Europe and the US are concerned about Russia’s hybrid warfare

ASPEN, Colo. –While NATO pledged more support to Ukraine in its bitter war against Russia last week, news of the Kremlin’s latest plots emerged elsewhere in Europe – and alliance members wondered whether a key tool for detecting and thwarting such attacks would disappear under a Trump presidency.

In recent months, European and American intelligence officials have pointed to Russian government efforts to sow chaos across Europe, including attempts to recruit ethnic Russians in Estonia to attack the property of government officials; disinformation campaigns to influence French elections and turn the Moldovan population against its leaders; possible arsons and attempted attacks in Lithuania, England and Poland; and a plot to assassinate the German head of arms manufacturer Rheinmetall, a major supplier of 155mm artillery shells and other military equipment to Ukraine.

“This is part of a pattern, part of an ongoing Russian campaign. And the purpose of this campaign is, of course, to deter NATO allies from supporting Ukraine,” said Jens Stoltenberg, the outgoing NATO Secretary General, last Thursday. He added: “And what we have seen over the last month is that NATO allies have not been intimidated. NATO allies are actually increasing their support and providing more assistance to Ukraine.”

The alliance has been looking for such a pattern. Its 2022 Strategic Concept identifies hybrid warfare by both Russia and China as a key concern and calls on members to “invest in our ability to prepare for, deter, and defend against the coercive use of political, economic, energy, informational, and other hybrid tactics by states and non-state actors.”

Now the alliance members are trying to do just that.

“We have worked to turn this into real plans and programs that demonstrate NATO’s ability to address exactly these kinds of challenges. That will be further advanced at this summit,” US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said last Wednesday.

Blinken described the hybrid attacks as increasingly worrying.

“Every Ally is aware of the fact that in recent months we have experienced attacks, arsons, sabotage, assassination attempts, misinformation, disinformation and cyber threats. These are not isolated incidents. This is part of a deliberate strategy by Russia to undermine our security and the cohesion of the Alliance. This will not work because we see it and act accordingly,” he said.

The allies are working to “forge multilateral security alliances, prepare domestic resistance units, and create new cyber and intelligence capabilities within their national security bureaucracies,” three authors wrote in the Spring 2022 issue of the Texas National Security Review.

However, there are many hurdles that make it difficult to detect and defend against hybrid attacks. One of them is that such preparations may require a blending of military and other government functions, which many democratic governments are reluctant to do.

“This leaves states largely defenseless against the Kremlin’s hybrid tactics, which target civilian (non-military) institutions with the aim of destroying social cohesion,” the authors write.

This idea was reinforced by Scott Jasper, a lecturer at the Naval Graduate School.

“Stopping this threat will require collaboration between government, international, and private partners,” Jasper wrote in an email. “For example, last week the U.S. Department of Justice announced the search of nearly a thousand social media accounts used by Russian state-sponsored actors to build an AI-powered bot farm that spread disinformation in the United States and abroad.”

He noted that the FBI, along with the Cyber ​​National Mission Force of the United States, Canada and the Netherlands, issued a joint cybersecurity alert about an AI-powered bot creator called Meliorator that created authentic-looking social media accounts to spread disinformation.

“The technology company X Corp. (formerly Twitter) voluntarily suspended the bot accounts,” he wrote.

But increased cooperation between military, intelligence and civil authorities remains weak. At the Aspen Security Forum on Wednesday, INTERPOL Secretary General Jürgen Stock described the growing cooperation between non-state criminal organizations as a growing challenge for which governments are still not well prepared due to the difficulties in working together. “We still operate on the basis of national jurisdictions and more than ever the threats to our communities come from outside all jurisdictions. We know that there is a fragmented legal framework and in many of our member countries there are no laws at all to combat cybercrime.”

As Russia’s history of supporting organized crime across Europe shows, organized crime groups can be a very practical extension of state hybrid warfare operations.

While experts from across NATO and other countries cite improved intelligence sharing within government agencies and with allies as critical to detecting and defending against hybrid attacks, the U.S. may soon take a different direction. A report from Politico earlier this month found that U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump is considering restricting the sharing of key intelligence with allies, which could hamper efforts to detect and defend against hybrid attacks.