Putin Takes Crimea 2014: Grey-zone warfare opens the Russia-Ukraine conflict (Raid Book 59)

by Mark Galeotti

Whether known by the problematic term ‘hybrid warfare’ or the later ‘grey zone warfare’, terms which are dissected below, it is an example of a type of military confrontation increasingly to be found in the 21st century, where soldiers are introduced not at the beginning of the conflict but the end, after it has already all but been won through other, so-called ‘non-kinetic’ means.

Yevgeny Messner, a tsarist officer who had fought against the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War before fleeing to Belgrade. In his Myatezh: imya tretyey vsemirnoy (‘Subversion: the name of the Third World War’, 1960), he predicted that: Future war will not be fought on the front lines, but throughout the entire territories of both opponents, because behind the front lines, political, social, and economic fronts will appear; they will fight not on a two-dimensional plane, as in olden days, not in a three dimensional space, as has been the case since the birth of military aviation, but in a four-dimensional space, where the psyche of the combatant nations will serve as the fourth dimension.

after Vladimir Putin’s ascension to the presidency in 2000, Russia would find itself adopting tactics that, if anything, were closest to what veteran scholar-diplomat George Kennan, architect of American strategy in the early Cold War, called ‘political warfare’: … the employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives. Such operations are both overt and covert. They range from such overt actions as political alliances, economic measures (as ERP—the Marshall Plan), and ‘white’ propaganda to such covert operations as clandestine support of ‘friendly’ foreign elements, ‘black’ psychological warfare and even encouragement of underground resistance in hostile states.