A new stage of Russian hybrid warfare

Hello,

In the last video of 2024, I discussed hybrid warfare in light of the recent case of maritime sabotage in Finland. It is an example of how hybrid warfare will change as we get closer to the final stages of the war in Ukraine and how Western European countries will be forced to change their approach to countering Russia's hybrid warfare.

You can watch the video here or read a transcript below.

Best,
Anders

Transcript:

The cases of sabotage on cables in the Baltic Sea by cargo ships have put the issue of maritime hybrid warfare on the agenda. In this video, I want to talk a bit about why this is happening and also what it means for the broader strategy of the western countries in dealing with hybrid warfare. So let's talk about it.

The specific case this time involves a ship called Eagle S, which has damaged a power line and some communication cables between Finland and Estonia, and it's done so by dragging its anchor across the seabed. This happened just a month after a similar incident that involved a Chinese ship that was called Yi Peng 3, which also damaged some cables a bit further south in the Baltic Sea. And overall, there have now been three such cases in just over a year. So there is a pattern here. Cargo ships are being used to sabotage maritime infrastructure in the Baltic Sea.

This is a case of hybrid warfare. If you are interested in seeing more about hybrid warfare on a general level, I've made a video specifically about that. But the short version is that there are all these kinds of things that states can do to harm each other that fall below the threshold of open war. Throughout most of the war in Ukraine, we have seen examples of Russian hybrid warfare against Western Europe. That's different kinds of sabotage: It's arson, it's cyber attacks, but also information operations to try to influence the public opinion. And there have also even been at least one case of a planned assassination in a Western country as part of this hybrid warfare campaign. I also think the cases where drones and missiles have crossed into NATO airspace should probably be considered attempts at hybrid warfare.

So there have been many things going on that can be characterized as hybrid warfare and this maritime sabotage fits into that pattern. And about hybrid warfare as a whole, I will say two things. First, the goal of Russia's hybrid warfare against Western Europe is to bring the war home to the Europeans. They want us to feel vulnerable. They want us to be scared and they want to force us to use a lot of resources to protect ourselves instead of sending those resources to Ukraine.

The Western response to hybrid attacks has so far mostly been to ignore them. I've made several videos about that, but I'll link one up there in the corner. The logic behind that approach has been to deny Russia the benefit of achieving the effect they want. In hybrid warfare, the goal is very often not the sabotage itself, but rather it's the effect that it creates in the information space and in terms of influencing public opinion. And because Western countries have refused to make a big deal out of these various Russian attacks, then it has more or less canceled their impact in the information space. Some of the attacks have gone so far under the radar that the general public hasn't even noticed that they happened.

So because of that Western response, there hasn't been as much of an impact from the Russian hybrid campaign as they would probably have liked. But that doesn't change the fact that their goal is still to bring the war home to the Europeans by waging this campaign against us below the threshold of open war.

The second point I want to make is that as we get closer to the end game in the war in Ukraine, we should expect hybrid attacks on Western Europe to intensify. And this will especially be the case if it looks like Russia is about to lose the war or if they're going to get an outcome of the war that is unfavorable for them. The reason for this is that if Russia realizes that they are about to lose the war, then they will start taking bigger and bigger risks to try to turn the tide.

So as time goes on, there is a trend toward intensification of the hybrid war against Western Europe. And I think the recent examples of sabotage in the Baltic Sea, that it should be seen as an expression of that, that there is this intensification going on. So that's a bit about the broader context.

If we look at the maritime hybrid warfare specifically, then there are a couple of features that make the seas a significant challenge for a country that wants to protect its infrastructure. Most people who are not used to sailing will have a very wrong impression of how good surveillance it's possible to have at sea. I meet a lot of people who assume that with modern technology, it's possible to have a very clear situational picture of what's going on at sea, and that governments will have almost as good a picture of what's happening at sea as they do on land. And that's just not true.

The reality is that most of the things that happen at sea will go unnoticed by the authorities. You can have a fairly good idea about where the big cargo ships are with modern technology, but everything else is still a very manual process. So all the small ships, like sailing yachts, they will more or less go unnoticed. And when you're talking about warships that usually will sail around without their automatic identification systems turned on, then you will have to go and look at them specifically to know who they are and what they're doing.

The challenge that governments have with maritime surveillance is that they have very limited resources to do it. Even countries with large navies don't have enough ships or helicopters or surveillance drones to keep an eye on everything. And usually you also have other tasks that you want your warships to handle. So instead of just sailing around and observing what other ships are doing, you actually want them to do the things that, well, warships do, like practicing warfare.

So there are a lot of things going on at sea that we don't know about. And on top of that, there's also so much infrastructure at sea that it's just impossible to protect all of it. I don't know the number internationally, but just here in Denmark, we have more than 4,000 kilometers of subsea cables and pipelines and all kinds of other things that need protection. So in Europe, there are tens of thousands of kilometers of this infrastructure. The reality is that it's impossible to protect everything. And that means that attacks can happen. Any discussion about how we're going to deal with maritime hybrid warfare has to begin with this realization that we are vulnerable. If the Russians really want to damage some of all this infrastructure, then they will be able to do so.

The way to deal with this is to make it as difficult and resource demanding as possible for the Russians to be successful and to ensure that the consequences of an attack will be minimized. Because that makes it less attractive for the Russians to do it. If it's very complicated to launch an attack and it doesn't really have any significant consequences, then why bother, right? That's the logic you want the Russians to feel.

So the first step here is to make sure that if something is sabotaged, then the consequences will be small. We need redundancy. We should be able to repair the damages very quickly. This has been also one of the keys to how the Ukrainian society still functions after years of intense destruction of their critical infrastructure. They're very good at repairing stuff.

But the other side of that is that even though it's impossible to prevent all attacks, we need to make it as difficult as possible for the Russians to succeed. And that's why I think what Finland is doing right now is important. This is a case where Russia is using their so-called shadow fleet of tankers to conduct sabotage. And even though Russia has a lot of control over this shadow fleet, there are also limitations. The captains of all these ships are not Russian. They come from other countries. So Russia has to somehow persuade them to conduct sabotage. They probably pay them a lot of money or they have other ways to do that. But if Finland now runs this as a criminal case against the captain and he ends up in a Finnish prison for a very long period of time, then that will serve as a deterrent for other captains who are asked to do the same thing next time.

So I think it's possible to find ways to make it more difficult for Russia to conduct sabotage. For example, if they can't use their shadow fleet of cargo ships anymore, because the crews will refuse to cooperate, that will make it more difficult. And it will mean that if they want to keep sabotaging this infrastructure, they will have to use more expensive resources like military assets to do it. They might still do it. But it's also possible that just that will mean that the cost benefit relationship doesn't really make sense for them anymore if they have to do it that way.

But whether we will see these attacks continue against maritime infrastructure in this way or some other way, I think it's important to keep in mind what I said in the beginning of the video. As the war in Ukraine gets closer to the endgame, we should expect Russia's hybrid warfare against Western Europe to intensify on a general level. That might be in the maritime domain, but it will also be in other areas.

And I can't help wondering if what's happening in Finland right now with the ship Eagle S is a sign that the previous strategy for how Western countries have been dealing with hybrid attacks, it might be reaching its limits. If Russia's hybrid attacks intensify against Western Europe, it might become impossible to keep the previous approach of simply ignoring them. Because Russia will insist on not being ignored in all this, so they will push the boundaries until they get a response. And that also means that going forward, the type of hybrid warfare we might see might not be the typical sort of sub-threshold activities that we usually associate with hybrid warfare, but rather something that will trigger an open confrontation with the Western countries. Because that's what Russia needs to achieve if they want to reach their goal of bringing the war home to the Europeans. So I think we might be heading into a period of more intense confrontation, and well, we just need to be prepared for that.

Okay, I will end it here. If you found the video helpful or informative, then please give it a like and also remember to subscribe to the channel and click the bell icon to get notifications when I upload new videos. And if you want to support the channel, you can subscribe to my newsletter at www.logicofwar.com. Thank you very much for watching, and I will see you again next time.