manipulate elections to cling to power, strengthening the grip of elites – Russia and China, among other authoritarians – are there to offer support, narrowing the space for democratic contestation. The state and party conflate as the security of the state is deliberately equated with regime stability.
This much is clear from examples worldwide, from Venezuela through Uganda and Tanzania to Georgia.
If the pattern of Russian preferences is clear, so too is the need to develop what General Sir Nick Carter, the UK’s former Chief of Defence Staff, describes as “a doctrine of integrated action” in dealing with the continuum of hybrid war. Democracies generally don’t do this well, since they are instinctively transactional given the short-term electoral horizons in which they are operating.
Not a viable strategy
But doing nothing is not a worthwhile option. As Sir Max Hastings, the veteran war correspondent and writer, put it on Britain’s attempts to cosy up to Trump, hoping that you will be the last to be eaten by the crocodile is not a viable strategy.
Some better alternatives exist.
First and foremost, fundamentally, it is necessary to call this form of warfare for what it is. The use of terms such as “hybrid war” or “grey zone” is misleading; these should rather be labelled subversion, sabotage, lawfare, terrorism, assassinations, murder, illegal incursions by air, sea and land, and cyber or political warfare.
And if the Russians – or the Chinese, Iranians, North Koreans or whoever – carry out a cyber-attack, don’t only acknowledge, assess and attribute it, but act. The Russian goal to undermine trust in democracies and institutionalise passivity is achieved when societies feel helpless against this action. The West’s goal has to be not just to become more resilient but to prevent these actions.
Being specific about the diagnosis will enable a clear understanding of the problem and the solutions. For instance, in the case of oppositions undermined through flawed and sometimes fraudulent election processes, there is a need to develop a playbook for change – detailing the roles and limits for internal and external actors, governmental and non-governmental, national and multinational.
At the other end of the continuum, states have to prepare adequately for conventional conflict in a way that stresses people and training as much as technology and equipment.
There is a need to be clear, too, about how to reduce the fuzzy conflict zones which the Russians and others exploit. A failure to do so can only increase the dangers of Russian expansion and escalation.
This requires realising that we are today in a new Cold War, that alliances have responsibilities if they are to be effective (not least around defence spending), and that lines have to be drawn and credibility maintained, not least through supporting Ukraine. While neither under- or over-estimating Russian strengths, the idea is to build political and institutional resilience to outweigh and outlive a recidivist Kremlin.
There is a stake for others outside of Europe. This era of Russian expansionism does them great harm, too; witness the regimes in CAR, Mali, Sudan and elsewhere, where politics and people have been weaponised in Putin’s global view.
Transparency helps. Corruption and authoritarianism thrive in the dark. Muddy waters are to the liking of malevolent foreign agents just as publicity is the best antidote. Funding a free press is probably the best investment that philanthropists and businesses intent on positive change can make. Quite contrary to President Trump’s assertion of a phrase employed by Lenin and Stalin that the fourth estate is the “enemy of the people” in his berating of “fake news”, the freer the better.
Bouquet of radical options
Political oppositions within authoritarian states must become organised. They need to ask themselves a single question in doing so: how do we increase our leverage over the regime? This has questions about internal organisation as much as external affairs, and an understanding of the bouquet of radical options.
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There is a need, however, to routinely discount the likelihood of salvation from outside. Outside actors, for their part, have to adopt the old credo: First, do no harm. They have to resist the temptation to trade and profit from authoritarians, and to be exposed where this occurs.
Unity among democrats is key and depends on leadership and organisation. That’s somewhat akin to herding cats, but can be facilitated by a combination of clear process, prominent personalities, and a powerful narrative.
As Freedom House puts it, “all those who understand the value of political rights and civil liberties must work together in the defence of democracy.”
Such an “insurgency for democracy” demands better organisation and training, tough choices and plenty of stamina, remembering that governance is not just about high ideals or administration, but about leadership.
To confront hybrid war, the bottom line is to do to Russia the same things that they are doing to others, but only better, operating also under the threshold of international aggression, dragging them down on multiple fronts, soaking up energy, bandwidth and resources.
The fear of not upsetting the Russians and other authoritarians is one of the biggest security weaknesses under which liberal democracies currently suffer.
*Eerik-Niiles Kross is an Estonian MP, and former diplomat and chief of intelligence. He was a prominent figure in the anti-Soviet non-violent resistance movement in Soviet Estonia in the 1980s. In 1991, he joined Estonia's Foreign Ministry. Kross served as the head of intelligence from 1995 to 2000, and as national security advisor to former President Lennart Meri in 2000 and 2001.
*Dr Greg Mills is a Fellow at the University of Navarra in Spain and a founder of the Platform for African Democrats. From 2005, he was for 20 years the director for the Johannesburg-based Brenthurst Foundation. His recent books include ‘Rich State, Poor State’, ‘The Art of War and Peace’ and the forthcoming ‘The Essence of Success: Insights in Leadership and Strategy from Sport, Business, War and Politics’, all published by Penguin Random House.
This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission