Uluslararası Kriz ve Siyaset Araştırmaları Dergisi, 2017

Along with western strategists, Russia made a great contribution to developing hybrid war doctrine; highlighting and justifying most of the tested tactics in strategically important state documents such as National Security Strategy, Foreign Policy Concept and Military Doctrine. The theoretical background was "successfully" implemented by Russia during the military operations in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Nagorny Karabakh, Transnistria; but the practical implementation of the complex of tools was demonstrated by invasion into Ukrainian territory, especially the illegal annexation of Crimean Peninsula. Changing a global security conjuncture by Russia turned "hybrid warfare" in a real threat to an overall stability.

Over 18 months into Russia’s not-so-very-proxy, proxy war in Ukraine, there remains a thriving and fascinating debate over the tools of conflict that Russia uses, how one describes those tools and where Russia’s next ‘target’ may be. ... The composition of Russia’s hybrid war tools change with the political terrain. Perhaps the best example of that is in the Baltic Sea area, the most complex, interesting and possibly dangerous area of confrontation, with the possible exception now of Syria. Here the different variants of Russian hybrid war overlap as Russia applies different tools, and different rules, to its relations with different states.

National Security Review, 2019

The goal of the study is to examine hybrid warfare's role and place in the Russian military thought. Hybrid warfare is a Western term and was largely missing from the Russian military literature until 2014. Russian theorists have started to use the notion broadly only after hybrid war has become the popular Western term to label the Russian warfare seen in Ukraine. Ironically, in the Russian understanding it is the West (i.e. the United States) that wages hybrid war, and as such the notion is a synonym for Russian expressions like "new type" or "new generation" war. While Moscow's perception on events of the Arab Spring-which are seen as cases for Western warfare-is distorted, Russian military thinkers probably correctly evaluate how the development of technology (particularly information technology) will change the content of war. Russian forecasts on the primacy of information domain in high-tech future wars preceded Western thinking about the subject. However, today similar thoughts on the preeminent role of information space are widely held by Western military thinkers, too. The paper argues, that in the Russian understanding the so-called hybrid war is the general form of future war.

Pakistan Journal of International Affairs

The primary focus of this research is to understand Russian hybrid warfare as a tool of Russian Foreign policy in contemporary Syria. Although hybrid warfare is not new, however Russian focus on hybrid warfare appears to signal a reorientation of its foreign policy, most visibly in Syria. Russian resurgence has caused a stir in the international community, particularly after the 'colour revolution' in Georgia in 2008. The threat seems to have grown with the Crimean Annexation of 2014 and the alleged Russian role in the U.S presidential election 2016. Russian hybrid warfare became noticeable in the Middle East, specifically in Syria after the infamous 'Arab Spring' 2011. The use of controlled warfare tactics in countering the enemy, aiding the proxies, and public opinion formation (misinformation); working aside from the governmental presentation has accelerated the international concern, as the legal uncertainties in the international law, leaves room for use of hybr...

Given the situation with Syria and elsewhere, please see a draft of my latest peer-reviewed piece in the Royal United Services Institute publication, the RUSI Journal. The article attempts a comprehensive definition of contemporary Russian warfare which I hope will contribute towards a wider debate on the subject amongst researchers, academics, soldiers and historians. Here is the abstract: In this article, Robert Seely offers a comprehensive assessment of what has become known as Russian 'hybrid' warfare. First, he asks whether 'hybrid' is the most appropriate term to use when studying contemporary Russian warfare. Second, he introduces a method of categorisation to help make sense of the considerable diversity of Russian tools of war. Finally, he suggests that contemporary Russian warfare is more than just war, and amounts to a reinvention of strategic art, where the tools of state power are integrated into a single whole. This is a manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in the RUSI Journal, 3 April 2017. The Version of Record is available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03071847.2017.1301634

CICERO FOUNDATION GREAT DEBATE PAPER, 2017

During the last decade, Hybrid Warfare has become a much-evoked, yet controversial, term in the academic, military and political discourses. This paper argues that from a military tactical-operational concept intended to describe the evolving reality of the battlefield in the 21st century, the idea of ‘Russian Hybrid War’ has been become a panacea to the identity crisis that the West (especially NATO, as its military alliance) has experienced since the end of the Cold War. This paper aims to trace the development of the contemporary definition of the so-called ‘Russian Hybrid Warfare’ focusing on several important aspects that have been shaping the conceptual understanding of this term and its political usage.

Irregular Warfare Center, 2023

2018

2018

The security policy of the Russian Federation has long involved elements of threat to neighbouring countries and forcing the hand of its political partners. In the last decade, Russia has used hybrid modes of warfare to instigate conflicts and instability in its neighbouring countries, while remaining below a certain threshold of violence, allowing it to dodge retaliatory consequences. The authors of the article indicate that the objective of the use of hybrid modes of warfare in Ukraine consists in blurring motives and actors in order to obfuscate a decisive and efficient response. This article argues further that these tactics, if used against a member of the Atlantic Alliance, would effectively allow such an attack to remain below the Article 5 applicability threshold, thereby making it difficult for alliance members to reach consensus on the characterisation of the attack. Even though the member states of NATO and the EU have not been direct targets of Russian actions, former republics of the Soviet Union can be considered to be in the danger zone, based on Russian political statements and its hybrid activities in these countries.

This short analysis intends to identify the strategic and operative requirements of Russia's "hybrid warfare", based on studying the field experiences gained in Ukraine. The concrete aim of this research is to define, where, and against, which countries Russia may be able to use this new form of warfare in its full spectrum.