From Little Green Men to the Azov Sea Attacks, A New Cold War?

• In Event: Propaganda and Misinformation

Abstract

While the nature of war has not changed, its implementation is increasingly driven by leap aheads in information technology which allow the most nimble actors to dominate the information environment. Russia, in particular, has shown itself to be a crafty user of the various tools of hybrid warfare, including manipulation of the media and savvy use of social media, to achieve its foreign policy objectives. This proposal will bridge a gap in the literature on the subject by drawing on Ukrainian sources to reveal Russian hybrid warfare methods. It will cover Russian activities against Ukraine from the period from the invasion of Crimea through the war in the Donbas and discuss the recent Sea of Azov Crisis to demonstrate the initial Russian capabilities in hybrid warfare, what the Russians have learned and improved upon since their engagement in the region, and, perhaps most interestingly, how Ukraine has learned to resist Russian attempts at disinformation and hybrid attacks.
The paper will examine two theoretical approaches.
The first concerns a return to the thought patterns of the Cold War, and whether or not the current relations between the west and Russia constitute a new Cold War, which would lead us to expect a return to proxy wars a lessening of direct great power involvement, and a view that the world is a bipolar chess board.
What started in the Crimea (2014) as a relatively local crisis quickly became the crisis of the post-Cold-War international stability system and liberal world principles, as well as traditional ‘Law of war’ frameworks.
The global context of the problem refers to the “privatization of violence’ tendency, as well as a kind of de-legitimization of liberal/democratic state through use of ‘hard power’ measures.
The second, a subset of the first, discusses hybrid warfare in the Cold War context. In particular, to what extent have perceptions, of the Cold War, in terms of its context, management, and ending influenced policy makers decisions as Russia continues to become more and more expansionist.

Authors

• John Marshall Callahan, New England College

• Oleksii Poltorakov, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv