A Comparative Study of Russian Political Warfare against the West and the Western (NATO & EU) Counteractions

Abstract

Since eruption of the Ukraine crisis, the world has witnessed a well-developed Russian political warfare strategy and the hybrid model, utilised by Kremlin, which have had destabilising consequences and as well as wide-ranging implications for international security, in particular for Europe. While the concept seems like a novelty, in fact, Putin has built up current Russian political warfare strategy against the West on a valuable historical background and experiences dates back to the Bolsheviks and the Soviet Union (Dickey, 2015). On the other hand, in the aftermath of the Cold War, the West mostly focus on public diplomacy and strategic communication to influence the foreign audience rather than political warfare (Boot and Doran, 2013). From my perspective, this shift creates a gap in all aspects of political warfare and makes the West vulnerable to political warfare waged by particularly one-man ruled states and non-state enemies. Therefore, it is high time to analyse the reasons behind the West, notably NATO’s and the EU’s, poor reaction against new forms of political warfare as well as to find ways to improve their response capacity and capabilities through a variety of mechanisms. In this paper, the first in a series of three articles, I will define political warfare and its new forms such as hybrid methods and blurring war, which is to be basis for the rest of the study. Then, I will develop a new conceptual framework which provides an interdisciplinary approach to understand the specifics of political warfare against the West, and to explore how and why the West has failed in countering and undermining political warfare employed by especially one-man ruled states. Finally, I will propose ways and means that I will go in detail in my further studies in order to explain how to counter political warfare in the future.