The importance of gaining support by the target population is particularly salient for estimating information warfare capabilities, which are increasingly seen as a dangerous aspect of Russian ‘hybrid warfare’. Former NATO SACEUR Philip Breedlove called the annexation of Crimea the ‘most amazing information blitzkrieg… in the history of information warfare’. This sentiment was echoed by Thornton, who concluded that ‘the major threat to Western interests anywhere in the world is… the threat posed by information warfare such as that recently conducted by Russia. It has achieved clear results, and this success can be repeated’ (2015: 40, 45). It is beyond doubt that Russia has stepped up its efforts to improve its information warfare capabilities, both in the technological (electronic warfare and cyber operations) and psychological (information/disinformation operations and deception) realms. It is also clear that the Kremlin is using information in various guises (social media and ‘twitter trolls’, stateowned media outlets, such as Russia Today and Sputnik) as a foreign policy tool to seek political influence abroad and that this poses challenges to its neighbours and to the West (Kofman and Rojansky 2015). With regard to the latter, it is at least debatable whether this type of use of information should be discussed under the umbrella of ‘hybrid warfare’ at all or whether this represents, as Samuel Charap wrote, a ‘dangerous misuse of the word “war”’ (2015/16: 52).
The generalizability of conclusions from the success of Russian information operations in Crimea per se should not be overstated. As the experience of many militaries using information operations during war has shown, they rarely achieve conclusive results and often fall short of expectations (Jackson 2016). In Crimea, Russian information operations were effortless as their primary target was receptive to the Kremlin’s narrative of events from the outset. The success of Russian information operations beyond Crimea cannot be taken for granted, however. For example, a large-scale study assessing the influence of official Russian narratives and disinformation during the Crimea crisis in eight European countries found that this influence was ‘largely limited’ (Pynnöniemi and Rácz 2016: 312). Moreover, Mark Galeotti concluded that the major ‘success’ of Russian information warfare since its intervention in Ukraine seemed to have been the growth of negative views of Russia across Europe from 54 to 74 per cent within the space of a year (2015).
Favourable circumstances in Crimea meant that Russian ‘hybrid warfare’ in this case yielded impressive results. Russia’s approach in Crimea worked, because it applied suitable means to a specific end. It made ‘concrete a set of objectives through the application of force in a particular case’, which is evidence of good strategy (Strachan 2013: 12). It is not, however, evidence of the invention of a new, war-winning formula that can easily be replicated in a different, less favourable scenario.
What ‘hybrid warfare’ can and cannot explain
The concept of ‘hybrid warfare’ has been useful inasmuch as it highlighted a number of new capabilities demonstrated in Crimea and it showed that the Russian military was not as stuck in Cold War thinking as previously assumed. As Antulio J. Echevarria noted, new strategic concepts are useful in this respect, as they can help draw the attention of policy makers to emerging security challenges. As he also pointed out, however, there is a tendency for concepts such as ‘hybrid warfare’ to turn into a dogma not supported by strategic analysis that can hinder, rather than aid, decision making and strategic planning in the long term (2015: 16). There is evidence that this is already happening in some Western analyses, where almost every Russian foreign policy move is now interpreted as a part of a ‘hybrid campaign’. This is decreasing the explanatory power of an already vague concept. As Michael Kofman has put it, ‘if you torture hybrid warfare long enough it will tell you anything… The term now covers every type of discernible Russian activity, from propaganda to conventional warfare, and most that exists in between. What exactly does Russian hybrid warfare do, and how does it work? The short answer in the Russia-watcher community is everything’ (Kofman 2016).
The concept of ‘hybrid warfare’ first gained traction as it seemed to offer a good explanation for how Russia achieved its swift and almost bloodless victory in the Crimea operation. If Crimea is considered the ‘gold standard’ of Russian ‘hybrid warfare’, its relevance for the analysis of other Russian military interventions is certainly questionable. It is widely held that the ongoing fighting in eastern Ukraine is the extension of an ongoing Russian ‘hybrid war’ against Ukraine (e.g., Iancu et al. 2015). In fact, apart from Russia’s involvement, there is very little similarity, from a strategic point of view, between the Crimea operation and the fighting in Donbas. As Sibylle Scheipers pointed out, Russia used a war-shortening approach in Crimea, where surprise, tempo and superior information was used to conclude the conflict before major battle could even commence. In contrast, in Donbas Russia pursued an indirect approach of the war-lengthening variety, drawing the civilian population into the conflict and relying on a mix of auxiliary fighters and Russian military personnel (Scheipers 2016). Unlike Crimea, the war in Donbas has been far from swift or bloodless. Whether intended or not, the conflict continued into 2016, resulting in over one million internally displaced persons. The death toll approached 10,000 casualties, most of them civilians, by the summer of that year. Even if long-term destabilization of the region was the desired objective, there have been doubts about the degree of Moscow’s control over the fighting. Moreover, there have been costly unintended consequences of the ‘hybrid approach’ pursued in Donbas, such as the downing of the Malaysian airliner MH17 (Galeotti 2014b). Although some features of the war in eastern Ukraine can be described as ‘hybrid’ inasmuch as it involves a mix of conventional and ‘irregular’ tactics, this certainly does not support the idea that such an approach is universally successful. In fact, as Paul J. Saunders noted, ‘what worked in Crimea demonstrably failed in eastern Ukraine’ (2015).
Russia’s involvement and intervention in the Syrian civil war has also been described as ‘hybrid warfare’ (Cordesman 2015). This is particularly puzzling, as it is hard to see significant similarities between the approaches pursued in both conflicts. In contrast to the ‘contactless’ war in Crimea, Russia’s Syria intervention in terms of tactics and technology took the form of a conventional air campaign not dissimilar to Western air-only operations pursued over the past two decades. Russian air operations in Syria have been far from ‘bloodless’ and showed little concern for civilian casualties. According to Ari Heistein and Vera Michlin-Shapir, ‘although the future of the war in Syria is uncertain, what remains clear is that Russia is fighting a hybrid war, combining its military, diplomatic and media capabilities to achieve its goals using limited armed engagement’ (2016). This stretches the concept too far and what the authors describe as ‘hybrid warfare’ is, in fact, basic grand strategy – the level of war where all instruments of power at a state’s disposal are routinely combined towards the achievement of political objectives (Liddell Hart 1967: 335–6). A combination of diplomacy, information, intelligence and economic tools have traditionally been used in most wars and as such this is not an expression of ‘hybridity’. The success of Russian information aimed at influencing international opinion on its involvement in the Syria conflict is also questionable. It is one thing to observe that Russia is using a new ‘technique of narrative construction and control through its international media outlets’ in order to build a ‘triumphalist narrative’ depicting ‘Russian bravery and resolve’, as Heistein and Michlin-Shapir (2016) had put it. It is quite another thing for such a narrative to have traction amongst audiences outside of Russia and in the West. The widespread coverage in the Western media of civilian atrocities caused by Russian airstrikes and accusations of Russian war crimes at the highest level, including in the UN, imply that the international influence of the official Russian narratives is at best severely limited, if not counterproductive.