Putin’s Hybrid War Opens a Second Front on NATO’s Eastern Border

[william]

“Russia is currently waging two wars,” Finland’s President Alexander Stubb said at a foreign policy forum in Helsinki on June 14. “One is a kinetic, conventional war in Ukraine. The other is a hybrid war in Europe and the West with the aim of influencing the tone of public discourse or in some way shake our sense of security.”

Sending groups of migrants to storm borders; jamming GPS signals; recruiting criminals for petty acts of sabotage: they are part of an expanding repertoire of acts cited by countries from Finland through the Baltic states to Poland and beyond as calibrated to unsettle their citizens.

Each nation shares a troubled history of dealings with Moscow, and all are now members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. They’ve responded with plans to reinforce and upgrade the eastern border through a combined $3.5 billion, and have asked for hybrid attacks to be on the agenda at next month’s NATO summit in Washington.

Seeking to weaken Europe and destabilize it from within, Russia is dipping into its hybrid operations toolbox more actively than ever, according to a May 30 report by the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats in Helsinki. While large-scale expulsions of Russian intelligence operatives across the region have hampered its ability to carry out such attacks, officials concede they tend to be one step behind whatever Moscow comes up with. That makes the hybrid threat from Russia ubiquitous, according to Finland’s Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen.
“There is no front line in this,” she said. “All of Europe is at war now.”

MSN

 

[william]

Russia targets Sweden's satellite networks following its NATO membership​

Russia has begun to disrupt Sweden's satellite networks. This happened after the Scandinavian country became a NATO member, according to the letter from the Swedish Post and Telecom Authority. Swedish authorities said that the interference from Russia and Crimea affected three different Sirius satellite networks serving the Scandinavian countries and Eastern Europe.
“These disruptions are, of course, serious and can be seen as part of wider Russian hybrid actions aimed at Sweden and others,” Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said in a comment to Bloomberg.

On May 2, Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna said that Russia's actions had led to a failure of the GPS signal in the Baltic Sea region. He clarified that Russia deliberately jams the signal, and this has intensified over the past year and a half.
The media also reported that Finland has been experiencing massive GPS malfunctions in aircraft amid Russia's war against Ukraine.

MSN

 

[william]

GPS jammed on commercial flight over Atlantic for the first time​

A plane’s GPS was jammed on a commercial transatlantic route for the first time, raising fears thousands of other flights are at risk of being deliberately hacked. The flight from Madrid to Toronto is likely to have been deliberately targeted rather than being accidentally caught in the “usual spillover” of electronic warfare. The suspected cyber attack happened in the northeastern Atlantic when a pilot reported being blocked from ascending to a higher altitude because the GPS (global positioning system) of the aircraft above them had been jammed.

The cause of the jamming has not yet been identified, but GPS jamming has been recently reported over Poland and the Baltic region and attributed to Russian electronic warfare.

The Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation said the aircraft would have likely flown over the Baltic or Middle East and had not recovered by the time it reached Shanwick Ocean Control, an international airspace zone that handles 80 per cent of transatlantic flights.

If GPS jamming becomes frequent over the Atlantic Ocean then “thousands of flights a day could be impacted with delays and cancellations.

Keir Giles, an expert on Russian military strategy, said Moscow’s GPS jamming had become “gradually normalised” and that “the disruption and the areas affected have both been steadily growing over year. It affects the “nuts and bolts of satellite navigation systems”, either knocking them offline or giving pilots misleading information, he said. “It means that systems reliant on satellite connections cannot keep accurate time, and outages of terrain and collision warning systems have become routine. Where smaller airports are fully reliant on GPS-based services, landing becomes impossible, and flights have to divert or even give up altogether and return to their starting point.”

The West had failed to respond to Russian GPS jamming when it was first detected in the 2010s. “It’s another example of hostile action from Russia becoming gradually normalized because nobody is willing or able to deal with it, which in turn encourages Russia to do it more. If nothing continues to be done to deter Russia from doing this, the logical next step is for Moscow to attempt to block GPS for road traffic too, which… could sow chaos on land across the region.”

MSN

 

[krzepice1976]

All resources in Russian economy are exhausted. Inflation is rising, Extreme lack of the workforce. Adding money from reserves to market will just increase inflation without bringing new growth. Russia is likely facing stagnation or deep recession".
- Chief of Central Bank

https://twitter.com/x/status/1817860278467322276

 

[Publius]

All resources in Russian economy are exhausted. Inflation is rising, Extreme lack of the workforce. Adding money from reserves to market will just increase inflation without bringing new growth. Russia is likely facing stagnation or deep recession".
- Chief of Central Bank

https://twitter.com/x/status/1817860278467322276

That sobering
Of course our national debt reportedly reached 34 trillion this year.

The real war being fought right now is an asymmetric financial war.
Who can keep juggling their economies longer than their opponents.
Inflation is a factor for us as well. It’s definitely hard on people right now but it’s not runaway.