Hybrid Warfare in Wartime – Concept and Action Operationalization Attempt –

"Russia’s aggression against Ukraine has made the concept of hybrid warfare almost forgotten. The literature has focused on the confrontation itself, but, as a rule, hybrid threats are activated when public attention is drawn to other issues and when the public is not prepared to meet the challenge. After the invasion of Ukraine, the term hybrid warfare has dissipated into the mass of frequently used operational terms. From the range of five dimensions of this term, which entails five types of associated interpretations (Solmaz, 2022), in the war in Ukraine, the emphasis seems to be on the aspects related to the hard component. The actual military confrontation, the occupation of Ukrainian territories by Russian troops and the violent actions (including those that exceed normative and moral boundaries on the battlefield) are the elements that attract public attention to a greater extent than the soft actions with a high degree of ambiguity (Mumford, Carlucci, 2022), contributing to the synergistic effect of sharp power. Under these conditions, hybrid warfare is not necessarily a form of war that substitutes for actual confrontation, but a way in which soft actions complement or compensate for the effects obtained by hard actions. Is the invasion of Ukraine a hybrid warfare, or can we talk about hybrid warfare as running parallel to and during the war? Which of these interpretative postures allows for the deviation from the classical meaning of war, as long as the action has been defined, from the perspective of the aggressor, as a “special military operation”? In the present paper, we attempt at perationalizing the concept of hybrid warfare, which has been analysed in the dynamics of application in several recent studies, starting from the study of its effects in the war in Ukraine (Muradov, 2022; Guerrero, 2022), and that of distinguishing between the hybrid warfare and ghibridnaia voina perspectives."