All in the Mind: the Power of Perception in Russia’s Hybrid War
Wing Commander Helena Ramsden is a Royal Air Force Communications Electronics Engineer and a student on the Advanced Command and Staff Course at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom. Studying for a Postgraduate Diploma with King’s College London, her Defence Research Paper examined the effectiveness of hybrid warfare as an implement of Russia’s foreign policy.
Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea sent shockwaves through the Euro-Atlantic security community. On display was a new and potent threat, which the West appeared powerless to counter. Russia’s coercive and aggressive actions fuelled an explosion into the study of hybrid warfare and the phenomenon became omnipotent in national characterisations of the contemporary operating environment. Spanning all levers of hard and soft power, hybrid war integrates military and civilian activities across the cognitive and physical dimensions in order to coerce the opposition via regular and irregular means.¹ While tactics of this nature are not new, what is new, and has thrust the concept back under the contemporary spotlight, is the use of hybrid methods by a resurgent and restless Russia, which has employed information age capabilities to gain asymmetric advantage and influence. Questions therefore arise concerning the characteristics of Russian’s hybrid approach, why the employment of such methods may have been deemed necessary, and how effective they have been in pursuit of Russia’s strategic aims.
At the core of Russia’s strategic culture is an “abiding sense of greatness”. Renz writes that “Russia sees its Great Power status in parallel to state survival and sovereignty, and therefore is ready to defend what it sees as its national interest by all possible means”. Gilpin argues cogently that the governance of an international system is determined by states who display dominance in terms of both power and prestige.² While ‘power’ is the state’s capacity to exercise its instruments of power, ‘prestige’ concerns its reputation. ‘Prestige’ is determined by the perceptions of other nations with respect to the state’s ability and willingness to exercise its power to compel or deter other states, particularly through military means. Russia’s hybrid approach appears to harnesses the opportunities afforded by global connectivity to operate extensively and deniably in the information domain, overcoming the disparities of its diplomatic, military and economic capabilities in comparison to the West by targeting perception as a strategic centre of gravity in order to increase its global prestige.
Examples of hybrid warfare in Georgia in 2008 and Crimea in 2014 demonstrate the effectiveness of information activities in setting the conditions for operational success, long in advance of any armed deployment. The employment of information activities against other states can therefore be interpreted as an indication of malign intent and a possible precursor to hostile acts in the physical domain. This leads to the notion of Russia waging a continuous hybrid war against its adversaries and competitors to create spheres of influence which would not otherwise exist.³ Consequently, Western states have begun to grapple with the complexities of Russia’s hybrid threat, and examine their own vulnerabilities to this style of warfare.
As a preliminary component of Russia’s hybrid war, information operations transcend the boundary between war and peace. Western states and multinational organisations have therefore become increasingly alarmed not only by Russia’s interventions in its near-abroad, but by its expanding information operations against the Euro-Atlantic community.
In the West, Russian information activity appears to employ a strategy of support to populist and far-right groups, undermining the liberal democratic order, employing cyber and media-enabled operations at scale to confuse and mislead public opinion, and disrupting political and economic infrastructure.⁴ In particular, Russia’s information operations against the Clinton campaign in the 2016 US Presidential Election provided a showcase for Russian expertise in cyberspace and the methods used to maintain plausible deniability. The 2019 Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election (known as the Mueller Report) documents the most recent and robust body of credible evidence concerning Russian information activities in its far-abroad. Providing tangible proof that Russia has harnessed its advanced information capabilities to discredit and destabilise the democratic process, the report highlights the extensive reach of social media platforms, and their vulnerability to exploitation by malign actors.
Elsewhere, despite the difficulties with providing direct, releasable evidence of Russian interference, circumstantial evidence is often abundant. As a consequence, the expert community has implicated the Kremlin in a vast number of cases, including the Brexit referendum, the French Presidential Elections and the infiltration of Western energy, media and telecommunications sectors.
Russia’s ability to integrate its information capabilities in pursuit of its foreign policy aims, and the scale at which it is prepared to apply such methods to disrupt, destabilise, deny and deceive, stand it apart from other agents of hybrid war, such as Iran, China and Hezbollah (around whose activities the phrase was originally coined). Crucially, Moscow’s information operations have enabled Russia to adapt the art of hybrid warfare to the information age, allowing the accomplishment of its strategic goals at low cost, with minimal damage to national interests. As a result, Russia has proved to be a capable and assertive actor on the world stage, and has provoked a reaction from the Euro-Atlantic community which affirms its renewed global influence.
The combined effects of Russian information operations against the West and its aggression in its near-abroad, against the backdrop of its progression towards conventional rearmament, have transformed the Euro-Atlantic security debate and firmly established Russia as a prominent threat actor. While recognising Russia’s increased importance in world affairs, and taking action to build resilience, the West remains uncertain of how to prevent its hybrid aggression.
Consequently, Russia has continued to act with relative impunity. The expansion of NATO’s operations for the first time since the Cold War, in parallel with intensifying diplomatic and economic sanctions, appear to have done little to deter aggressive and audacious acts such as the 2016 NotPeyta cyberattack, the 2018 Salisbury nerve agent poisoning, and the attack on Ukrainian ships near the Kerch Strait in November of the same year. Indeed, the Euro-Atlantic community appears bereft of any means to effectively respond to Russian sub-threshold acts. Instead, Western measures have fuelled the Russian narrative of NATO as an aggressive actor, and may have been instrumental in pushing Moscow towards cultivating closer relationships with China and the East. In turn, Russia’s shift towards China may serve to increase, rather than diminish its long-term resilience to Western retaliation.
Despite being overmatched by the West in terms of its diplomatic, military and economic instruments of power, the innovative and aggressive use of the information domain has enabled Russia to expand the competitive space and achieve advantage over its adversaries. Far in excess of any material gains, hybrid interventions have enabled Russia to win the battle for the perceptions of world leaders. This is evident in the National Security Strategies of many countries, including the US, the United Kingdom and France, which explicitly acknowledge the multidimensional threats emanating from Russia. In turn, this acknowledgement of Moscow’s enhanced influence in global affairs strengthens the state’s prestige as a Great Power. While the longevity of this success cannot be guaranteed, it represents a formidable feat of grand strategy and highlights the potent and pervasive power of hybrid warfare as a tool for achieving Russia’s strategic aims.
For these reasons, Russia is likely to continue to employ hybrid warfare as an implement of foreign policy, enabling Moscow to project its influence on a global scale. It is therefore vital that more study is undertaken to enhance understanding of the second and third order effects of hybrid interventions in order to guide the construction of appropriate and proportionate responses and preventative measures. In particular the role of perception and prestige, as determining factors in the success of hybrid war, should be a central consideration in the formation of a Euro-Atlantic response. Despite the vast body of literature on the subject of hybrid warfare, the chronological proximity to events means that both evidence and analysis have yet to mature. As they do, the continued study of Russia’s modus operandi may yet highlight effective means to diminish the effectiveness of hybrid warfare and in the longer term, could serve to undermine completely Russia’s strategic advantage in this arena.
[1] Hoffman, Frank G. “Hybrid Warfare and Challenges”. JFQ 1, no. 52 (2009): 36–38.
[2] Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 29–30.
[3] Julian Lindley-French, Complex Strategic Coercion and Russian Military Modernization, Canadian Global Affairs Institute, 2019, 1.
[4] Nicu Popescu and Stanislav Secrieru, eds. Hacks, Leaks and Disruptions: Russian Cyber Strategies (Paris: EU Institute for Security Studies, 2018), 117.
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