I understand but when does the West get fed up with Russia's hybrid warfare?
Not sure. I guess it depends on which technique we are talking about.
Hybrid Warfare is a mixture of several different techniques to achieve Russian foreign policy objectives.
They use criminal elements (to smuggle stuff into targeted countries), to carry out hits they do not want Russian governmental fingerprints on. Smuggling by nature is surreptitious.
They use propaganda to influence Russian (or Russia-friendly) populations in targeted countries. Do you shut down free speech? What happens when the Russians surreptitiously take control of the censors and, instead of
stopping Russian propaganda, they are the ones ensuring that only Russian propaganda gets published? Also, ban RT and then the Russians will point out how the West does not live up to its own ideals of freedom of speech.
Economic levers? Why did Europeans buy Russian oil? Because it was the cheapest oil available to them. You can ban that stuff, but when voters get ticked off and vote the government out of office, what lesson do you think the other parties will take from that?
Cyber attacks? How do we know who committed them? How do you arrest those inside Russia or China?
Resistance organizations sponsored by the Russian government? If you outlaw them, they will just go underground and continue their activities. Also, if you outlaw a paintball league that happens to have nothing but ethnic Russians as members (in countries with an ethnic Russian minority like Estonia or Latvia), then get ready for a propaganda campaign about how the government seethes with race-hatred against Russians.
One of the errors that early air power theorists made was to underestimate the response of targeted countries. If you are on your way to destroying Nazi Germany's rail system, you are giving the Nazis a really powerful incentive to get really good at repairing rail damage. November 1944 was the record Allied bomb tonnage month for the entire war, and also the Nazi record tank and aircraft production month.
The same goes for countering hybrid threats. If you stop one technique, the Russians do not just throw up their hands and give up on their pursuit of their foreign policy objectives, they just find another way to pursue the same objective, by other technique. And the Russians are happy to sacrifice a few lower level operatives to achieve their goals. In fact, the recent prisoner swap, we gave back a lot of the Russians intel operatives the West had arrested and convicted. So, really, no harm, no foul. Send an FSB (or criminal) operative to murder a Chechen dissident in Berlin? It's okay, you get him back after a while if you have some Western bargaining chips rotting in a Russian jail.
www.forbes.com
