Peter Hartcher
Lenin was supposed to have been speaking about clearing landmines when he said: “Probe with bayonets. If you encounter mush, proceed; if you encounter steel, withdraw.”
He might never have spoken those words, but no matter. It’s an excellent metaphor for the strategy that Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are applying to the democratic West.
Both Moscow and Beijing are probing with the bayonet of “hybrid” or unconventional war – using flexible combinations of military and non-military methods, overt and covert, to test, destabilise and weaken rivals.
It’s aggressive, but the individual actions usually fall beneath the conventional definition of armed combat. This allows democracies to pretend that it’s not war, so let’s not worry. That’s called the “mush” response, and that’s why it works so well.
“This has been something they’ve been engaging in against the West – including Australia – for two decades,” observes Mick Ryan, the prominent strategist and retired Australian Army major general. He includes North Korea and Iran as practitioners.
The current showcase is Europe. On the weekend, Denmark reported that unidentified drones had appeared in the air above its major military bases. It announced a ban on all drone use this week, fearing risks to the two major summits it’s due to host.
It was Denmark’s third drone alarm in a week, and it was one of only five European countries in a month to suffer incursions from either the Russian air force or drones strongly suspected of Russian origin. The headline in The Economist magazine on the weekend summed it up: “Russia is violating Europe’s skies with impunity”.
This is no coincidence. As a report by the Institute for International Strategic Studies reported last month, quite separately to the air incursions: “Russian sabotage operations in Europe have increased their range of targets and severity of attacks. The number of attacks almost quadrupled from 2023 to 2024.”
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