- Frank Gardner
- BBC security correspondent
image source, Reuters
In September last year, strong underwater explosions in the Baltic Sea ripped huge holes in the Nord Stream gas pipelines between Denmark and Sweden.
Mysterious underwater explosions, anonymous cyber-attacks, and subtle online campaigns to undermine Western democracies: they are all “hybrid threats.”
The BBC visited a center dedicated to fighting a relatively new form of warfare that is increasingly worrying NATO and the European Union.
“It’s about the manipulation of the information space. It’s about attacks on critical infrastructures,” explains Teija Tiilikainen, when asked to define hybrid warfare.
She is the director of the European Center of Excellence for Combating Hybrid Threats (Hybrid CoE), created in Helsinki, Finland, six years ago.
Tiilikainen explains that it consists of an ambiguous threat format, against which it is very difficult for nations to fight and protect themselves.
image source, Getty Images
Cyber attacks are part of hybrid threats.
real threats
But these threats are not fictitious.
In September of last year, Powerful underwater explosions under the Baltic Sea ripped huge holes in Nord Stream gas pipelines, between the coasts of Denmark and Sweden. The pipelines were built to transport Russian gas to northern Germany.
Moscow was quick to deny any responsibility, but Western suspicions centered on a possible Russian motive for continuing to deprive the West of power, as punishment for backing Ukraine after Russia’s invasion last February.
Then this election interference. Few people realized it at the time, but after the 2016 US election, investigators concluded that there had been concerted Russian interference – again, denied by Moscow – aimed at hurting Hillary Clinton’s chances against Donald Trump.
This was allegedly used for this online “bots”, artificial social media accounts controlled by state-backed cyber-activists, working out of “troll factories” in St. Petersburg.
Another method is misinformation: the deliberate spread of an alternative and false narrative, often attractive to certain more receptive sectors of the population.
This phenomenon has accelerated since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with millions of citizens – not just in Russia, but even in Western countries – accepting the Kremlin’s line that the invasion was a necessary act of self-defense.
image source, Reuters
Hybrid threats include underwater sabotage, a growing concern here in the Baltic Sea
neutral territory
To help Western governments identify these threats and protect against them, NATO and the EU created the Hybrid CoE in Finland.
The country is an interesting and perhaps natural choice for a center of this type. Finland has remained neutral since World War II, when it ceded territory to the antigua USSR.
The two countries share a 1,300 kilometer long border. Now a nervous Finland has drawn ever closer to the West, completing its application for NATO membership last year.
On a cold, snowy morning, I visited the center, located in an office block near the Ministry of Defense and a short distance from the gray Soviet-era Russian embassy building.
There, director Teija Tiilikainen leads a team of some 40 analysts and subject matter experts from various NATO and EU countries, including a Briton on loan from the Ministry of Defense in London.
Tiilikainen explains that one of the focuses of attention is the Arctic, where they have detected great potential for hybrid threats.
“New sources of energy are emerging,” he explains. “There are new possibilities for the great powers to protect their interests. There is also a lot of manipulation of information.”
“The Russian narrative is that the Arctic is a special non-conflict region where nothing bad happens, and yet Russia is building its military there.”
image source, Getty Images
Attacks as subtle as they are dangerous
Maybe the key distinguishing feature of hybrid threats is that they almost never involve an actual attack, that is, that someone opens fire with a weapon. They are more subtle, but no less dangerous.
They are also non-attributable in nature, which means that it is often difficult to determine who is behind these acts, such as the 2007 massive cyberattack against Estonia, or last year’s gas pipeline explosions under the Baltic.
The authors take care to leave as few clues as possible.
There are numerous ways for one State to harm another without resorting to direct military action.
This is illustrated by a manual prepared by the Center in which hybrid maritime threats are described and which contains 10 imaginary but very plausible scenarios.
They range from the clandestine use of underwater weapons to the declaration of a control zone around an island, to the blockade of straits.
One real scenario that they have examined in detail was Russia’s actions in the Azov Sea prior to its invasion of Ukraine.
Starting in October 2018, Ukrainian ships had to queue for inspection by Russian officials if they wanted to proceed from their home ports of Mariupol and Berdyansk through the Kerch Strait and out into the Black Sea.
These delays – according to Jukka Savolainen, director of vulnerabilities and resilience – could last for days or even up to two weeks, with the consequent economic damage to Ukraine.
image source, Getty Images
Russia managed to win the information war between substantial sections of the population in favor of the invasion of Ukraine.
The information war
But it is in the field of misinformation that the center’s experts have found the most surprising results.
After collating and evaluating numerous opinion polls across Europe, they have come to the conclusion that in several NATO countries, Russia is winning the information war among substantial sectors of the population.
In Germany, for example, the Kremlin’s version that its attack on Ukraine was a necessary reaction to NATO provocation has been gaining popularity as the war rages on.
In Slovakia, more than 30% of respondents believes that the Ukraine war was deliberately provoked by the West. In Hungary, 18% blamed the war on “the oppression of the Russian-speaking population in Ukraine.”
Jakub Kalensky, an analyst from the Czech Republic, uses the water analogy to illustrate the need to suppress Moscow’s disinformation campaign.
“I would not assess Russian disinformation as especially sophisticated,” he explains.
“It’s not about the appeal of the message, it’s about the way they succeed is through sheer quantity. There’s no reason to give these people access to social media platforms. Everyone wants access to water drinkable, but we don’t allow them to poison the water.
Tilicainen explica que the role of the hub is not to take action to counter hybrid threatsbut to assess, inform and then train others to do what is necessary to protect Europe from this growing phenomenon.
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