“When does hybrid war become just war? »

LFinnish cool: powerful weapon that intrigued Europeans have just discovered. The cold and determined reaction of police officials, stingy with their comments to the press but perfectly sure of their actions in the investigation carried out into the rupture, on Christmas Day, of submarine electrical cables may have surprised the south of the Baltic; it is, on the other hand, second nature in a country which shares not only a sea but 1,300 kilometers of border with Russia. When it is necessary to board an oil tanker coming from a Russian port and suspected of having cut the cables, in Helsinki, there are no words. We get on board.

In the region, everyone knows that this type of cables connecting Scandinavia to the Baltic countries, Poland or Germany can be damaged accidentally. But everyone also knows that, in recent years, and even more so since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, these valuable electricity and communication infrastructures are among the targets of another war that Russia is waging to Europe: hybrid warfare.

« Cool, calm, collect. » React calmly, gather all the data then, “once you have them, coordinate closely with your allies” : this is the instruction given, in September 2024, by the Finnish President, Alexander Stubb, warning security experts meeting in Helsinki of the foreseeable increase in “hybrid attacks: information warfare, sabotage, cyber attacks, attacks on civil infrastructure”.

Instrumentalization

Hardly a week goes by without a European leader alluding to this form of aggression. Monday January 6, President Emmanuel Macron spoke to the ambassadors “the acceleration and transformation of the threat” and listed the different forms of Russian aggressiveness in Europe, including attempts to destabilize the electoral process in Moldova and Romania and falsification of results in Georgia.

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