Beyond the “Hybrid War” Cliché

The author argues that Europeans must stop speaking of a “hybrid war,” when in fact it is a systemic cognitive war whose goal is to make us think in terms shaped by Putin’s lies. Our leaders remain trapped in a vocabulary—“hybrid war,” “escalation,” “de-escalation”—and in a conceptual blindness that condemns them to fight the previous war while the adversary is already waging the next one. Recognizing the link between the war in Ukraine and Europe’s cognitive war is the precondition for an effective response.

On September 26, 2025, three Russian MiG-31s violated Estonian airspace for twelve minutes. A week earlier, 19 drones crossed the Polish border, forcing NATO to fire its first shots since the start of the war in Ukraine. Then, for ten days, dozens of drones paralyzed military bases and airports across Europe, from Denmark to Romania. In a matter of weeks, more than 500 reports flooded emergency centers—the desired effect, perhaps.

These violations are not “diplomatic incidents.” They reveal a war already underway, unlike any Europe has seen since 1945. Cables cut in the Baltic, cyberattacks on hospitals, a “ghost fleet” off the coast of Denmark: all these signs point to a truth that our leaders struggle to name.

Because what we call “hybrid warfare” is simply war. It is a cognitive war, but also an Orwellian, subversive, systemic war, whose goal is to accustom us to thinking within the universe of Putin’s lies, to make us accept Russian conditions in the real world, and to prepare for more aggressions in Europe.

Therefore, putting an end to this “hybrid war” requires first defining it and naming what it conceals.

The colonization of our mental space

We suffer from a conceptual confusion that prevents us from understanding the war being waged against us. The term “hybrid war,” ubiquitous in our analyses, does not describe reality—it limits what we can think, and the metaphor of the hybrid engine locks us into an inadequate framework.

This cognitive war aims first and foremost, according to O’Brien’s chilling formula in 1984, “Power over minds. If we have that, everything else follows¹.“ The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) confirms this totalitarian ambition: ”The primary objective of Russian cognitive warfare is to shape the decision-making of its adversaries and erode their will to act².” It operates in four mutually reinforcing dimensions: Cognitive, Orwellian, Subversive, and Systemic. Together, they represent a revolution in the art of warfare that attacks the very foundations of our democratic societies.

The cognitive dimension continues the practice of “active measures, the heart and soul of Soviet intelligence to weaken the West and create divisions within NATO³,” which Putin experimented with as soon as he was assigned in 1987 to the First Directorate of the State Security Committee. Updated by the FSB⁴, they are formalized in the concept of “reflexive control,”⁵ theorized by Soviet mathematician Vladimir Lefebvre in the 1960s. It is a refinement of maskirovka—a centuries-old tradition of Russian military deception, popularized in the West by Tom Clancy in Red Storm Rising⁶—but where maskirovka aims to deceive through camouflage, reflexive control aims to control the very foundations of our decision making. Lefebvre defines it as “transmitting information specially prepared to induce the recipient to voluntarily make the decision desired by the initiator⁷.”

Its originality lies in its ambition: not to convince us of the validity of the claims, but to make us reason within a given conceptual framework in order to lead us to conclusions favorable to Moscow – while leaving us with the illusion that we are defending our own interests. What Chinese General Sun Tzu proposed as an ideal – “Break the enemy’s resistance without fighting⁸”– reflexive control elevates to a method. Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz defined war as “the continuation of politics by other means⁹”, but cognitive warfare pursues it through the manipulation of perceptions.

The example of the “peace negotiations” in Ukraine illustrates this mechanism. Accepting the very idea that it is necessary to ‘negotiate’ with Russia is already tantamount to implicitly recognizing that Moscow has legitimate grievances. Once this basis has been adopted, logic naturally leads to territorial “compromises” that ratify Russian conquests.

The Orwellian dimension extends the cognitive approach by trapping us in the universe of its lies. In 1984: “The Party commanded you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. That was its ultimate command¹⁰.” But the Russian strategy is more subtle. The Institute for the Study of War reveals the essence of this approach: “The Kremlin succeeds if it persuades its opponents that it is too difficult to know the real truth, too difficult to resist Russia, too difficult to be sure which side is right and which is wrong. Moscow does not need to persuade its opponents that its views and objectives are correct—just that resisting Russia is pointless, unjustified, or imprudent¹¹.”

The bombing of the maternity hospital in Mariupol on March 9, 2022, reveals this mechanism with chilling clarity. Faced with Associated Press images showing bloodied pregnant women being evacuated from the rubble, Russia systematically reversed reality: the hospital became a “military base,” the patients became “actresses,” and the pregnant woman on a stretcher became a “blogger wearing makeup.”

The goal: to establish what Orwell called “doublethink,” the ability to simultaneously hold two opinions that cancel each other out, even though we know they are contradictory, and to believe in both. The 19,546 Ukrainian children who have been deported were “evacuated for their protection.” The war of aggression became a “special operation” aimed at “denazifying” Ukraine—even though Zelensky is Jewish and several members of his family perished in the Holocaust¹².

This organized denial of reality does not aim to establish a credible counter-truth. It seeks to destroy the very concept of factual truth, to make us abandon the idea that there is such a thing as objective reality. The result: widespread disorientation. We do not necessarily believe the Russian lies, but we cease to believe firmly in anything.

The subversive dimension is the physical arm of cognitive warfare: sabotage, cyberattacks, assassinations, infiltration, and the methodical creation of chaos. Each action maximizes its psychological impact by undermining institutions. This strategy of organized chaos is not new. Fritz Lang masterfully anticipated it in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), in which the deranged criminal devises a plan to “upset institutions and the established order” through seemingly absurd crimes: “When men are dominated by terror, driven mad with fear, chaos will be the supreme law, and the hour of the Empire of Crime will have arrived¹³.” Lang, a visionary filmmaker from Weimar, understood that this seemingly absurd violence obeys a higher logic—the elimination of our ideals—and constitutes the ultimate weapon against democratic societies.

The strategy excels at creating community chaos at low cost. “Red hands” in Paris in October 2023¹⁴, “Stars of David” a few days later, pigs heads outside mosques in September 2025. The goal is not the graffiti itself, but the explosion of tension it triggers. “From October 7 onward, the Kremlin’s networks of influence began to exploit the conflict in order to weaken public support for Ukraine¹⁵.” Each symbol triggers trauma, exacerbates divisions, and sows suspicion. The debate becomes poisoned, social media networks flare up, and cohesion cracks. It is The Testament of Dr. Mabuse updated on a continental scale.

The subversive dimension also targets individuals. The attempted assassination of Armin Papperger, CEO of Rheinmetall, foiled in July 2024¹⁶, was a message to the European defense industry. On October 13, 2025, four men were arrested in Biarritz as they were preparing to shoot Vladimir Osechkin, a Russian opposition figure who had taken refuge in France¹⁷. The message is clear: arming Ukraine or denouncing the regime makes you a target on European territory.

The systemic dimension coordinates the others on three levels: tactical, operational, and strategic. At the tactical level, operations appear scattered: a Romanian TikTok influencer, an anti-Semitic tag in Paris, a cyberattack against an Estonian hospital. Each incident appears isolated, making it easier to deny.

These operations are part of large-scale operational campaigns. The ISW identifies several Russian campaigns targeting the Baltic states: “Redrawing maritime borders; granting pensions and Russian citizenship to Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians; and accusing local governments of Nazism¹⁸.” These campaigns are setting the stage for the Kremlin to justify future military action.

At the strategic level, all these operations converge toward a central goal. A severed cable in the Baltic Sea is not just meant to disrupt communications; it is part of a campaign to accustom us to the idea that our security ultimately depends on Russian goodwill.

The real hybrid war: total war

Some even dispute the existence of hybrid warfare. “There’s no fire,” they say, so there’s no war. This objection reveals a conceptual misunderstanding. The theorists who coined the term “hybrid warfare¹⁹” sought to identify the evolution of warfare through the incorporation of different modes: “We add a fourth dimension […] that deals with psychological aspects or information operations…” The fire is indeed there—not in the form of gunfire, but in the form of danger.

“Russia’s new total war integrates the two Russian modes of the 20^th Century²⁰,” observes British politician Bob Seely: the real hybrid war, the one that deserves the name, combines the war of aggression against Ukraine with the cognitive war being waged simultaneously in Europe. These two theaters are not separate conflicts but two sides of the same strategy, each reinforcing the other.

In Ukraine, Russia is not only waging a conventional war of territorial conquest. It is waging a terrorist war—systematic bombing of civilian infrastructure, mass rape, and torture—and a war of identity erasure, as evidenced by the tens of thousands of deported children, the hundreds of thousands of Russified Ukrainians, and the cultural plundering. This combination of physical terror and negationist annihilation reveals the totalitarian nature of Russia’s aggression.

Simultaneously, in Europe, cognitive warfare aims to paralyze our capacity for resistance by cultivating our weariness²¹ and leading us to accept Russia’s terms in Ukraine by persuading us that any other option would be too costly or doomed. This dialectic reveals the structural complementarity of the two theaters: consolidating gains by persuading us of their irreversibility, or compensating for failures through cognitive intensification to divert attention, sow doubt, and erode our willingness to support Ukraine.

The Finnish series The Conflict²² illustrates this total war and shows the strategic unity of seemingly heterogeneous operations. Pro-Russian mercenaries seize the Hanko Peninsula and offer to “lease” it to the Helsinki government. The scenario deploys four dimensions: cognitive (imposing “negotiation”), Orwellian (aggression becomes a “misunderstanding,” mercenaries become “tenants”), subversive (hostages, communication jamming), systemic (division between an overwhelmed, Munich-style prime minister—let’s do what we’ve always done, negotiate—and a resistant president despite NATO’s reluctance: “Don’t activate Article 5, Madam President”).

Recognizing this unity changes everything. If Europe is truly facing a hybrid war—the combination of war of aggression in Ukraine, plus cognitive warfare in Europe—then we can only effectively combat cognitive warfare in Europe by actively participating in the defense of Ukraine, particularly by protecting its airspace. The two fronts are linked, and victory on one determines success on the other.

Total war aims at the complete submission—physical, mental, cultural—of the adversary. While Guernica inaugurated the bombing of civilians, continued in Coventry and beyond, Russia adds cognitive warfare to its arsenal. Military historian Hew Strachan observes: “Wars have become blurred: they have no clear end²³. “ These wars have no end in two senses: neither a temporal end nor geographical limits to the theater of war. The space of conflict expands indefinitely, from Kyiv to Paris, from the trench to the algorithm, from physical sabotage to cognitive manipulation. The methods transgress all boundaries: between war and peace, civilian and military, truth and lies, reality and perception. This dissolution of boundaries is the essence of contemporary totalitarian warfare.

Cognitive encirclement

Cognitive warfare achieves its objectives through seemingly scattered but coordinated operations, multiplying fronts through manipulation and intimidation, overwhelm and blackmail.

Volodymyr Zelensky embodies one of the most sophisticated campaigns: transforming the symbol of democratic resistance into a geopolitical foil by gradually instilling doubts about his motivations, integrity, and legitimacy.

The narratives mobilize our democratic concerns. Corruption, warmongering, and authoritarianism: each grievance exploits our standards to discredit us in the face of totalitarian aggression. The genius lies in the relay system: these narratives are not disseminated directly by Russian propaganda but by politicians who are either on the payroll or prisoners of lies that suit them. This category of willing “useful idiots,” such as Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Thierry Mariani²⁴, proves effective: their status as elected officials or former leaders lends their words a respectability that masks their harmfulness.

The delegitimization of symbols is accompanied by the intimidation of territories. Russian operations in the Baltic reveal the inadequacy of our analytical frameworks. Interpreting airspace violations, cyberattacks, and disinformation as mere “espionage missions” misses the point: their function is to paralyze our decision-making processes. These operations have two complementary objectives, as illustrated by the intrusion of three MiG-31s into Estonian airspace on September 26, 2025. They aim to sow fear and division in Baltic societies by reminding them of their geographical vulnerability. At the local level, the operation tests our resolve. But at the European level, it serves above all to reveal the divisions within the West between those who favor a firm stance and those who advocate “de-escalation.”

Alongside this direct intimidation, electoral subversion is advancing under cover. Southern and Eastern Europe are the most visible laboratories where manipulation techniques are deployed in formally democratic electoral processes. The attempt to rig the 2024 Romanian elections—thwarted by the cancellation of the vote—revealed an ecosystem of digital manipulation of unprecedented sophistication.

Beyond that, the African theater perhaps best reveals the dimension of “war of movement” that compensates for Russian military weaknesses with geopolitical agility. Within just a few years, a coordinated campaign succeeded in driving French forces out of the Sahel and replacing them with Russian mercenaries—a major geostrategic transformation achieved at a negligible cost²⁵.

The case of Mali illustrates this sophistication, which skillfully exploits post-colonial resentments: influence operations have succeeded in channeling this protest toward a rejection of the French presence and toward pro-Russian solutions, paving the way for the arrival of the Wagner Group.

Hovering over all these theaters is Russia’s nuclear arsenal. The war in Ukraine has revealed a doctrinal shift that French political analyst Bruno Tertrais calls “aggressive sanctuarization²⁶”: unlike defensive deterrence, it allows Russia to “allow itself to conduct major offensive operations” protected by its nuclear capability and aims to guarantee territorial conquests. Each annexation is followed by constitutional integration, which allows Moscow to brandish the nuclear threat: these territories are now “Russian” and therefore covered by the doctrine of deterrence. The atomic weapon becomes the legal and military seal of aggression, the lock that transforms a fait accompli into an “intangible” border.

This transformation can only work through cognitive warfare, whose aggressive sanctification is a weapon. It paralyzes our will and turns our caution into wait-and-see attitudes, our wisdom into renunciation. Its effectiveness relies less on the actual probability of use—which experts consider low—than on our perception. Apocalyptic statements, changes in posture, doctrinal revisions: this theatrical apparatus aims to saturate our mental space with nuclear fear, to make us internalize “escalation” as an insurmountable prospect, to make us reason on the basis of their threat rather than our interests.

This rhetoric colonizes our own debates. The obsession with “de-escalation,” the fear of ‘provoking’ Moscow, the pathological search for an “exit ramp” testify to the success of aggressive sanctification. We have internalized the Russian nuclear threat as a determining factor in our decisions, erasing our own.

Are we safe behind a MagiNATO line?

May 1940 and October 2025: two dates separated by nearly a century but haunted by the same blindness to the rupture underway. French General Maurice Gamelin did not anticipate the breakthrough at Sedan; General Maxime Weygand was equally unable to understand the nature of this blitzkrieg that was dislocating our armies. As French historian Marc Bloch diagnosed in L’Étrange Défait²⁷, “The Germans’ triumph was, essentially, an intellectual victory, and that is perhaps what was most serious about it.”

The analogy reveals its cruel relevance. While the Russian army excels in this cognitive warfare and penetrates deep into our territory, our collective defense system is based on a static concept. “It must be acknowledged that NATO has become the new Maginot Line of European democracies²⁸,” while the adversary operates in the fluid space of perceptions: constant rotation of theaters (Baltic, Romania, Africa), modes (drones, sabotage, elections) and narratives (nuclear, fatigue, corruption). We oppose this cognitive mobility with fixed responses—anti-drone walls, defined perimeters. The absurdity: the MagiNATO line stops where the real front begins. Ukraine, which is suffering the most massive offensive against Europe since 1945, remains separated from the system it defends.

This exclusion is the most striking success of cognitive warfare. It deprives the Alliance of the most battle-hardened army in Europe, which is inventing 21^st-Century techniques in the heat of battle and revealing the trap in which the Kremlin is locking us: Ukraine’s exclusion from NATO gives credence to the notion of “spheres of influence” and neutral zones in the very architecture of our collective defense. Putin’s worldview is promoted, volens nolens, as a structuring factor in the debate.

While the military leadership of 1940 suffered from an obsolete framework for understanding the world, our leaders remain prisoners of a vocabulary—hybrid warfare, escalation, de-escalation—and a conceptual blindness that condemns them to fight the previous war while the adversary is already waging the next one.

Understanding this war in its four dimensions—cognitive, Orwellian, subversive, systemic—and recognizing the true hybrid and total war, the combination of war in Ukraine and cognitive war in Europe, is the prerequisite for an effective response. Cognitive warfare knows no half measures: either it makes us think within the universe of its lies, or we think the real.

At the end of Hitchcock’s film Lifeboat²⁹, journalist Constance Porter notes the submission of the shipwrecked passengers to Nazi captain Willy, who had manipulated them: “We didn’t just let Willy row for us, we also let him think for us.” 

Marc Bloch identified a crisis of intelligence: our leaders “were unable to think this war³⁰.” Will the Europe of 2025 be able to?

1. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Secker and Warburg, London, 1949. See also: Jean-Jacques Rosat, L’esprit du totalitarisme. George Orwell et 1984 face au XXI^e siècle, Marseille, Hors d’atteinte, 2025.
2. Natalya Bugayova, Kateryna Stepanenko, “A Primer on Russian Cognitive Warfare,” Institute for the Study of War, June 30, 2025.
3. “Inside the KGB – An interview with retired KGB Maj. Gen. Oleg Kalugin.”
4. Steve Abrams, “Beyond Propaganda: Soviet Active Measures in Putin’s Russia,” Connections, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Winter 2016).
   
5. C. Kamphuis BSc, “Reflexive Control,” Militaire Spectator, Netherlands, 2018.
6. Tom Clancy, Red Storm Rising, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1986.
7. Timothy L Thomas, “Russia’s Reflexive Control Theory and the Military,” The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Rouledge, vol. 17, 2004.
8. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Chapter III, Verse 2.
9. Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Krieg [On War], Marie von Brühl, Dresden, 1832.
10. George Orwell, op. cit.
11. Natalya Bugayova, Kateryna Stepanenko, op. cit.
12. Volodymyr Zelensky, interview by Fareed Zakaria, GPS, CNN, March 20, 2022.
13. Fritz Lang, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse [The Testament of Dr. Mabuse], Nero-Film AG, 1933.
14. “The hypothesis of Russian interference after red handprints were spray-painted on the Wall of the Righteous,” Le Parisien, May 21, 2024.
15. David Colon, La Guerre de l’information : Les États à la conquête de nos esprits [The Information War: States Conquering Our Minds]. Chapter “The Kremlin’s exploitation of the conflict between Israel and Hamas,” Tallandier, Paris, 2023 and 2025.
    
16. “Russia believed to be behind plot to assassinate European defense boss,” Financial Times, July 12, 2024.
    
17. “A plot to assassinate a Russian opponent of Vladimir Putin,” op. cit.
18. Natalya Bugayova, Kateryna Stepanenko, op. cit.
19. Frank G. Hoffman, “Conflict in the 21^st Century: The Rise of Hybrid Wars,” Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, 2007; James N. Mattis & Frank G. Hoffman, “Future Warfare: The Rise of Hybrid Wars,” Proceedings Magazine, U.S. Naval Institute, November 2005.
20. Bob Seely, The New Total War. From Child Abduction to Cyber-Attacks and Drones to Disinformation, Biteback Publishing, London, 2025
21. Pierre Raiman, “The Old Philosopher, the Ogre at Our Doorstep, and the Good Europeans,” Desk Russie, September 7, 2025
22. Aku Louhimes, Konflikti, MTV Katsomo, November 2024.
23. Hew Strachan, “The Changing Character of War, a Europaeum Lecture,” at The Graduate Institute of International Relations, November 9, 2006.
24. “When LFI and RN speak like the Kremlin,” Collective op-ed, Ouest France, September 18, 2025.
25. Léa Perruchon, “Propaganda Machine: Russia’s offensive against information in the Sahel,” Forbidden Stories, November 21, 2024.
26. Bruno Tertrais, “The shadow of nuclear power over the war in Ukraine,” Foundation for Strategic Research, Bulletin No. 96, March 2022.
27. Marc Bloch, L’Étrange Défaite, Franc-Tireur, 1946 (written in 1940)
28. Jean-François Bouthors, “The Carabinieri of the War in Ukraine,” Desk Russie, September 28, 2025
29. Alfred Hitchcock, Lifeboat, 20^th Century Fox, 1944.
30. Marc Bloch, op. cit.