Welcome to a new world of hybrid warfare
Wolfgang Hansson
This is a commenting text. Analysis and positions are the writer's.
Updated 22.12 | Published 21.53
Finland and the rest of NATO can count on a long period of hybrid war operations from Russia.
The put forward demand to unilaterally change the border with Finland and Lithuania is just the latest example of how Russia tries in various ways to disrupt, provoke and confuse.
Quick version
If the Russian Ministry of Defense publishes a note on its official website detailing plans to unilaterally change the border line between Finland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea, you can be pretty sure that it is not a mistake.
It is not a single official who accidentally pushed the wrong button, although Putin's spokesman Peskov now claims that Russia has no plans to change the border.
On the contrary, it is completely in accordance with a Russian modus operandi where you throw out a fire torch to read the reaction of the outside world. Only to deny the whole thing the next moment.
All with the aim of creating confusion about Russia's real intentions.
Who doesn't remember how, in the days before the invasion of Ukraine, Foreign Minister Lavrov, spokesman Peskov and Putin himself almost laughed at the outside world when they warned of an invasion despite the presence of a few hundred thousand Russian soldiers on the Ukrainian border.
- We have no plans whatsoever to invade Ukraine, read the shocking message from the Kremlin. West is just hysterical.
We all know what happened a few days later, on February 24, 2022.
In today's security policy situation, you simply cannot trust anything that is said officially from the Kremlin. That may be correct but it may just as well be part of a well-planned hybrid operation.
Creates panic
To suddenly claim that a border at sea that was set in 1985 no longer applies is a typical such operation. Russia has signed a UN convention that excludes unilateral changes to borders.
But Russia has a large naval base in the Baltic Sea in Kaliningrad. The area is strategically important for Russia.
The Russian demands naturally create concern, perhaps even panic, in the affected countries.
They show that Russia is ready at any time to back out of its international obligations and agreements.
Just as they broke all the rules that go during the warfare in Ukraine. Russia knows no borders.
No one can be sure that some of the deals made with Russia will apply in the future.
Especially not Finland and Sweden, who were disobedient enough to join NATO. One of Putin's demands before the invasion of Ukraine was that Sweden and Finland were not allowed to join NATO under any circumstances.
Instead of admitting the strategic mistake he made when he invaded Ukraine, Putin instead wants to punish Finland, Sweden and NATO in general.
Border disputes are usually the traditional starting point for justifying acts of war. When Putin's little green men seized Crimea in 2014 and Russia shortly afterwards annexed the Ukrainian peninsula, it was with the justification that it actually belonged to Russia. This despite the fact that Russia has guaranteed Ukraine's territorial integrity in international agreements.
Tested before
Now Russia wants to turn small parts of Finland and Lithuania into Russian territory.
At best, it's just to tease and provoke. It would be extremely unwise for Putin to start a war against a NATO country. But he likes to give the impression that he is not afraid of NATO. Both abroad and in front of the home crowd.
It is likely that the Russian demands are just one in a series of hybrid attacks aimed at NATO. We have seen during the winter how Russia sent waves of asylum seekers towards various border stations in Finland. The Finns quickly responded by first closing some border stations and then the entire border.
Fear that the Russians would otherwise send thousands of migrants in an attempt to destabilize the situation in Finland, a country historically very reluctant to accept non-European refugees.
The Russians, of course, did not admit that it was a hybrid operation, but claimed that hundreds of migrants simultaneously decided to cross the Finnish border, where normally no asylum seekers come at all.
But the method had already been tested with the help of Belarus and its dictator Alexandr Lukashenko, who sent migrants towards the Polish-Lithuanian border and then prevented them from returning. Before that, Putin played the same game against NATO country Norway's northern border during the great refugee wave of 2015-16.
Cheap warfare
Hybrid warfare is a cheap type of war. Often, the other party has not even understood that they have been exposed to a hidden act of war with the aim of causing harm to the recipient.
The toolbox includes all kinds of influence operations, cyber attacks and sabotage against important infrastructure, such as the damaged telecommunications cable between Sweden and Estonia. That is what today's Russia is focused on.
Finland, the Baltics, Sweden and the rest of NATO are doing their best to prepare for a wave of Russian hybrid operations in the coming years.
If Russia can't win in Ukraine, Putin can at least do various evil things in the West.
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