Technically, the Western countries he attacks can’t always prove right away that Putin is personally responsible for a specific act of aggression. That’s in the nature of hybrid warfare, which deliberately blurs the boundaries between military, technological, psychological and other kinds of combat and dodges easy attribution. But experts are picking up that signature whiff.
Over the weekend, rail traffic in northern Germany came to a screeching halt for several hours. Two separate radio cables had been severed concurrently, one acting as backup for the other, hundreds of miles away. Investigations are underway. But the consensus is that this was professional, and highly sophisticated, sabotage.
That outage followed suspiciously choreographed explosions deep under the Baltic Sea the other week. Those detonations damaged two pipelines meant to pump natural gas from Russia to Germany — which Putin wants to blackmail into submission via energy starvation. The giant Baltic methane bubble reminded the entire Western alliance that it has hundreds of other vulnerable links on the ocean floors, carrying everything from gas to electricity and internet data.
With every such act of sabotage and provocation — this week, there’ve also been cyberattacks against several US airports — an interesting dynamic unfolds in some Western countries. The cognoscenti immediately point to Putin as the likeliest perpetrator. But others, upon hearing the name, react as though somebody had just shouted “Voldemort.” Right on cue, they dredge up conspiracy theories from the nether regions of the Kremlin’s propaganda swamp. Maybe it was the Yanks, maybe it was us, maybe it didn’t even happen at all.
And that, too, is what Putin wants. He needs Americans, Germans, Italians, Hungarians and others to fight with — and even to start hating — their own compatriots. He wants us to start believing, as the author Peter Pomerantsev has put it, that “nothing is true and everything is possible.” He wants to gaslight us into doubting reality — good and evil, victim and aggressor, self-defense and escalation.
This way, Putin knows, many of us will be even more frightened of him. Of course we’re scared that he might drop nukes. But now we also worry that he could take out our power and water supply, our telecommunications and hospitals, or that he could otherwise mess with our lives, wherever we happen to be. As a top brass in Germany’s army told a newspaper, we’re in a state of being no longer fully at peace and not yet really at war.
Contemplating all these theaters of war in their entirety, we must give Putin a certain kind of credit. He’s probably long been laughing at the arbitrary distinctions Western military analysts have drawn, which have become silos in our minds, and therefore in our preparations to defend ourselves — against him.
That starts with the term “hybrid warfare.” The underlying idea — of strategic ambiguity in fighting, basically — is as old as war, and therefore humanity. But the term was coined only in 2007 — by Frank Hoffman, an American military think-tanker — to describe what Putin was already well on his way to practicing.
The same applies to the so-called “domains” of war. Originally, these were land and sea, later joined by air, then space and then cyberspace. These distinctions may have made sense to logistics planners in defense ministries, which could assign a service — army, navy, air force — to each domain.
But they’re irrelevant to an enemy like Putin, who intuitively mixes all the means provided by the physical and psychological universe to manipulate, blackmail and violate his adversaries. He has already used migrants, hydrocarbons, wheat, Novichok, Manchurian candidates, conspiracy theories and much else. He’d just as gladly avail himself of viruses, radiation and whatever else comes along.
We must expect more cables to be cut, and more pipes to explode. We should get ready for factories to turn dark without warning, satellites to behave strangely, navigation systems to crash and cash dispensers to deny our PINs. And every time, we’ll see more of Putin’s “useful idiots” — his sock puppets in Western politics and media — telling us not to believe whatever is happening.