Hybrid tools and influences in Eastern Neighborhood

Eastern Neighborhood, and in particular the wider Black Sea region, has become an El Dorado of hybrid wars and influences.

The Russian Federation, which invented and refined the concept, tests new forms of hybrid war in this territory.

At the same time, other countries in the region also have increasingly pronounced tendencies to imitate the Kremlin hybrid forms, mechanisms and tools of war. Forced by the conflict in its eastern districts, as well as by the inequality of forces with Russia in the hybrid conflict in these districts, Ukraine is ready to build its own reactions to hybrid wars, its own hybrid wars.

Finally, the other actors in the region seem to be contaminated by the new physiognomy of the struggle for influence.

Under these ideological pressures, the hybrid war seems to lose one of its mandatory components, the purely military dimension. The new trend in the hybrid war is to eliminate / exclude the military factor, and this trend can be easily monitored and proven in the wider Black Sea region.

In this region, hybrid wars seem to exhibit the following specific characteristics:

- The existence of a strong logistic, political, military and intelligence infrastructure of the Russian Federation.

- The existence of powerful Russian communities that facilitate the implementation of Kremlin policies.

- The existence of traces / marks of territorial reconfigurations (Stalinist, pre-Stalinist or post-Stalinist), which generated confusing, ambiguous stories and myths of confusion, at the limit of credibility and without historical milestones.

- The need for the new states in the region to create quickly, often unscrupulous, often with large internal contusions, its own identity profile.

- Accumulation of the russian geopolitical competition in the region to recover its own influence space (largely lost with the collapse of the USSR), a target threatened by the dynamics of NATO and EU expansion in the region.

In this context, the expanded Black Sea region has become today not only a theater of confrontation and geopolitical competition between US / NATO and Russia, not only an opportunity for reserve players (Ukraine, Turkey, Poland, Romania) to test their geopolitical potential but also a laboratory for testing new forms of hybrid warfare, a testing laboratory to negotiate the new global order.

In this geopolitical game in the wider Black Sea region, Moscow remains the most active and effective player in the hybrid battlefield, because: it has multidimensional hybrid game capabilities; it has already tested in the region primary forms of hybrid warfare (Crimea, Donbass, etc.); this space belongs to its area of ​​traditional influence; it has in the region partners still seduced by the the eagle on the Russian coat of arms.

The most important objective of the hybrid wars waged in the region seems to have been gaining / maintaining / expanding the geopolitical influence in this space (thus creating an important semiotic gap to the traditional war paradigm that had the ultimate goal of winning territories). At the limit, we can equally symbolize the hybrid influence with the hybrid war.

In the new paradigm it becomes clear that the hybrid struggle instruments are diverse and sophisticated, including the Orthodox Church and Orthodoxy, the Panslavic myth, the nostalgia for the Soviet common space, the mirage of Russian language and culture, the tradition of traditional spiritual ties with the "older brother", the energetic blackmail (friends receive the energy resource at preferential prices), the pretext of protecting the ethnic communities in the "Russian world / russki mir", green men, fake news, propaganda and manipulation, online trolls, use of Trojan horses (virtual, ideological, imagistic, cyber etc.) for the weakening of the "enemy", the identity confusion cultivated deliberately, systemically (in countries like R. Moldova, Ukraine etc.) etc.

The main hybrid war in the region, in our analysis, is the one initiated and conducted by Moscow for the recovery of its geopolitical influence in the ex-Soviet space.

This hybrid war involves several theaters of operations, as well as several hybrid battles / battles, on various fronts:

- Reconfigure the allies network. The ideological spider cloth of Moscow appears to have recently joined Hungary and Turkey.

- Internal weakening of competitors: see Ukraine, M. Britain and the EU (Brexite, immigration, populism, iliberalism, etc.), the USA (possible interference in the presidential campaign), etc.

- Construction of the new military platforms, based on the model of Kaliningrad, Crimea, Transnistria. The new destination – Odessa?

- Maintaining influence in small and medium-sized states for their future use as a currency of exchange.

- Develop colonial policies in small and medium-sized states.

- Maintaining and revitalizing the ideological seduction of the Slav and Orthodox world, a collective and synodal world of order and force (USSR, Commonwealth of Independent States, Collective Security Treaty Organization, etc.).

On the other hand, the wider Black Sea region is rapidly hybridizing through contagion to the Russian hybrid warfare model.

This region is continually reinvigorated, multiplies its forms of manifestation, hybridises its political taboos, refines its own challenges and answers to challenges, etc.

At present, the most active hybrid theater is the Azov Sea. Hybrid battles are currently taking place in regions of Ukraine inhabited by compact ethnic minorities, where Ukraine fails to create an attractive model for minorities to empathize with the national identity (Transcarpathia, Lviv, Chernovtsy, Odessa).

The already traditional list of frozen conflicts (Transnistria, Osetia, Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh) is constantly expanding and new hybrid, latent or active conflicts enrich it almost annually (Crimea, Donbas).

The dissolution of confidence in the future of the European construction, the nostalgia for the Soviet world, the nationalistic and populist puzzles, the mirage of the illiberal models of democracy facilitating the new hybrid realities.

Against them, the classic forms of reaction seem not to convince.

In order to effectively manage the response to countries in the region seeking optimal solutions to democratization and stabilization, the European Union needs to refine its tools for networking with the region. The Eastern Partnership is obsolete, no longer responds to the increasingly sophisticated needs of the region, it needs to be recalibrated in relation to the region's new geopolitical realities and the new needs of its states.

If the whole region tends to hybridize its hostile / aggressive manifestations, the European community needs to refine, diversify and hybridize its responses and reactions.

The Eastern Partnership seems today to be a long corridor to a giant waiting room beyond which the doors are locked and behind them earthquakes (Brexits, populisms, immigrants, iliberalisms, etc.). Perhaps it is necessary to build a clear EU vision of the future of the region such as the EU initiative for Western Balkans (2025) - an active and responsible initiative, in dynamics and permanent evolution. Maybe new initiatives are needed. Perhaps a European Union Strategy for the wider Black Sea is needed.