Tension between Russia and Ukraine has been on the rise for several weeks now.
They have been days of crossed accusations from side to side. The United States says there is an “imminent” threat from Moscow to Kiev and has deployed more than 8,000 troops in Eastern Europe.
Vladimir Putin’s government, for its part, has denied the possibility of an attack and accuses Washington of trying to draw his country into war against Ukraine.
The border between the two nations, however, already accumulates more than 100,000 Russian soldiers , which has set off alarms in numerous foreign ministries around the world, which openly speak of the possibility of a war.
The main demand of the Russian government is that the West guarantees that Ukraine will not join NATO, a defensive alliance of 30 countries, which they see as a threat to their security.
But although no military confrontation as such has taken place so far, the Ukrainian authorities have denounced the existence of a “hybrid war” against them.
They did so in mid-January, after assuring that the Kremlin was behind a cyberattack that affected dozens of official government websites.
The action – they affirmed from Kiev – is the ” manifestation of the hybrid war that Russia has maintained in Ukraine since 2014″ , referring to the year of the Kremlin’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula.
But what is a hybrid war? And what factors determine its existence?
What does a “hybrid war” mean?
The concept —which was used for the first time in the early 2000s— has to do with the implementation of a strategy (or several) of confrontation that does not necessarily go through a military-type combat.
This is how Antonio Alonso Marcos, professor of International Relations at the University of San Pablo CEU , explains it to BBC Mundo .
“A country can use means that undermine the security and stability of another country. And they are not military means, but, for example, cyberattacks or the launch of a massive wave of tweets that go against the position of a certain government . That is called hybrid warfare,” he says.
The use of mechanisms such as insurgency, migration or the use of “fakes news” and disinformation , among others, is also considered part of these non-traditional combat strategies, where propaganda and provocation are fundamental factors.
According to Alonso Marcos, new technologies are an important facilitator for hybrid wars due to the increase in cybercrimes.
When the cyberattack on Ukraine occurred in mid-January, the authorities of that country stated in a statement that the objective “was not only to intimidate society,” but also to “destabilize the situation” with “false information about the vulnerability of state IT infrastructures.
In recent days, and amid fears of a Russian military attack, Ukrainian security services have reported hundreds of hoax bomb threats, prompting the closure of some schools.
This has also been described by the Ukrainian authorities as part of Russia’s hybrid warfare strategy.
The Kremlin, however, denies any plan of aggression against Ukraine.
An increasingly common mechanism
According to various experts, this type of aggression is becoming more and more common.
Academic Antonio Alonso Marcos explains that “traditional wars, with a uniformed army entering the territory of another state, as was done in Iraq or Afghanistan, hardly happen anymore.”
“Now, wars are more asymmetrical, with other actors involved,” he says.
Another difference between hybrid warfare and traditional warfare is that it is difficult to know when the first begin . In traditional warfare, generally one country declares war on another. But in these cases, the dynamics are not the same.
“The war is a process that is happening [between Russia and Ukraine]. But even so, it is not clear that it is actually a war of one country against another country, because there is no open invasion,” he explains to BBC Mundo Olga Malchevska , journalist for the Ukrainian service of the BBC.
For Alonso Marcos, “it is not easy” to catalog hybrid warfare because “its predominant characteristic is that it is not carried out with traditional methods, so it also has to do with the political will to identify it that way.”
unrecognizable adversary
The foregoing becomes even more complex because in hybrid warfare it is not easy to recognize who is attacking.
In this case, for example, Russia has consistently denied involvement in the accusations made by the Ukrainians even though, according to experts, it has proven to be adept at attacking the cyber domain of countries.
“Russia will continue to deny it and it is a good way to hide its involvement. This mechanism works even better in cases of cyberattacks, when it is difficult to know who is behind it. That is why it is seen as a very efficient way to confront the adversary,” Sergei Goryashko, from the BBC’s Russian service , explains to BBC Mundo .
Another dimension of this type of conflict is the immersion of separatists who seek to destabilize a certain country, something that is not done openly either.
“They are not soldiers of a country, but local people who agree with that country. [In the case of Russia and Ukraine] many experts proved and evidenced that local people were using weapons supplied by Russia and also by the main authorities of the countries. so-called rebels,” explains Olga Malchevska.
“There is a lot of evidence that Russia supports the separatists, but the Putin government takes very little responsibility for it,” he adds.
Other cases
It is not the first time that there has been talk of a hybrid war with the case of Russia and Ukraine.
One of the most recent episodes is what happened in 2021 between Lithuania and Poland (both from the European Union) and Belarus (an ally of Russia).
The migratory flow from Belarus doubled, putting the governments of Lithuania and Poland in check, who directly accused Putin of “orchestrating” a crisis in both nations in response to the sanctions imposed by the European Union against the Belarusian regime, led by Alexander Lukashenko.
A BBC investigation, published in October last year, found how Belarus was helping migrants from these countries by granting them tourist visas to move through their country towards the border with Lithuania and Poland.
The Lithuanian government said the migrants were being used as a “political weapon”, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said they were facing a “cynical and dangerous hybrid attack”.