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For several years now, the terminology of “hybrid warfare” has taken root in European public debate with a force that is shaping the tone of the upcoming French presidential election. Several potential candidates have already been targeted by interference operations originating from Russia, while the director of the Directorate-General for Domestic Security (DGSI) recently warned of a probable uptick in “more direct and violent” hybrid actions by April 2027. “Hybridity” is thus on everyone’s lips, to the point that it risks becoming one of those concepts that define an era and an imaginary, and on which future historians will focus.
Originally introduced in the 2000s to describe the combination of regular and irregular fighting methods (notably by Hezbollah), the term hybrid warfare later evolved with the digital revolution to denote the new means of subversion enabled by the digitization of open societies. It came to encompass anything arising from exploiting the vulnerabilities of this interlinked world: hacking and informational interference certainly, but also aggressive legal tactics (lawfare) or physical- infrastructure sabotage enabling the movement of goods and people in a society whose prosperity now rests more than ever on the flow of inputs. In a world as interconnected as ours, hybridity quickly came to refer to nearly any coercive, subversive, or even provocative act that remains under the threshold of armed conflict. Likewise, while the term originally claimed universality, it now almost exclusively designates destabilizing operations conducted by Russia on the European continent, while it is almost never used to describe aggression by other states. In other words, the current sense of hybridity is both hyper-extensive and hyper-restrictive, producing more confusion than clarity. This would not be a problem if this term were not today massively used by the European Union and NATO in political communication and doctrinal reflection, thereby playing a significant role in shaping public-protection policies for citizens.
The problem, therefore, is not merely a terminological quarrel, since “hybrid warfare” participates in draining the political substance from interference phenomena. It reduces the issue to a face-off between technicians of subversion, sabotage, or intelligence—whether European or Russian, defender or attacker. In its commonly accepted sense, it narrows the horizon of threats that can be anticipated, both in terms of vectors and actors capable of leveraging them. For instance, the overrepresentation of studies that—but are nonetheless necessary for informing the public—toc lines the focus on effects and practices rather than on causes and objectives of such interferences. Today, we know a great deal about the identity of the actors who organize these operations, their means, and the ideas they intend to propagate in our public spaces. By contrast, few research efforts attempt to situate these operations and their responsible actors within their sociological, geographic, and historical contexts, to better understand their worldviews and, ultimately, their goals. Instead, we see a proliferation of quantitative matrices and other technical typologies that, rather than broadening our vision, narrow it. Hybrid warfare, like the question of foreign interference, thus appears as a largely technical problem to be managed by technicians. This vision condemns us to respond to each field separately (cyber vs cyber, disinformation vs influence, etc.), in a technical, depoliticized, and generally ineffective way. This is evidenced by the proliferation of software tools promising to fight interference, or the normalization of medical-epidemiological vocabulary to describe it—some even speaking of “infodemics” and proposing to develop “information vaccines.”
The terminology of hybridity in its current sense is both hyper-extensive and hyper-restrictive, so it introduces more confusion than it resolves.
Jonathan Guiffard, Kevin Limonier
Thus, with the term “hybrid warfare,” we Europeans self-limit in how we perceive the real threats weighing on our political, social, and economic systems. It obscures the fact that Europe’s opponents do not only seek to destabilize states and administrations but to subvert political systems and the values that underlie them—an even more serious concern. In other words, hybrid warfare and its expert jargon mask, through excessive technicization, the fundamentally political dimension of what we collectively face. It also leaves us perpetually surprised: our decision-makers and public opinion are regularly stunned by operations that had not been anticipated because the forecasting software in which we confine ourselves simply cannot foresee them.
The question of surpassing the hybridity terminology is therefore not a whim but a strategic necessity, one to which we wish to contribute by proposing a return to a different approach: that of political warfare.
This is not merely about swapping labels. While hybridity is defined by means that tend to expand and diversify without end, political warfare is defined by intention and decision: a state choosing to pursue political and ideological subversion of an adversarial system. In this sense, the means mobilized (disinformation, sabotage, covert financing, or economic influence) are only tools in service of that end. It is therefore not a latent state of international relations, but a choice, a decision that can be fought and halted. It is precisely this shift—from means to intention—that allows us to encompass in the same analytic category actors that hybridity, with its technical focus, has always kept apart: Russia, of course, but also the United States under Donald Trump, and perhaps tomorrow China.
Political warfare through the lens of Russo-American convergence
To discern the contours of this political warfare, one must examine the teleology of interference operations, i.e., question their ends rather than their means. We know, for example, that current interference attempts, and more broadly the destabilization operations Russia has conducted in Europe since 2022, aim primarily to erode Europeans’ willingness to support Ukraine and thus influence the strategic choices we will make to guarantee our security in the decades ahead.
This objective, which since 2022 has taken the form of a situational manifestation of a political war Moscow has been waging since 2011-2012, sits within a broader and older aim: for Russia to seek to weaken European democratic systems by eroding citizens’ trust in their institutions. We also know that political parties opposed to large-scale European aid to Ukraine are often the same as those hostile to the liberal political philosophy underpinning the European project for more than half a century. These parties and movements—what Marlène Laruelle terms illiberal—are not only backed by Russia; they are increasingly supported by the Trump administration and a segment of American nationalist right, so that we are beginning to see real Russo-American convergences. One example is the Hungarian elections of April 2026, where former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, ultimately defeated, received support from Russia’s influence apparatus and explicit support from American officials, including a visit by Vice President JD Vance to Budapest.
Where hybridity is defined by expanding and diversifying means, political warfare is defined by intention and decision.
Jonathan Guiffard, Kevin Limonier
Some readers might consider placing Vladimir Putin’s Russia on the same plane as Donald Trump’s United States a provocation. After all, Russia has pursued since 2014 a deeply destabilizing expansionist and imperial policy, while the United States remains, for now, a longtime ally of European states sharing interests and values. Despite the Trump drift and the ongoing erosion of traditional political systems, the United States remains a great democracy in which many checks and balances operate, whereas Russia has long sunk into an authoritarianism so pronounced that it has barred the sole opposition party outside the system, Yabloko, from presenting candidates to the September 2026 legislative elections.
Our aim, however, is not to place Russia and the United States on the same rung as states, because it is clear that their relations with Europe rest on historically different structures, values, and dynamics. That said, we observe a growing convergence of views and practices that leads Russian officials and ultra-conservative Americans to support the same political movements, sometimes using similar methods.
The Trump administration, aided in this by Silicon Valley billionaires, has made no secret of its hostility toward any form of regulation of digital life, environmental protection, wealth redistribution, or defense of ethnic or gender minorities. The State Department recently opened funding to European organizations based on their pro-MAGA political orientations: the French think-tank Western Edge (France) applied, and a five-million-dollar grant was contemplated (and later withdrawn) for the Free Speech Union (UK). In the 2010s, Russia had done exactly the same thing. For example, the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation (IDC) aimed to support initiatives aligned with a “sovereignist” (i.e., anti-European), extractivist line and, even if not stated at the time, illiberal. Today, we see forms of coordination between the Trump base and Russian interference actors. Here is an example that personally involved one of the authors of this article: after fieldwork in Moldova during the September 2025 parliamentary elections, two French researchers were accused by several blogs, Russian and MAGA-linked sites, of being destabilizing agents acting for the Elysee. The messaging, strikingly similar across Russian and American accounts, indicated a clear coordination.
At bottom, Russia and the Trump administration share a common objective: to bring Europe to a Finnishization, a term reintroduced in 2022 by the estonian-Russian writer Sofi Oksanen. She meant to explain that Russia sought to produce in Europe what the USSR and the United States had imposed on her country during the Cold War: a status as a non-power, or rather a non-agent in the international power game, turning the Finns into spectators of their own fate. In her article, Oksanen accused Russia of pursuing such a goal. Today, it would appear that the Trump administration, embroiled in many standoffs with Brussels, openly disdainful of European institutions and preferring bilateral dialogue, pursues the same ambition: to minimize Europeans’ ability to organize collectively to take charge of their own destiny and to weigh in on world affairs.
Despite this shared teleology, it would be inaccurate to say that the strategic objectives of the two countries toward Europe converge in a strict sense. While Moscow seeks to fracture a project of unity and cohesion in order to reassert territorial domination over its margins, Washington aims to realign Europe with its strategic agenda. The former breaks and divides to regain maneuvering room and to reassert its ideology and regional role, while the latter coerces and influences to shape its strategic environment by cultivating like-minded allies. This remodeling sometimes takes the form of actions that eerily resemble the interference Moscow has undertaken, as shown by Elon Musk’s open support for Germany’s AfD, the MAGA online influence campaigns, or interference operations in Greenland. When viewed against Russia’s actions on the continent, we see shared interests among the same actors, whether in Hungary, Germany, the United Kingdom, or elsewhere. In short, there is a certain convergence of struggles that suggests Europe is threatened more by the illiberal vise imposed by Russia, the Trump administration, and its American far-right allies than by “hybrid” actions whose definition eludes everyone.
This is therefore not a latent state of international relations, but a choice, a decision that can be fought and halted.
Jonathan Guiffard, Kevin Limonier
Some readers may object that none of this is new, and that it has long been demonstrated that the MAGA movement has, for nearly a decade, maintained a real porousness with actors of Russian interference, who sought to foster its growth. Yet the fact that this Trump administration, unlike the previous one, seeks to trigger a political war by deploying a broad range of means— including federal instruments — to accomplish its ideological ends, marks a novelty. If we can hope this is only temporary, this move signals a kinship between Moscow and Washington that is not accidental. Indeed, the United States and Russia share a doctrinal lineage of political warfare inherited from a century-long Soviet-American rivalry, which, when combined with other factors, has led in one case as in the other to a privatization of interference devices. These increasingly focus on the same levers to destabilize Europe: exploiting the strategic dependencies of the digital era, and instrumentalizing social anger.
Political warfare, a product of the Soviet-American rivalry
The situation Europe faces today is not new. Contemporary practices of interference are the product of a long confrontation between Moscow and Washington, during which each observed, imitated, and perfected the other’s methods. It is from this conflictual “dialogue” that the repertoire of actions we know as “hybrid warfare” emerges. The novelty is that its two architects now find themselves on the same side when facing Europe.
The first act of the conflict that gave birth to political warfare occurred in Bolshevik Russia in the 1920s. On January 11, 1923, Unszlicht, deputy head of the GPU (the precursor of the KGB), created the first office responsible for dezinformatsiya. Its activities began with a broad misinformation campaign aimed at exiled Russian monarchists and European intelligence services to discourage military intervention against the USSR, notably during the Trust operation led by Artuzov, head of counter-espionage. Confident after early successes, the Bolshevik—and then Soviet—intelligence services multiply influence and disinformation operations up to World War II, building extensive and pioneering experience in this field.
On the American side, the response to this Soviet activism in undermining Western democracies was crafted by George Kennan after World War II. As director of political planning and counselor at the State Department under President Truman, and considered a forerunner in the fight against the “Communist threat,” he sought a strategy that would allow the United States to respond without risking a world war, especially in the nuclear era. In 1947 he proposed the concept of political warfare, explicitly drawing on the lessons of Clausewitz and Lenin, who held that other means beyond conventional war could be used to confront an adversary. In a late-April 1948 classified memo that launched the American political warfare program, titled “Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare,” he wrote that “Léon Trotsky might have synthesized Marx and Clausewitz so well that the Kremlin’s conduct of political warfare became the most refined and effective form of warfare in history.” The concept of political warfare breaks with the past by not separating peacetime from wartime, but instead anticipates a war conducted against a designated enemy and its ideological system.
Political warfare quickly becomes an official directive and involves two dimensions: open and clandestine. The open dimension seeks to mobilize financial, political, and diplomatic means to prevent foreign countries from becoming communist and falling under Moscow’s control. It includes, for instance, open or “white” political propaganda, which roughly corresponds to today’s strategic communication. The clandestine dimension aims to mobilize secret means to prevent such takeovers—from political and electoral interference to support for irregular armed groups or black propaganda designed to influence the perceptions of targeted publics through mis- and disinformation or compromise. George Kennan thus became a strong advocate of CIA clandestine operations, just created in 1947 and the operational arm of this political warfare.
Europe is threatened by the illiberal vise imposed by Russia, the Trump administration, and its American far-right allies.
Jonathan Guiffard, Kevin Limonier
During the Cold War, numerous American operations fell under political warfare—supported by Truman and his successors—against the USSR and the spread of international communism: economic assistance, subversion (the 1953 coup in Iran), electoral interference (funding of Christian Democratic parties in Italy and France), financing of armed groups (Stay‑Behind networks in Western Europe; the Contras in Nicaragua), etc.
From the Soviet side, the American doctrine of political warfare provided a major source of inspiration for the KGB, which adopted it under the name of fighting “ideological subversion” throughout the 1960s. Although the Soviet services were custodians of the Cheka heritage, the post-Stalin era demanded new tools to counter the American adversary. The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, by paving the way for de-Stalinization, opened a liberal era with less repression and somewhat greater openness. This led to the emergence of intellectual, political, and civic movements that the KGB quickly identified as Soviet-American destabilization attempts. This included dissent. Born after political prisoners released from the gulag described the system’s brutality, this multipronged movement was soon seen by Soviet authorities as an American destabilization operation directly inspired by Kennan’s doctrine. The KGB even glimpsed American fingerprints in the worker’s revolt in Novocherkassk in June 1962, though it had been triggered by a rise in prices and bloodily suppressed. It went so far as to claim that Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago was a CIA-ordered book designed to discredit the Soviet regime and to undermine Western Communist parties’ trust in the USSR. By July 1967, a fifth directorate of the KGB was created at the initiative of Yuri Andropov to combat this “ideological subversion”—still viewed as foreign interference rather than as a result of the country’s economic, political, and social problems. In other words, Soviet services and government conducted a conspiratorial reading of the world and of internal crises in which the USSR found itself.
This conspiratorial reading did not disappear with the collapse of the Soviet Union; on the contrary, contemporary Russia inherits this paranoid worldview of international relations, which interprets the USSR’s disappearance as the success of Western destabilization rather than the failure of a political and economic system unable to reform. It is this conspiratorial vision of history that Vladimir Putin and his circle defend today, who have interpreted color revolutions, the Arab Spring, and Maidan in Kiev the same way. In 2011-2012, when tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets to demand democratic alternation and to reject a third presidential term for Putin, once again the political warfare weapon and ideological subversion were denounced. This time, however, the Kremlin viewed it as a direct threat to the regime’s physical survival. The decision was therefore made to turn the adversary’s weapon against it: the first trolling factories and initial attempts to support Western populist parties appeared immediately after this unprecedented wave of protests. Since then, the movement has grown: discrediting the Ukrainian Revolution of 2014, backing the Donbas civil war, massive interference in the 2016 US elections, and attempts to influence several European referendums (Brexit, Catalonia, etc.). The list of Russian operations since then is long and continuously diversifying, with a notable but not exclusive preference for sovereignist movements across the left, right, and far-right. In sum, Russia adopted a form of “ideological counter-diversion,” itself inherited from American political warfare, as an offensive operational software for about 15 years.
Political warfare outsourced: Moscow and Washington in mirror
If Russia relaunched political warfare in 2011-2012, the United States re-engaged in this strategic practice in 2025, as stated in the National Security Strategy. Old modes of operation were revived, but a relatively new method appeared: closer cooperation between public intelligence actors and private operators pursuing economic or political aims. In short, political warfare now rests in Washington as in Moscow on a privatization of the security apparatus, which also serves domestic political and economic competition.
American political warfare practices are diverse, which is why we must take a step back to characterize this strategy: coercive diplomacy; political and financial support to parties or political figures; interference in electoral processes; clandestine media, parties, or unions broadcasting its ideas; conferences organized to disseminate its ideas; forging false documents; recruitment of influence agents and journalists; disinformation and propaganda; agitprop and public disorder; support for irregular armed groups; sabotage, etc. The multiplicity of practices thus requires focusing on the initial actor and its political intent, rather than being lost in the fine-grained analysis of each tactic. The National Security Council has served as a coordination hub since 1947, giving it a central role in shaping a global view of political warfare conducted in both open and clandestine domains. The intensity of this political warfare can be measured by the mobilization (or not) of clandestine institutional actors to carry it out.
If there are only two years and a half left in Trump’s term, there remain several decades of political future for J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and Elon Musk.
Jonathan Guiffard, Kevin Limonier
To achieve its objectives, the White House can rely on actors dedicated to open strategies for some and clandestine strategies for others. In the open domain, the State Department is the preferred entity. During the Cold War, it supervised and financed numerous entities to expand American influence and challenge communism, such as USAID for development aid, aid programs like the Marshall Plan, influence programs such as the Fulbright scholarship or the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP). In the 1990s and 2000s, while soft power remained central to its practice, it did not explicitly pursue political warfare because it did not seek to aggressively subvert an adversarial ideological system. With Trump’s return to power in January 2025, the DoS was brought to heel by the Government Efficiency Office (DOGE) and then placed under the responsibility of Marco Rubio, who became Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. It is worth noting that such a dual responsibility is unprecedented since Henry Kissinger and indeed illustrates the return of convergence between the diplomatic instrument and national security, a hallmark of political warfare. The State Department has thus regained an active political role, formally engaging in internal European political affairs, as illustrated in May 2025 by the approach of two State Department advisers to a French magistrate to gather arguments against Marine Le Pen’s condemnation.
In the clandestine sphere, two entities can be mobilized in particular: the CIA for political-warfare operations, and the United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM) for military-influence operations. Under Executive Order 12333, the CIA alone is authorized to conduct clandestine operations. Since the early 2000s, the CIA has built a cyber arsenal and carried out intermittent clandestine operations, notably for influence purposes; however, it is only since Trump’s first term that it resumed mass propaganda operations, and only since the second term that it has adopted a political-warfare orientation. For instance, it was tasked with identifying Greenlandic groups favorable to integration with the United States. Thus, while the CIA is better known for training irregular armed groups in Afghanistan or Syria for counterterrorism, it possesses substantial experience in political warfare via entities such as political parties, media, associations, and unions. Susan Williams’ book White Malice, which recounts political-subversion operations in newly decolonized Congo and Ghana, perfectly illustrates these operating modes. It should be noted that European intelligence services have shared relatively little about these methods, being more accustomed to gathering information and neutralizing security threats than executing political influence and subversion operations.
A hallmark of this renewal of political warfare is also the mobilization of private actors, politically and/or financially supported, sometimes openly but most often covertly. By their independent or non-state nature, these actors are more convincing and help blur lines by offering plausible deniability: influencers and parties are more effective if their state links are not known, and businesspeople thus become discreet, less diplomatically risky channels of trust and influence.
These interpersonal networks have become central in American political warfare. Indeed, the existence of a structured political base, MAGA, which already has well-established operations and effective influence methods that can serve as an echo chamber for American political actions, combines with the development of Trumpist political and business networks that mobilize—on initiative or on request—to influence foreign actors. The Greenland mobilization of several networks of Trump-connected entrepreneurs, some of whom had been part of the administration in the first term, is revealing. Danish intelligence described this interference as a clandestine operation. The appointment of Jeff Landry, Governor of Louisiana, as Special Envoy to Greenland, and repeated meetings between State Department officials and independence advocates of the Alberta Prosperity Project in Canada in 2025, are further illustrations. They gain political and economic rewards in exchange for their personal engagement, with the objectives of current political warfare having a fundamentally economic dimension in digital, critical metals, and energy sectors.
We observe a similar dynamic in Russia, where state services and entrepreneurs operate on a level playing field within a system in which prerogatives of the sovereign are increasingly open to private actors. One of the main architects of contemporary Russian political warfare is not a security service head but a businessperson—Evgeny Prigozhin. After his death in a suspect plane crash in 2023, the monopoly he wielded on numerous interference capabilities was challenged. Recall that two months before his death he had taken up arms with his troops and organized in southern Russia a mutiny that could have forced Vladimir Putin to flee Moscow preemptively.
This administrative and financial ecosystem was thus redesigned to prevent such monopolies from reoccurring. Influence entrepreneurs and other polittechnologists (spin doctors) are now put in competition with one another, subjected to a more bureaucratized funding-distribution system. The Russian state created several operators to distribute public money to a host of start-ups and communications-consulting firms specialized in interference. This system, while intended to prevent oligopolies, also facilitates coordination with the security services, headed by the GRU. According to a series of documents leaked from the Kremlin and from several interference-focused companies, the “control room” of this entire system would be located in the Kremlin, in the offices of Sergei Kirienko, the first deputy head of the presidential administration. According to numerous documents studied by various journalist collectives and by one of the authors of this article, Kirienko’s staff acts as a transmission belt between the ecosystem of interference-focused companies and Russia’s security services. For example, in the internal documents of the Social Design Agency—the Russian company that organized the Doppelgänger operation in several European countries including France—the need to report “to the boss” (i.e., to Kirienko) regularly appears in meeting minutes whenever an original idea is proposed.
This is a typical neoliberal-style bureaucracy, where sovereign prerogatives are diluted and spread among a multitude of private actors pursuing their own ends. The main consequence of such a system is the development—or more precisely the maintenance—of endemic corruption that structures power relations and steers state strategies. This is one reason why Russian actors engaging in interference in France continue to organize operations that, on paper, have every reason to fail (e.g., rumors about would-be candidates in the 2027 presidential election). Notwithstanding the evident failure of these operations to have any tangible impact (other than on French media that repeatedly relay these contents and give them unwarranted visibility), subcontractors of Russian interference seek to sustain a public market that grows year after year until it resembles a speculative bubble. In the American sphere, it would not be surprising to see similar mechanisms taking shape, fueled by clientelism within the Trump administration.
Cables, satellites, platforms, and “cyber guerrilla”: the instrumentalization of digital dependencies
Beyond a shared history and often similar mechanisms, American and Russian political warfare against Europe share another common trait: they instrumentalize Europe’s numerous strategic dependencies, which the continent has entangled itself with over the past three decades through globalization and the digital revolution. In other words, digital-age political warfare often consists of mastering and/or subverting the flow of data and information across the adversary’s network to win the ideological battle that underpins reactionary teleology.
From the U.S. perspective, the outsized role of American intermediation platforms—now including public AI systems in Europe—constitutes a major strategic lever, reviving an ongoing European debate about digital sovereignty and strategic autonomy. Until recently, this debate rested on a broad consensus that regulating cyberspace was necessary to uphold humanistic and liberal values shared by business leaders and regulators on both sides of the Atlantic. However, since Donald Trump’s return to power, this ideological status quo has been upended by openly reactionary leaders such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. A new phenomenon has emerged for Europe: the arsenalization of its digital interdependencies to serve not economic competition but a Trumpist political warfare aiming to advance its political ideas in Europe. Among countless examples, the confrontation between Elon Musk and the European Commission over social-network regulation, or the battle to include or remove Palantir software, whose cofounder Peter Thiel argued in 2009 that “liberty and democracy are not compatible anymore,” illustrate this shift.
These episodes represent a form of political contest in which two visions of cyberspace, and more broadly of the world, clash. More broadly, the rise of hyperscalers controlled by reactionary billionaires has the effect of reducing Europe’s resilience to digital connectivity. Historically at the heart of the distributed fabric that makes up the Internet since the 1990s, Europe is experiencing the phenomenon known as “the flattening of the Internet”—the concentration of all means of communication, from submarine cables to algorithms and platforms, in the hands of a small number of actors with increasingly opaque policy choices.
Until recently, the actors responsible for the physical infrastructure of cyberspace were distinct from platform operators, preserving the principle of net neutrality: no content access hierarchy on the network. That era is over: Meta builds its own submarine cables, while Musk maintains his own satellite network, Starlink. Concretely, this means that the actors who flatten the Internet prioritize access to their own networks, their content, and thus the worldview and truth regime they want to disseminate. If Europe resists better than elsewhere on the telecoms segment, the risk remains that entities like Starlink could become leverage points for political warfare: by giving Musk’s customers access to his services, this constellation could favor the use of AI algorithms that several studies suggest align with a reactionary agenda shared with the Trump administration. The pressure against Ukraine—an almost naked attempt to favor Russia—was the first warning shot. These dependencies thus dictate the parameters of political warfare. The loss-making purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk to amplify positions of reactionary actors is now a matter of record: it openly instrumentalizes the platform to advocate for nationalist leaders in Europe, particularly in the United Kingdom, Germany, or France.
On the Russian side, the digital dimension of political warfare aimed at Europe is the mirror image of the American one: while Washington can rely on its supremacy, Moscow has no privileged access to the European network—in fact, it is treated as a pariah in European cyberspace since 2022: its media have been blocked in Europe, its platforms challenged, and many of its entrepreneurs sanctioned.
It is for Russian interference subcontractors to maintain a public market that grows year after year to resemble a speculative bubble.
Jonathan Guiffard, Kevin Limonier
Yet Russian actors continue to penetrate the European space through increasing clandestine methods and by cooperating with cybermafias. Consider the Doppelgänger operation, which continues to target European public opinion by relying on pirated infrastructure known as bulletproof hosts that enable bypassing the guardrails Europeans have erected at Union borders to block Russian interference operations. This is a genuine guerrilla strategy that, with very limited means, exploits to the maximum the organization of Europe’s cyber landscape—that is, how our digital space is built, with its strengths and, above all, its weaknesses—most notably dependence on American actors. This dependence is widely exploited by Russia across informational layers of cyberspace, through the use and manipulation of social-media algorithms that are mostly American or Chinese. For example, Sputnik’s meteoric rise in the late 2010s within the Francophone information space (Europe and West Africa) was largely made possible by an early hyper-offensive communication strategy designed to generate as many clicks as possible. Today, numerous cases of algorithmic manipulation—unmastered by European actors—continue to occur within the political warfare framework, such as the broad campaigns conducted on TikTok during Romania’s 2024 presidential elections, which were ultimately annulled by the Constitutional Court. In other words, whereas the United States arms its supremacy over the European network from the “top” by attacking it, Russia wages a true cyber guerrilla from the “bottom.” In both cases, the same problem arises: Europe’s difficulty in guaranteeing its security and sovereignty in a digital space that has become a genuine extension of territory in the literal sense.
Social anger as the breeding ground for political warfare
Reviewing doctrines, actors, and means of political warfare helps us gauge the magnitude of the problem facing Europeans today. Yet all this leaves open the fundamental question: why does this political warfare work, or at least why do those who engage in it believe in its effectiveness? This question is tied to the impact of interference operations and, more broadly, to the vulnerability of European public opinion to the aims of political warfare.
On the Russian side, one major wager has been that Western democracies harbor within them weaknesses to be exploited. These weaknesses are primarily socio-economic, tied to a sense of exclusion or marginalization increasingly felt by growing segments of European populations. As numerous studies have shown, French-language Russian media first gained traction by cultivating a seemingly heterogeneous readership that was, in fact, unified by a shared feeling: that they were being excluded from the political field and increasingly cut off from centers of wealth and power.
Through tone and editorial stance (Sputnik’s slogan “tell what others hide,” or “telling the untold”), Russian media has aimed to capture the attention of people who want to reclaim politics, whom they sense as slipping away from them. This is illustrated by Gulnara Zakharova’s work on RT France: by extensively covering international affairs while maintaining a frontally hostile line toward “mainstream media,” Russian media in French sought to give their readers the feeling that they were moving closer to the world’s tempo.
This strategy helps explain why, in some cases, Yellow Vests collectives warmly welcomed Russian media cameras while they barred continuous French news channels from approaching. The militarization of marginalization is a constant feature of Russian political warfare—not just in Europe: in West Africa, Harouna Drabo has shown how Russia’s geopolitical return in the region relies on exploiting “geographies of anger,” i.e., the frustrations of populations subject to forms of socio-spatial exclusion dating back to colonial times.
On the American side, MAGA ideology emerged precisely from this feeling of marginalization among large segments of the electorate who have borne the brunt of globalization—an idea already identified in its predecessor, the Tea Party: deindustrialization, unemployment, health problems, wealth concentration, protracted wars, etc. These issues lie at the heart of concerns about an electorate that, though heterogeneous, is ready to embrace scapegoats among the most vulnerable (immigrants, women, etc.). A political-ideological narrative thus formed, capable of attracting similar electorates in Europe.
This strategy of propaganda oriented toward mobilizing margins also manifests in other contexts: in Greenland, for instance, the Trump administration exploits tensions between Copenhagen and Greenlanders, who feel legitimately excluded from their own destiny—and from the dividends of their resources. In Ireland, Trump understood that by professing sympathy for reunification and thereby appealing to a marginalized population within the kingdom, he increases pressure on London. These secessionist mechanics also explain why MAGA networks showed such support for Brexit and now advocate dismantling Europe.
Where the United States arms its supremacy over the European network from the “top,” Russia wages a true cyber guerrilla from the “bottom.”
Jonathan Guiffard, Kevin Limonier
The result is an urgency: to conceive interference not merely as a security or defense problem, but as a public-policy issue, and specifically a social-policy question. Ultimately, Europe’s adversaries use convergent means to exploit the same vulnerability—the same vulnerability that fuels the far right: the failure of wealth-redistribution policies and of efforts to reduce inequalities to diminish a sense of injustice, real or perceived, that haunts a portion of the population.
Leaving the “strange defeat” behind
From this assessment, three fundamental elements emerge: (a) political warfare is an intentional political act and a bureaucratic decision, not a latent state of international relations. It can be fought and halted; (b) political warfare aims at subverting a system politically and ideologically. The tactics—incorrectly lumped under “hybrid warfare”—are merely tools for that subversion. Disinformation or sabotage are not ends in themselves but tools among others. The political and ideological stakes must be the focus; (c) political warfare arose within intelligence services, has a strong clandestine dimension, and is undergoing hybridization embodied by influence entrepreneurs, which means it must be analyzed through this lens as well. This understanding explains our difficulty in grasping precisely what is happening to us, because the secret dimension deliberately hinders our comprehension and response. It is therefore necessary to characterize precisely what falls under political warfare, its tempo, its deployment space, and the actors involved, in order to propose targeted and effective public policies.
By calling for a shift in emphasis from hybrid warfare to political warfare, we propose a repoliticization of how we read events: democracy, its liberal foundations, and progressive values are explicitly targeted by a dual-machine. It therefore becomes necessary to defend a political model and its values while safeguarding against political warfare, but also to seek to undermine adversary systems to influence their ideological framework. The strategic-political equation of the adversaries must change so that Europe emerges victorious from these aggressions.
Thus, to compel Russia to end its political warfare, one would likely need to work toward subverting Russia’s political system. Only a fundamental political paradigm shift inside Russia could foster a new, peaceful, cooperative coexistence. The United States, by contrast, does not seem to have laid down its arms; however, it is clear that future representatives of the Trumpism axis will endure in the American political space and will pursue a long-term strategy. If Trump’s term lasts only two and a half years, there remain several decades of political life for J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and Elon Musk. The likely defeats of the administration in the midterm elections and the 2028 contests will not erase the dynamics at work in the United States, nor restore the pre-2024 status quo with Europe.
Thus, Europe must reduce its vulnerabilities (starting with its digital dependencies) and strengthen coordination with democratic and progressive forces in the United States to bolster their legitimacy, without entering a stance of political warfare against the United States. European leaders must avoid enabling political warfare through denial of social realities and by fixating on diversions, as many successive governments have done over the past twenty-five years. National and European political debate should remain vibrant, but shielded from external interference: this red line is essential to our shared sovereignty.
Returning to analysis from the political-warfare perspective can yield useful knowledge for mobilizing Europeans and crafting their own geopolitical narratives, to exit our “strange defeat,” confront aggressions, reframe threats, and support democratic political forces seeking a shared cause with Europe.