The Hidden War: How Hybrid Warfare Targets Democracy

“Hybrid warfare,” warns diplomat Eitvydas Bajarunas, is “a direct assault on the very foundation and backbone of democracy.” 

Bajarunas has been Lithuania’s ambassador to Russia and today is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for European Policy Analysis. In his view, what may look like isolated instances of, for example, cyberattacks or GPS jamming or severing underseas cables, are in fact a deliberate effort to create “sustained mayhem.” The big danger, in his view, is that we don’t connect the dots and therefore don’t realize that the many instances of sabotage or poisonings are part of an  active war even though not a shooting war.  

He points out that each instance of hybrid warfare is designed to be small enough so that it won’t trigger a NATO Article V response.  As he explains, “This strategy thrives on ambiguity, making it difficult to attribute specific actions to state actors, and this complicates the West’s ability to have timely and decisive responses.”

For Bajarunas, one of the most pervasive tools of hybrid warfare is disinformation. “The 2024 U.S. presidential election saw the Russian ‘Doppelganger’ campaign unleash a wave of AI-generated fake news, mimicking credible outlets to sow confusion and division among voters. This deliberate distortion of reality eroded trust in institutions and manipulated public perception.” 

Bajarunas goes on to say, “The ripple effects of such campaigns extend far beyond elections, fostering societal polarization and undermining democratic norms.”

The digital realm has become a key battleground. Chinese hackers, dubbed "Flax Typhoon," infiltrated U.S. telecommunications networks in 2023, potentially compromising emergency services and energy distribution systems. Bajarunas points out that, “These breaches highlight how cyber warfare can disrupts essential services, creating chaos and testing the resilience of democratic societies.”

He's also seen that GPS jamming has emerged as a critical challenge. “In regions like the Baltic States, during NATO exercises in Estonia, there were disruptions near Tallinn airport, and these forced rerouting and reliance on backup systems.” He goes on to add, “Risks of electronic warfare are tangible.   Surveillance efforts compound these threats because state-sponsored espionage operations infiltrate sensitive sectors, gathering intelligence that can be weaponized.”

Still another realm where he sees hybrid warfare operating is the West’s energy infrastructure. The Baltic States rely on Russian grids for electrical power, but on Christmas Day, 2024, undersea power cables between Finland and Estonia were cut. Few people doubt that Russia was behind this. Since the Baltic States rely on Russian grids, they’ve experienced how hybrid warfare can weaponize energy dependency.  

Hybrid warfare doesn’t stop at digital or economic tactics. It extends to more direct methods, including arson, sabotage, and even poisonings. Pro-Russian groups have targeted 5G infrastructure in Europe, while incidents like the poisoning of Alexei Navalny and Sergei Skripal illustrate the grim lengths to which adversaries will go to silence critics.

Bajarunas repeats that it’s crucial to understand that these events are part of a pattern. As he says, “Hybrid warfare is not a series of one-off attacks; it’s a coordinated strategy. Seemingly disparate events form a larger pattern of destabilization. Hybrid warfare may be waged in the shadows but it has real and far-reaching consequences.”

Currently, Western democracies are in danger of being in a gray zone of inaction. The insidious nature of these attacks—disguised as isolated incidents but woven into a tapestry of strategic destabilization—challenges the very integrity of democratic institutions. 

In a time of hybrid warfare, battles can be fought not with tanks or missiles but through the manipulation of information, the sabotage of infrastructure, and the erosion of public trust. Bajrunas’s message is that to protect democracy, we must first recognize the kind of war that is being waged against it.  

He’d be on board with a principle in clinical psychology. “You can’t fix a problem until you recognize it exists.” We can fix the problem of how to respond to the challenges of hybrid warfare, but not before we connect the dots and understand the scale of the problem. In the next installment, I’ll share with you his idea on how to do this.