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“If ‘hybrid’ is now such a magic word - we should close the hybrid skies, put hybrid boots on the ground and ask Belgium to unfreeze some hybrid assets.”—Gabrielius Landsbergis on Twitter/X
At our inaugural Bette’s Book Club event, I asked American Overthrow author Keir Giles what he thinks about the recent comments in the Telegraph made by Kaupo Rosin, the director general of the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service (EFIS).
Along with Rosin’s prediction that Putin’s reign may collapse quickly and imminently due to in part to battlefield losses in his increasingly unpopular war in Ukraine, Rosin believes we need to start calling Russia’s sabotage and subversion attacks on the West “state-sponsored terrorism” and stop hiding behind euphemisms.
I told Keir: “He, like me, agrees that we’ve hidden the type of warfare that has been inflicted on the West under euphemisms and weak words — ‘active measures, hybrid warfare, information warfare’ — all accurate but ineffective at relaying urgency and necessity to take action. What should we have been calling what is happening? You’ve written a handbook on this. What should we have called it?”
Keir responded: “Yes, you’re rolling in a hand grenade, because you know I’ve been arguing against this for the last decade. And now, finally, it seems to be making some headway. It should never have been described as hybrid warfare, grey zone warfare, liminal warfare, subthreshold, all of the other adjectives that were applied to what Russia was doing in order to avoid having to do anything about it. If you simply call it acts of war, or state terrorism, it’s very clear what needs to be done. Instead of the obfuscation of giving it these labels that allow you to pretend that something’s happening that we don’t really understand and can’t really deal with.”
Hybrid Schmybrid
A decade of pretending away acts of war has led to escalation, as Rosin noted in his interview with the Telegraph:
“It’s almost everywhere by now. It’s a campaign orchestrated by the Russian government through the GRU [Russian Military Intelligence] mainly. It is becoming more violent and dangerous. We see that the main targets, currently, are defence industry production sites, but also logistical sites.”
Russia’s goal, he adds, is to “disrupt European supplies, European weapons equipment deliveries to Ukraine”.
Of the often used term, “hybrid warfare,” Rosin said: “Hybrid schmybrid,” which he called a “nice and cosy word” that “distorts from the reality.”
I have written much about Estonia on these pages, because the small Baltic country offers a blueprint on how to thwart Russian aggression.
No Rear Areas
In an interview with Keir from January 2023, I mentioned that he was the first person who taught me that there are not rear areas in the type of subversion operations America and the West were being targeted with, and he said:
“That phrase that you just used ‘no rear areas’ that actually comes from a quote that I pulled from Russia’s Chief of General Staff, Valery Gerasimov. He was talking about the way in which there’s no front line and there’s no rear areas, about the effects that Russia can now deliver, being able to reach across the whole of an adversary’s territory. And that means that the United States is not insulated by distance from how Russia can reach out and do it harm. What we really need is key leader engagement in far more countries than we’ve seen so far.”
I will never forget his next comment, which triggered such urgency that me and my colleagues sent an open letter to Joe Biden on how he needs to handle these acts of war.
Keir said:
“As soon as the leadership of a country admits publicly that they are under attack by Russia, that triggers a whole load of other processes, which make defending against Russia a great deal easier, because it gets over that initial mindset of denial of ‘it’s not happening here,’ and government and media and institutions and businesses and ordinary people actually take those essential steps to protect themselves and to build up that societal resilience, which is the biggest tool in protecting yourself against Russia. So the first step anywhere is just admitting and recognizing the problem.”
And, of course, that acknowledgment never happened in the US.
All we had to do was look further over the waves to see what was working in other countries.
If We Called It Terrorism
In my “If We Called It Terrorism” post written on 20 October 2024, I cited Gabrielius Landsbergis, who was then Lithuania’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. Like Rosin, he annihilated the weak words we’ve been using to refer to Russia’s terrorism on the West, and demanded we take action to stop them.
In that post, I wrote: “We are in a war — it has always been a war, because it has always been terrorism.”
And then I quoted Landsbergis, who in a one minute and 24 seconds video clip said:
Why do we call it hybrid? Because if you call it hybrid, then basically you don’t need to do anything about it. You can just talk about it in the conference, and it solves the problem.
If you call it terrorism, then it implies reaction — that then there’s actually something needs to happen. In several countries, there have been incidents that we know that have been organized, financed by Russians, in order to burn down the buildings, harm people, destroy property. So how else can you call it? And this is where the danger — the biggest danger — comes from, that if we stay in this situation long enough, that sends a very clear message to Russia that basically, they are able to do whatever they want. They can walk around, they can harm people, they can burn down buildings. And we still will be talking about the hybrid, and this is the biggest, biggest problem.
And I usually say — I’m not afraid of Russia — I’m afraid of our fear of Russia. This is what really keeps me up at night. And if we don’t find a way how to stop Russians, how to send a message to them that this is a red line — you cannot cross it — they will continue.
In America, we called acts of war “meddling.”
It’s interesting to me that a decade into consistent state-sponsored terrorism from Russia, there finally seems to be an appetite to call it what it is.
Yesterday, German defense contractor Stefan Thumann told Politico that “Germany and Russia are at war” as he argued that “sabotage operations carried out by Moscow against his country are “acts of war… controlled and coordinated here by the Russian armed forces.”
Like Estonia’s Rosin, Thumann rejects the hybrid warfare label.
Thumann supplies combat drones to Ukraine and lives with full-time protection in an undisclosed location after German authorities uncovered a Russian intelligence plot to poison him, according to Politico.
As Gabrielius Landsbergis wrote today on Twitter/X:
“If ‘hybrid’ is now such a magic word - we should close the hybrid skies, put hybrid boots on the ground and ask Belgium to unfreeze some hybrid assets.”
And I couldn’t resist a quote tweet, when I saw Pedro Sanchez, the prime minister of Spain, repeatedly use the term hybrid warfare on X.
I wrote: “Today is a good day to stop using the word hybrid, which has made it possible for western leaders to do nothing about Russian aggression.”
Last year, when I asked former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele at the Byline Festival why we don’t call Russia’s attacks on the West “war” rather than hiding behind euphemisms, he said: “It’s important to keep the temperature down.”
That’s a luxury for people who haven’t lost their country.
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