Quote Originally Posted by davidbfpo View Post
Thanks to a "lurker" for this interview of a Riga, Estonia based SME on hybrid warfare, Russia and more. It starts with:Link:http://visegradinsight.eu/new-generation-warfare/

Quoting Janis Berzins:

We should pay attention to this idea. Russia’s strategy is very Clausewitzian with some influence from Sun Tzu. It’s about achieving strategic political objectives using the minimum effort. Therefore, warfare is more than a simply armed conflict, it’s rather the combination of military and non-military means, the result of which is that for each specific tactical objectives and war theater a different strategy is needed. For example, the tactical base for Ukraine is Low-Intensity Conflict, while in Georgia it was more like conventional linear tactics.
This is crucial to understand. Russia's focus on minimizing both risk (i.e. escalation) and effort makes it vulnerable to escalation dominance.

Russia's military incursions into Chechnya in 1999, Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 all indicate a very strong aversion to insurgency and guerrilla warfare. In each case, Russia depended heavily upon local auxiliaries, and the lack of integration of Donbas - as opposed to Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Crimea - reflects minority pro-Russian popular sentiments, even if the local population is ambivalent or opposed to Kiev's central authority.

In addition, Russia appears to be very averse to a shooting war with NATO; hence, the nuclear threats and conventional posturing.

This sort of information warfare can only work if the seeds for its success are already there. For example, to what extent were the alleged Russian operations aimed to influence the American people and help Trump win the election really decisive? I’m convinced that with or without the Russian operations Trump would have won the election. Was Brexit the result of Russian operations? Of course not. In fact, both are the results of common people being tired of politicians and civil servants making policies which benefit either the financial system or the very rich, hoping that the result will be greater employment or wages.
The "seeds" only really exist to a small extent in the Baltics and a much larger extent in Belarus and northern Kazakhstan.