Russian 'Hybrid Warfare' and the Annexation of Crimea

The Modern Application of Soviet Political Warfare

Kent DeBenedictis

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780755640003
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Russian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Western academics, politicians, and military leaders alike have labelled Russia's actions in Crimea and its follow-on operations in Eastern Ukraine as a new form of "Hybrid Warfare." In this book, Kent DeBenedictis argues that, despite these claims, the 2014 Crimean operation is more accurately to be seen as the Russian Federation's modern application of historic Soviet political warfare practices-the overt and covert informational, political, and military tools used to influence the actions of foreign governments and foreign populations. DeBenedictis links the use of Soviet practices, such as the use of propaganda, disinformation, front organizations, and forged political processes, in the Crimea in 2014 to the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 (the "Prague Spring") and the earliest stages of the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Through an in-depth case study analysis of these conflicts, featuring original interviews, government documents and Russian and Ukrainian sources, this book demonstrates that the operation, which inspired discussions about Russian "Hybrid Warfare, " is in fact the modern adaptation of Soviet political warfare tools and not the invention of a new type of warfare.

1

Introduction

In February and March 2014, in the wake of the pro-Western Euromaidan protests that swept over Ukraine and led to the fall of President Viktor Yanukovych’s government, the Russian Federation invaded its neighbour and annexed the Crimean Peninsula. The swiftness and decisiveness of the annexation operation sparked an intense wave of literature on the nature of Russia’s modern warfare practices. Most commonly, Western academics, politicians and military leaders alike labelled Russia’s actions in Crimea and its follow-on operations in Eastern Ukraine as a new form of ‘hybrid warfare’. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) at the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine, defined ‘hybrid warfare’ as a combination of military action, covert operations, and a disinformation campaign (Landler and Gordon 2014). General Philip Breedlove, NATO’s supreme allied commander at the time, made a similar prognosis, claiming, ‘What we see in Russia now, in this hybrid approach to war, is to use all the tools they have [. . .] to stir up problems they can then begin to exploit through their military tool’ (Vandiver 2014). The head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) warned that one of his nation’s top security threats was ‘the increasingly dangerous phenomenon of hybrid warfare’, which Russia accomplishes ‘through means as varied as cyber-attacks, propaganda, or subversion of democratic process’ (Farmer 2016).

Despite these claims, the 2014 Crimean operation was not some new form of warfare but more accurately the Russian Federation’s modern application of historical Soviet political warfare practices. The Soviet Union conducted political warfare to attack what it perceived as Western subversion designed to achieve ‘counter-revolution’ to overturn the communist revolutions in the Soviet sphere. It consisted of overt and covert informational, political and military tools to influence the actions of foreign governments and foreign populations. It involved the use of active measures, including propaganda, disinformation, front organizations and forged political processes, as well as maskirovka, the military’s elaborate deception schemes. Two of the most prominent examples of the Soviet government’s application of these political warfare techniques were the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in response to the ‘Prague Spring’ political liberalization programmes and the earliest stages of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The Soviet government was able to capitalize on these techniques in those campaigns because of the close relationships it held with its fellow communist governments in Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, giving it the political and military access it needed.

When the 2014 Crimean operation is placed in the context of these historical Soviet political warfare practices, it becomes clear that the Russian government employed these same methods at the operational and tactical levels before and during the annexation. Motivated by the fear of ‘colour revolutions’ that were sweeping through Eastern Europe and the Middle East in the twenty-first century – a new interpretation of the Soviet belief in Western ‘counter-revolutions’ – Russia appeared to abandon earlier attempts at cooperation with the West and instead re-adopted the same political warfare responses the Soviet Union and its fellow Communist Bloc countries used throughout the Cold War. Its close ties with the Ukrainian government, especially between the Russian Black Sea Fleet and the Ukrainian Navy in Crimea, expanded under Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych’s regime and provided the Russian government the same ‘fraternal’ access the Soviet government utilized in Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. While in many cases the Russian government adapted these tactics to fit the modern informational, media and political landscapes, the historical linkages of the practices are clear upon closer comparison.

Discussions of Russian ‘hybrid warfare’ in Eastern Ukraine and elsewhere in the former Soviet states are thus better understood if seen through this lens. Such is also the case to greater comprehend the Russian government’s ongoing influence operations in the United States and Europe. As the conflict that spawned these discussions, the 2014 Crimean crisis is the most appropriate starting point to analyse the influence of Soviet political warfare on modern Russian military practice and its consequences for the nature of warfare in the contemporary security environment.

Structure of the book

To demonstrate these points, this book uses two case studies from the Soviet period, the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia and the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, to refine the concept of Soviet political warfare. It draws on more examples of political warfare practices from throughout the Soviet period, but these two conflicts serve as the core of case study comparison. The book then compares the aspects of the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea side by side to these Soviet political warfare conflicts to demonstrate that they are pulled from the same toolkit. It is these specific political warfare tools used to execute the campaigns, not necessarily the conflicts themselves, that are the focus of comparison.

The chapters are presented thematically across four key categories: security environment theories, informational tools, political tools and military tools. This approach allows for a more direct, side-by-side analysis across the case studies versus a historical, case-study-by-case-study chapter method. As a result, not all subsections describing a particular aspect of Soviet political warfare cover the three case studies evenly. For any particular tactic or technique, one case study may exhibit an abundance of examples, and another may not display it at all. Military conflict, like all international relations and politics, is a human endeavour. As with all military doctrine, Soviet political warfare techniques moulded to the political and operational environment of each conflict. Whenever a specific aspect of Soviet political warfare is not evident in one of the case studies, an explanation is provided of what situational factors contributed to why it was not used.

The first main purpose of this book is to provide an explanation of Russian ‘hybrid warfare’ and its connections to Soviet political warfare. Its focus is thus on operations and tactics, not on strategy. It does not answer why Russia invaded Crimea or why the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia or Afghanistan – outside of the impacts that their respective security environment theories had on their threat perceptions. Instead, it provides the details of how the operations were conducted to firmly nest Russia’s modern military practices with its Soviet antecedents.

The second main purpose of this book is to paint a detailed, compelling picture of the specific features of Russia’s 2014 Crimean operation. It provides original research and new insights into how exactly Russia accomplished the annexation. Those new sources include original interviews with Ukrainian military and defence officials involved in the 2014 crisis, declassified Ukrainian government documents and Russian and Ukrainian media sources. The Crimean case study subsections thus go into more thorough detail than those for the historical case studies, whose main purpose is to establish a framework understanding of the aspects of Soviet political warfare. Viewing the historical case studies through the political warfare lens sheds them in a new light, but this book is not attempting to provide original historical research on the Soviet conflicts. As a result, the Crimean subsections are of significant longer length to provide new information into the nature of the Russian operation.

Case study selection

This book uses the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia and the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan as the two historical case studies because they were two of the three most significant political warfare conflicts the Soviet Union fought during the Cold War. Analysts at the time drew strong connections between the tactics and techniques employed in both conflicts, including the use of deception, subversion and special operations forces, and even considered the invasion of Afghanistan to be modelled on the invasion of Czechoslovakia (see Collins 1986). While the conflicts or the political dynamics surrounding them were by no means identical, they lend themselves as a model of Soviet political warfare tactics and techniques.

Soviet responses to the third significant conflict, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, in many ways led to the development of the political warfare approaches witnessed in the later conflicts. Yuri Andropov, Committee for State Security (KGB) chairman from 1967 to 1982 and Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) Central Committee general secretary from 1982 to 1984, was one of the most significant figures in the development and refinement of Soviet political warfare tools; his reaction to the Hungarian Revolution was in many ways the catalyst which led to the implementation of several of these practices. For example, the KGB created Department D (dezinformatsia, or disinformation) as a reaction to what it believed it witnessed in Hungary (Dziak 1988: 149).

For the Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan case studies, the starting points of analysis are the discussions among the Soviet leadership in the prelude to the conflict about the possibility of intervention. The ending points are the initial political resolutions of the crises: for Czechoslovakia, the signing of the Moscow Protocol and for Afghanistan, the installation of Babrak Karmal as the new leader of Afghanistan. Outside of additional minor details, this book does not include major follow-on developments, including the replacement of reformer Alexander Dubček with hardliner Gustáv Husák as first secretary in Czechoslovakia in 1969 or the decade-long Soviet war in Afghanistan. These events are beyond the scope of the central Soviet political warfare campaigns that are the focus of this comparison.

For its analysis of Russian ‘hybrid warfare’, this book concentrates on the 2014 annexation of Crimea. However, most scholarly analysis to date on Russian hybrid warfare – including its components, practices and originality – has instead focused on the conflict in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine. On 7 April 2014, three weeks after Russia completed its Crimean operation, violent protesters occupied government buildings in the cities of Donetsk, Luhansk and Kharkiv and called for their own independence from Ukraine. Three pro-Russian separatists were killed in Mariupol ten days later as they tried to seize a military installation, meaning that the conflict immediately surpassed Crimea in the number of lives it cost (BBC 2014c). The Ukrainian government responded with a full-fledged military operation, which is still ongoing. Fighting has been intensive, as the separatists have received tremendous amounts of military support from Russia. Despite significant evidence to the contrary, President Vladimir Putin continues to claim ‘outright and unequivocally that there are no Russian troops in Ukraine’ (Kremlin 2015).¹

Because of the severity, duration and magnitude of the ongoing conflict in the Donbas, it has attracted the most attention from researchers. However, the 2014 annexation of Crimea is the most appropriate case study to start an analysis of the genesis of Russia’s so-called hybrid warfare. Whereas the war in the East wages on, the Crimean operation is complete, allowing for a holistic view of the operation and the identification of a finite period of study. The Russian government continues to deny its presence in the Donbas, but it has admitted its involvement on the Crimean Peninsula, meaning that more commentary from the Russian perspective – including government statements and speeches – is available for analysis. The Crimean operation is a more direct reflection of any doctrinal changes the Russian military may have made in the period before the conflict, and it was the first instance of what commentators perceive as a departure from recent Russian practice. On the other hand, the campaign in Donetsk and Luhansk benefits from the lessons learned on the Crimean Peninsula and likely incorporates them into an updated strategy, which makes it more of an evolution from the Crimean campaign than a significant shift from earlier Russian practice. Even though the Russian operation in Crimea is shorter in duration and provides fewer data points on tactics and techniques, it is the best case study to illuminate the potential sources of Russia’s current ‘hybrid warfare’ practices, including the influence Soviet political warfare has on those practices.

For a similar reason, this book does not address the 2008 Russo-Georgian War (see German 2009; Toal 2017; Gahrton 2010; Cornell and Starr 2009). The Russian government’s reintroduction of Soviet political warfare tactics relied heavily on its theory of colour revolution, discussed in detail in Chapter 2. While it began to describe this threat in the early 2000s, it was not until the aftermath of the perceived US interference in the 2011 Russian State Duma elections and Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 that these concepts have truly been refined and taken hold. For example, Russian chief of the General Staff General Valery Gerasimov’s seminal article, often cited as the source of some of these tactics, appeared in 2013 (Gera simov 2013). Because the 2008 Russo-Georgian War predates these developments, it can be seen as a predecessor to the shift in Russian military practice – much as the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 largely predated the refinement of Soviet political warfare practices.

This book’s analysis of the Crimean case study starts with the Euromaidan protests beginning in November 2013, as they set off the sequence of events that culminated in Russia’s annexation of Crimea in February and March 2014. However, the book also addresses key events that occurred in the months and years before the start of crisis that directly contributed to the Russian government’s annexation operation, such as the support it gave to pro-Russian Crimean politicians and political organizations. The end point of analysis is the signing of the annexation agreement on 18 March 2014, with some minor discussion on efforts to consolidate Russian control in Crimea over the following year, especially in the media landscape.

A key similarity between the two Soviet case studies and the Crimean case study is the strong relationship between the Soviet or Russian government and the governments of the targeted states. Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan were fellow communist states at the times of the invasions, meaning...