(Mis)Understanding Russia’s Two ‘Hybrid Wars’

A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of ‘hybrid war’. Whether we call it that or one of the other terms sometimes used, from ‘non-linear war’, [1] simply to ‘a new Cold War’ [2] there can be little doubt that at present Russia and the West are locked into a political and normative struggle being fought in familiar and unfamiliar battlefields, from the virtual realms of cyberspace to the minds of people, whether in Topeka, Tallinn, or Tomsk. To the Kremlin, it is responding to a Western – and American-led – campaign to isolate it diplomatically, undermine it politically, and destabilize it culturally, such that Russia is denied its rightful status as a ‘great power’. To the West, it is rather that Moscow has embarked on a neo-imperialist project that challenges both the architecture of the post-1945 global order and the values this is meant to embody.