WHICH POWER COULD BREAK FIRST?

 

THE WORLD NEWSREEL

HW1 — THE FIRST HYBRID WAR

FINANCIAL EXHAUSTION: WHICH POWER COULD BREAK FIRST?

The Historical Atlas of HW1 — Strategic and Economic Assessment

24 October 2026

Wars are not necessarily lost when armies are defeated. Sometimes they are lost when governments can no longer afford to maintain them.

The financial history of HW1 raises a question that may prove more important than the outcome of any individual battle: could one of the participating powers suffer a sudden financial collapse under the accumulated burden of war?

The answer is yes. But the danger is distributed very unevenly, and financial exhaustion must not be confused with sovereign bankruptcy.

A state may remain technically solvent while losing the ability to finance military operations at their previous intensity. It may struggle to replace equipment, purchase ammunition, pay suppliers, maintain mobilisation or protect its currency. Long before a government formally defaults, its capacity to wage war may already have deteriorated.

I. The Financial Vulnerability of the Powers

Power	Principal vulnerability	Potential consequence
Ukraine	Dependence on external financing	Sudden budgetary liquidity crisis if assistance is interrupted
Iran	Inflation, currency instability and economic contraction	Monetary and fiscal crisis, with wider social consequences
Russia	Persistent military expenditure, inflation, high interest rates and weak growth	Progressive deterioration of fiscal and industrial capacity
Israel	Prolonged mobilisation, military expenditure and higher deficits	Rising debt and pressure for fiscal adjustment
European Union	Divergent national fiscal positions and political commitments	Delays or reductions in collective support
United States	Federal debt and increasing interest expenditure	Political and budgetary constraints rather than an imminent war-induced default
NATO	Uneven burden-sharing among member states	Disagreements over expenditure and military commitments

NATO is not a sovereign state and therefore cannot suffer sovereign bankruptcy. Its members can, however, encounter individual fiscal constraints.

The categories above describe possible mechanisms of financial distress, not calculated probabilities of collapse.

II. Ukraine: The Danger of an Interrupted Lifeline

Ukraine is particularly vulnerable to a sudden interruption of external financing.

Its wartime economy depends upon international assistance not only for military equipment but also for the continued operation of the state.

The International Monetary Fund has identified financing requirements of approximately $140.3 billion for 2026–2029, while public debt is projected to reach approximately 111.8% of GDP in 2026.

The danger is therefore not simply the accumulation of debt.

It is the possibility that essential financial transfers might be interrupted faster than alternative resources can be mobilised.

Under such circumstances, a government might encounter a severe liquidity crisis even without a conventional sovereign default.

The distinction is critical. Ukraine's immediate financial endurance depends substantially upon the reliability and timing of external support.

III. Iran: The Danger of Monetary Destabilisation

Iran presents a different form of vulnerability.

International restrictions, inflationary pressures, currency instability and military expenditure interact within an economy already exposed to substantial structural difficulties.

IMF projections for 2026 indicate a severe economic contraction and exceptionally high inflation, estimated at approximately 68.9% on an annual average basis.

The principal danger is not necessarily the government's immediate inability to issue domestic currency or meet nominal obligations.

Rather, it is the possibility that inflation and exchange-rate instability will progressively undermine the real purchasing power of state revenues and household incomes.

A government may continue financing military expenditure in nominal terms while finding it increasingly difficult to obtain the equipment, imports and productive resources required to sustain its operations.

Iran therefore illustrates the distinction between nominal solvency and real economic capacity.

IV. Russia: The Danger of Cumulative Exhaustion

Russia's financial position is fundamentally different from Ukraine's.

It possesses a substantial domestic economic base, significant energy resources and the capacity to finance much of its expenditure in its own currency.

These characteristics make an immediate sovereign liquidity collapse less plausible than in a state heavily dependent upon foreign budgetary transfers.

They do not, however, eliminate the costs of prolonged mobilisation.

In October 2026, the Russian central bank maintained its key interest rate at 14%, against a background of persistent inflationary pressure and weak economic growth.

The problem is cumulative.

High military expenditure competes with civilian investment, while expensive credit constrains private economic activity. Labour shortages, industrial bottlenecks and the continuing cost of military procurement can further reduce economic flexibility.

Russia's more plausible financial danger is therefore not a sudden disappearance of state resources but a prolonged deterioration in the productive and fiscal foundations of military power.

A state can continue fighting while becoming progressively less capable of sustaining the same intensity of operations.

V. Israel: The Burden of Prolonged Mobilisation

Israel's vulnerability arises principally from the costs of sustained military operations and mobilisation.

A prolonged campaign imposes expenditure on personnel, equipment, ammunition, air defence and the replacement of military assets.

It also affects civilian production when reservists are withdrawn from the workforce.

Nevertheless, Israel retains substantial fiscal and financial institutions and access to domestic and international capital markets.

The Bank of Israel's projections place public debt at approximately 68% of GDP in 2026, with a projected fiscal deficit of 4.4% of GDP.

These figures indicate fiscal pressure rather than imminent sovereign collapse.

The principal question is how long elevated military expenditure can continue without requiring more substantial taxation, borrowing or reductions in other government programmes.

VI. The United States and Europe: Financial Power and Political Limits

The United States occupies a different position from the principal battlefield economies.

Its financial capacity rests upon the scale of its economy, the depth of its capital markets and the international role of the dollar.

The direct expenditure associated with HW1 represents only part of a much larger federal budget and global military establishment.

The principal constraint is therefore more likely to arise through political decisions about taxation, borrowing, appropriations and strategic priorities than through an immediate inability to finance military operations.

The European Union presents a more fragmented picture.

Its member states possess different debt levels, industrial capacities, military commitments and fiscal constraints.

Germany, France, Italy and Poland cannot be treated as though they shared a single sovereign balance sheet.

European military assistance may consequently be constrained by political disagreement or national budgetary decisions even when the aggregate economic resources of the Union remain substantial.

Financial capacity and political willingness are not the same thing.

VII. The Financial Exhaustion Index

A serious historical assessment should not attempt to predict state collapse from military expenditure alone.

The appropriate measure would combine several variables:

1. Monthly financing requirements: the resources required to maintain military operations and essential state functions.

2. Available liquidity: cash balances, usable reserves and accessible domestic financing.

3. External financial dependence: the proportion of expenditure requiring foreign grants, loans or transfers.

4. Debt-service pressure: interest and principal payments relative to government revenues.

5. Monetary stability: inflation, exchange-rate pressure and the government's capacity to preserve purchasing power.

6. Economic replacement capacity: the ability to replenish military equipment, ammunition and industrial resources.

Such an index would distinguish a country experiencing gradual economic deterioration from one exposed to an abrupt interruption of essential financing.

It would also avoid the misleading practice of assigning precise probabilities of state collapse without a defensible statistical model.

VIII. The Strategic Conclusion

Three distinct mechanisms of financial exhaustion emerge from the record of HW1.

Ukraine faces the danger of interrupted financing.

Iran faces the danger of monetary and economic destabilisation.

Russia faces the danger of cumulative fiscal and productive exhaustion.

Israel, the United States and the European powers confront different combinations of military costs, debt pressures and political constraints, without the same immediate dependence upon emergency external budgetary support.

These distinctions matter because the financial end of a campaign need not coincide with the military defeat of its armed forces.

A government may withdraw, negotiate, reduce operations or accept an unfavourable settlement because the marginal cost of continuing has become politically or economically intolerable.

Conversely, a state may sustain considerable economic damage without abandoning its strategic objectives.

The decisive historical question is therefore not merely which power possesses the greatest financial resources.

It is which power can continue converting those resources into military effectiveness, political endurance and economic stability.

The first financial defeat of HW1 may occur long before the first formal sovereign bankruptcy.

And the power that breaks first may not be the one that has spent the most, but the one whose financial system can least withstand the interruption of a single indispensable source of support.

The Cardozo Institute for Critical Legal Enquiry | CI-CLE Institute

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The World Newsreel — Historical Atlas of HW1

Principal references: International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook and Ukraine programme assessments; SIPRI Military Expenditure Database; Bank of Israel macroeconomic forecasts; Central Bank of Russia monetary policy statements.

Know today the truths of tomorrow.

THE FINANCIAL HISTORY OF THE CAMPAIGNS OF THE CURRENT HYBRID WAR

 

THE WORLD NEWSREEL

HW1 — THE FIRST HYBRID WAR

THE FINANCIAL HISTORY OF THE CAMPAIGNS

The Military Expenditure Ledger, 2022–2026

Historical Atlas of HW1 — Economic and Strategic Supplement

AN ANALYSIS FROM: THE CRITICAL LEGAL ENUIRY - CARDOZO INSTITUTE

The First Hybrid War was fought not only by armies, aircraft and warships, but also through government budgets, industrial production, international credit and the mobilisation of national economies.

Its financial history reveals an important distinction: the money spent maintaining military power was considerably greater than the money directly attributable to individual campaigns.

For this reason, the following account separates total military expenditure, campaign-related assistance and sovereign indebtedness.

I. The Military Expenditure Ledger

The latest internationally comparable annual figures cover the period through December 2025. Expenditure during 2026 remains provisional and is therefore excluded from the consolidated totals.

All amounts are expressed in billions of US dollars.

Power or alliance	2025 expenditure	Consolidated historical figure
NATO — all members	$1,581 bn	$5,660 bn, 2022–2025
United States	$954 bn	$3,744 bn, approximate 2022–2025 total
Russia	$190 bn	$448 bn, 2023–2025; 2022 excluded
European NATO members	$559 bn	Separate cumulative total not established
European Union	—	Separate EU-27 series required
Israel	$48.3 bn	Four-year total not established
Iran	$7.4 bn	Four-year total not established
Ukraine	$84.1 bn	Four-year total not established

The NATO total is the sum of reported annual alliance expenditure: $1,232 billion in 2022, $1,341 billion in 2023, $1,506 billion in 2024 and $1,581 billion in 2025.

These annual totals reflect changes in NATO membership, including Finland's accession in 2023 and Sweden's in 2024.

The American figure is an approximate sum of annual spending, while Russia's three-year figure deliberately excludes 2022 rather than introducing an insufficiently reconciled estimate.

These are historical expenditure totals, not estimates of the direct cost of HW1. The 2022 totals also include January and most of February, before the opening of the Eastern Campaign.

II. The Balance of Military Expenditure

In 2025, NATO members collectively spent approximately 8.3 times as much on their armed forces as Russia.

The United States alone spent approximately five times as much.

Yet military expenditure cannot be translated mechanically into battlefield superiority.

Personnel costs, procurement prices, exchange rates, industrial structures, geographical commitments and purchasing power differ substantially between countries.

Furthermore, American military expenditure supports global operations, including commitments outside the European and Middle Eastern theatres.

The financial imbalance therefore describes the scale of available military resources, not the outcome of any particular campaign.

III. The Eastern Campaign: The Cost of Supporting Ukraine

Military assistance to Ukraine constitutes one of the most identifiable financial components of HW1.

The European Union, its member states and the United States have supplied weapons, ammunition, training, financial assistance and support for the Ukrainian state.

Two distinct accounting methods must be preserved.

The first records military assistance allocated to Ukraine.

The second records national government appropriations, including procurement, replacement of donated equipment, military operations and other related expenditure.

These figures cannot simply be added together.

For the United States, supplemental appropriations to the Department of Defense for Ukraine-related support reached approximately $127 billion during 2022–2025.

Of this amount, approximately $65.1 billion had been disbursed by the end of 2025.

The difference between appropriation and disbursement is essential: money authorised by a legislature is not necessarily money already spent.

European assistance must likewise be distinguished between commitments, allocations and actual disbursements.

IV. The Ukrainian Sovereign Debt

Ukraine's state and state-guaranteed debt, 31 August 2026: $215.55 billion.

Component	USD billions
External public debt	164.80
Domestic public debt	44.97
State-guaranteed debt	5.79
Total	215.55

The figures are rounded.

External public debt represented approximately 76.5% of the total.

A substantial proportion of Ukraine's obligations consisted of concessional financing, carrying terms more favourable than ordinary commercial borrowing.

The debt total must not be mistaken for the cost of the war.

It includes obligations incurred before February 2022, as well as financing associated with wartime expenditure and the continued operation of the Ukrainian state.

Nor should military grants be counted as additions to sovereign debt.

A grant transfers resources without creating a repayment obligation. A loan creates a liability, although its economic burden depends upon interest rates, maturity, grace periods and possible restructuring.

V. The Persian and Levantine Campaigns

The financial history of the Persian and Levantine theatres requires a different accounting approach.

Israel's national military expenditure reached $48.3 billion in 2025, while Iran's estimated expenditure was $7.4 billion.

These figures describe annual military spending, not the cumulative operational costs of the campaigns.

An adequate campaign account would separately identify expenditure on aircraft operations, precision-guided weapons, missile launches, air defence, mobilisation, equipment replacement and the protection of maritime communications.

It would also distinguish expenditure by Israel and Iran from the costs incurred by American forces operating in the region.

The published national military budgets cannot, by themselves, supply this operational account.

VI. The European Rearmament

The financial consequences of HW1 extended beyond direct military assistance.

Germany expanded defence expenditure and forward deployments.

Poland accelerated procurement and the expansion of its armed forces.

France maintained overseas and European commitments while increasing defence investment.

Italy strengthened its participation in NATO's eastern deployments and expanded military spending.

Finland and Sweden entered NATO, changing the military geography of northern Europe.

The enlargement of the Alliance and the reinforcement of its eastern flank involved expenditure on equipment, infrastructure, readiness, logistics and military exercises.

Such expenditure belongs to the wider strategic history of HW1, even where the forces concerned did not participate in combat.

VII. The Problem of Double Counting

A financial history of HW1 must avoid three common errors.

First, NATO expenditure cannot be added to American expenditure, because the American total is already included in NATO's accounts.

Second, European Union expenditure cannot be added indiscriminately to NATO expenditure, because most EU member states also belong to NATO.

Third, military assistance supplied by one state and received by another must not automatically be counted twice as an additional resource consumed by the international system.

The appropriate method is to maintain separate accounts for military spending, international transfers, direct campaign costs and public debt.

Only after these categories have been reconciled can a meaningful consolidated estimate be attempted.

VIII. The Historical Balance Sheet

The financial record already establishes the enormous scale of military mobilisation.

Between 2022 and 2025, the annual expenditure totals of NATO members amounted to approximately $5.66 trillion.

In 2025 alone, the United States spent $954 billion, Russia approximately $190 billion, Israel $48.3 billion and Iran an estimated $7.4 billion.

By August 2026, Ukraine's public and state-guaranteed debt had reached $215.55 billion.

But none of these figures, individually or collectively, measures the total economic cost of HW1.

That larger account would require estimates of destroyed infrastructure, lost production, displaced populations, disrupted trade, reconstruction liabilities and the long-term costs of military mobilisation.

The historical significance of the expenditure ledger lies precisely in this distinction.

The cost of maintaining the armed forces, the cost of conducting the campaigns and the economic cost of the international confrontation are three different quantities.

A serious history of HW1 must calculate all three.

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The World Newsreel — Historical Atlas of HW1

Financial record compiled from SIPRI military expenditure series and official Ukrainian debt statistics. Annual military spending is distinguished from campaign expenditure, assistance commitments and sovereign liabilities.

Know today the truths of tomorrow.

The principal statistical references are SIPRI Military Expenditure Database, SIPRI 2025 expenditure report and the Ukrainian Ministry of Finance debt statement. 

SIPRI

+4

The $5.66 trillion NATO total is calculated, but the remaining four-year national totals should not be presented as final until the 2022–2025 figures have been reconciled against one consistent SIPRI database vintage. The same applies to the EU-27 total. This is a substantive limitation of the current ledger, rather than a zero-expenditure entry.

THE SIX PRINCIPLES OF WORLD ORDER

 

THE WORLD NEWSREEL

OUR COMMENT ON THE INTERNATIONAL SITUATION

THE SIX PRINCIPLES OF WORLD ORDER

Why International Law Is Becoming Incoherent

October 25, 2026 | Strategic Affairs — The Editorial Desk

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I. TWO POWERS, TWO GLACIS

Consider two maps.

The first depicts Russia and its western approaches. Ukraine and Belarus form the geographical space separating Russia's European heartland from the military powers of Central Europe. Their political alignment determines the strategic depth available to Moscow.

The second depicts the United States and the Western Pacific. Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and the successive island chains form a strategic perimeter through which American power is projected and the expansion of rival military power is constrained.

The geographical configurations are different. One is predominantly continental; the other maritime. Yet the underlying strategic calculation is remarkably similar.

Neither power defines its security interests exclusively by reference to its sovereign borders.

Both regard the military and political configuration of neighbouring regions as a matter of national security.

This observation does not establish which territorial arrangements are legitimate. It identifies a problem that contemporary international law has never satisfactorily resolved: what principles determine the legitimate organization of international space?

The answer depends upon which conception of world order we adopt.

And there is more than one.

II. THREE MODELS OF LEGITIMACY

Modern international relations are governed by three competing principles of legitimacy.

1. The Realist Model — Kissinger

In World Order (2014), Henry Kissinger returned to a fundamental proposition of classical diplomacy: international order depends upon an equilibrium among major powers, each possessing its own historical experience, strategic interests and conception of legitimacy.

The relevant political units are not necessarily equal in power or influence. International stability emerges from arrangements that accommodate the distribution of power and prevent any single actor from overturning the system.

Its underlying principle resembles constitutional checks and balances, transposed to the international level.

Just as a constitutional system distributes authority among competing institutions, a realist international order distributes effective power among competing geopolitical centres.

Its hard core is equilibrium among great powers and their strategic spaces.

2. The Idealist Model — Wilson

Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points of January 1918 expressed a fundamentally different conception.

The legitimacy of international order rests upon the right of peoples and political communities to determine their own political destiny.

In its universalized form, this principle applies independently of the distribution of military power. A small nation's political independence cannot be made conceptually subordinate to the strategic requirements of a larger neighbour.

The relevant unit is the people or nation-state, not the great-power system.

Its hard core is self-determination.

3. The International Democratic Model — Roosevelt

Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced a third conception, particularly through his Four Freedoms of 1941 and the ideological objectives of the Second World War.

International legitimacy could no longer depend exclusively upon sovereignty or equilibrium. The internal political character of states also became relevant.

Freedom of expression, religious liberty, freedom from want and freedom from fear supplied an emerging international vocabulary of fundamental rights.

In its subsequent development, this conception associates legitimate international conduct with democratic institutions, constitutional government and human rights.

Its hard core is the conformity of political authority and its actions to internationally recognized democratic and human-rights principles.

These three models need not be mutually exclusive. But neither do they necessarily produce the same conclusions.

A territorial arrangement may satisfy the requirements of strategic equilibrium while conflicting with self-determination. A sovereign political decision may conform to national independence while conflicting with a democratic conception of international legitimacy.

Thus the first problem of international law is already apparent: different principles may produce different judgments concerning the legitimacy of the same political situation.

III. THREE MODELS OF INTERNATIONAL ENFORCEMENT

There is, however, a second question, logically distinct from the first.

Even if the legitimate principles of international order could be agreed upon, who would maintain that order?

Here again, three competing models can be identified.

1. The International League Model — The United Nations

Order is maintained through an international organization representing the community of states.

Its institutions establish procedures, formulate collective decisions and authorize measures for the maintenance or restoration of international peace.

The United Nations represents the most developed historical expression of this model, although its Security Council incorporates important great-power privileges.

2. The Hegemonic Model — The American Security System

Order is maintained principally by a predominant military power possessing the capacity to enforce international arrangements.

In the contemporary American experience, this function is associated with the global military establishment, the Pentagon, overseas bases, security guarantees and worldwide operational capabilities.

International order depends not merely upon agreed rules, but upon the military capacity of a hegemonic state to sustain them.

3. The Classical European Model — Spheres of Control

Order is maintained through the coexistence of great powers exercising effective control or predominant influence within their respective strategic spheres.

Rather than requiring a universal institution or a single global enforcer, this model relies upon reciprocal accommodation, territorial arrangements and limitations upon competing interventions.

Its historical reference is the classical European international system, including the traditions of the balance of power and the Concert of Europe.

Once again, these are not necessarily exclusive arrangements.

Roosevelt himself combined an ambitious conception of international freedoms with a proposed system of great-power enforcement. His original Four Policemen envisaged the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union and China as the principal guardians of postwar security.

The future United Nations thus emerged partly from a combination of universal institutional aspirations and the recognition of unequal geopolitical power.

IV. THE NINE POSSIBLE ORDERS

The distinction between principles of legitimacy and mechanisms of enforcement produces a simple analytical matrix.

Legitimacy / Enforcement	International League	Hegemonic Power	Spheres of Control
Realist	Collective management of great-power equilibrium	Hegemonic stabilization of the balance	Reciprocal great-power accommodation
Idealist	Collective protection of self-determination	Hegemonic protection of national independence	Territorial autonomy secured by reciprocal restraint
International Democratic	Multilateral enforcement of democratic and human-rights standards	Hegemonic enforcement of democratic standards	Differentiated political orders within respective spheres

These nine combinations are ideal types, not nine mutually exclusive historical systems.

Indeed, the actual positions adopted by states may be understood as variable combinations of all six principles.

Each government, political movement or international institution may adhere more or less strongly to the hard core of each model, producing a particular configuration of legitimacy and enforcement.

A state may invoke self-determination in one dispute, strategic equilibrium in another, and international democratic legitimacy in a third.

It may simultaneously demand enforcement by the United Nations, rely upon the protection of a hegemonic military power, and insist upon freedom of action within its own regional sphere.

Such combinations are not necessarily the result of deliberate inconsistency.

They may reflect the simultaneous operation of different conceptions of world order within the same political and legal system.

V. THE COMBINATORIAL DISORDER

This brings us to the distinctive predicament of contemporary international law.

The usual explanation for the present disorder is that the international community has abandoned the principles upon which the postwar system was constructed.

But perhaps the opposite is closer to the truth.

The crisis may result not from a shortage of principles, but from their proliferation and simultaneous application.

The contemporary international system contains elements of Wilsonian self-determination, Rooseveltian international democracy and Kissingerian equilibrium.

It also contains institutions of collective security, structures of hegemonic military enforcement and persistent spheres of strategic influence.

These principles survive together, despite the fact that they originated in different historical circumstances and rest upon different conceptions of political legitimacy.

They are neither fully integrated into a coherent constitutional order nor arranged according to an agreed hierarchy.

Consequently, different actors can construct plausible but conflicting accounts of the same international event by selecting different combinations of principles.

The disagreement is no longer simply about the interpretation of a particular rule.

It concerns the underlying conception of international order from which the rule derives its meaning.

VI. THE RETURN TO GEOGRAPHY

We may now return to our two maps.

Russia's western glacis and America's Pacific perimeter illustrate the continuing relevance of the realist conception of strategic space.

The competing claims of neighbouring political communities introduce the Wilsonian principle of self-determination.

The political character of governments, the international protection of rights and the institutional commitments of democratic states introduce the Rooseveltian conception.

Finally, the question of who may legitimately preserve, modify or enforce these arrangements introduces the three competing mechanisms of international order.

The result is not a single controversy governed by a single set of principles.

It is a conflict among different combinations of legitimacy and enforcement.

This is why contemporary debates about international law so frequently seem to proceed in parallel rather than converge upon a common answer.

The participants are not always disagreeing about the facts. Nor are they necessarily disagreeing about the text of particular international instruments.

They may be reasoning from different constitutional conceptions of the international system itself.

The resulting incoherence is therefore structural.

The contemporary crisis of international law is not simply the disappearance of world order.

It is the simultaneous operation of several potentially incompatible principles of world order, none of which has succeeded in establishing an undisputed priority over the others.

We live not in a world without principles, but in a world governed by too many competing principles claiming authority over the same events.

And perhaps that is the most revealing feature of the international situation today.

P. G. Monateri

CI-CLE — Critical Legal Enquiry Cardozo Institute

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The World Newsreel — Know today the truths of tomorrow.

Historical references: Henry Kissinger, World Order (2014); Woodrow Wilson, Fourteen Points Address (January 8, 1918); Franklin D. Roosevelt, Four Freedoms Address (January 6, 1941); Roosevelt's proposals at the Tehran Conference (1943).

THE WAR ALREADY UNDER WAY

 

THE WORLD NEWSREEL

SPECIAL HISTORICAL ANALYSIS — OCTOBER 24, 2026

THE WAR ALREADY UNDER WAY

How the World Entered a Hybrid War Without Recognising It

A chapter from a history of the early twenty-first century, written as it might appear in 2060.

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I. The War That Had No Name

Future historians may disagree about when the war began. Those who lived through it had a more peculiar difficulty: they could not agree that they were already at war.

They had seen armies cross frontiers, cities destroyed, commercial shipping attacked, pipelines threatened, communications disrupted and economic sanctions imposed on an extraordinary scale.

They had watched governments mobilise industries, rebuild arsenals and prepare their populations for prolonged confrontation.

Yet each morning their newspapers continued to announce the possibility of war.

War was always approaching.

War was always threatening to break out.

War was always something that might happen tomorrow.

This was perhaps the most remarkable intellectual achievement of the period: the ability to experience an expanding system of military confrontations while describing each confrontation as an isolated crisis.

The newspapers spoke of Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and the Baltic.

The historians of the following generation would increasingly ask whether these were merely separate geographical headings in the same newspaper, or the theatres of a broader transformation in international conflict.

The question was not whether every battle belonged to a single military campaign. Clearly, it did not.

The question was whether the international order had entered a prolonged condition in which military force, economic coercion, technological disruption and political destabilisation had become interconnected instruments of competition.

By October 2026, the evidence was sufficient to make the question unavoidable.

The war was not hidden.

It was simply divided into news categories.

II. February 24, 2022: The Ukrainian Campaign

The conventional opening date was February 24, 2022.

That morning, Russian forces invaded Ukraine from several directions, advancing from Belarus towards Kyiv, from Russia towards Kharkiv and from Crimea into southern Ukraine.

The invasion was intended to alter the political and strategic position of Ukraine by military force.

Its opening operations failed to secure a rapid victory. Ukrainian resistance prevented the capture of Kyiv, and Russian forces eventually withdrew from northern Ukraine.

During the following months, the war developed into a succession of offensives, counteroffensives, sieges and campaigns of attrition.

Ukraine recovered territory in the Kharkiv region and the city of Kherson in 2022. Russia subsequently consolidated positions elsewhere, while both sides adapted to a battlefield increasingly dominated by artillery, mines, drones and electronic warfare.

The Ukrainian campaign was not the beginning of Russian-Ukrainian hostilities. Fighting had already continued in eastern Ukraine since 2014.

But February 2022 marked a transformation in scale.

It also transformed the strategic position of Europe.

NATO strengthened its eastern deployments. European governments expanded military assistance to Ukraine. Sanctions became a central instrument of Western policy towards Russia.

The war therefore acquired two dimensions.

The first was territorial: armies fighting for control of Ukrainian land.

The second was systemic: states competing over the political and security order of Europe.

It was this second dimension that made the Ukrainian campaign a possible opening chapter of a much wider history.

The battlefield was in Ukraine.

The consequences were international.

III. The First Enlargement: The Economic Front

The expansion did not initially require the opening of another military front.

It required the mobilisation of economic instruments.

Sanctions, export restrictions, financial controls, energy policies and industrial production became part of the confrontation.

European governments sought to reduce dependence on Russian energy.

Russia sought alternative commercial relationships.

Military assistance to Ukraine required new production capacity, new financial commitments and new political agreements.

The economic struggle was not merely a secondary consequence of military operations.

It influenced the resources available for those operations and the capacity of governments to sustain them.

The distinction between battlefield and home front consequently became less secure.

A factory producing ammunition was part of the war effort.

So was a port handling energy supplies.

So was a government negotiating access to strategically important materials.

The transformation was especially visible in the relationship between economics and logistics.

Globalisation had created a world in which production depended upon the movement of components, raw materials, information and finance across multiple jurisdictions.

That system had generated extraordinary prosperity.

It had also created extraordinary vulnerabilities.

The international economy was not a battlefield in the literal sense.

But its infrastructure increasingly became an object of strategic calculation.

A sanction could interrupt a transaction.

A cyberattack could interrupt a service.

A missile could interrupt a shipping route.

The instruments differed.

The strategic consequences could converge.

IV. October 2023: The Middle Eastern Theatre

On October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks against Israel initiated a new phase of war in the Middle East.

Israel's subsequent military campaign in Gaza produced immense destruction and civilian suffering.

The conflict had its own history, its own causes and its own political objectives.

It would be historically indefensible to describe it as merely an extension of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Yet its consequences entered an international environment already transformed by that invasion.

The United States faced simultaneous security commitments in Europe and the Middle East.

Regional powers recalculated their positions.

Armed organisations in neighbouring territories became involved in hostilities.

The confrontation widened through attacks, reprisals and military operations involving multiple actors.

The Red Sea acquired particular strategic importance.

Beginning in late 2023, attacks by Yemen's Houthis disrupted commercial shipping and forced vessels to reconsider routes through the Suez Canal.

International trade was affected far beyond the immediate region.

Ships travelling between Asia and Europe were diverted around the Cape of Good Hope, increasing distances, costs and delivery times.

A local military operation had acquired global economic consequences.

The significance was not that the wars in Ukraine and Gaza had become one war under a single command.

They had not.

It was that the international system was now required to sustain several major confrontations simultaneously, while the consequences of each affected the management of the others.

By 2025, direct military confrontation involving Israel, Iran and the United States had further complicated the regional picture.

The Middle Eastern theatre had become both a conflict in its own right and a source of pressure upon the wider international order.

V. Africa: The Wars That Refused to Remain Local

The Sudanese civil war, which began in April 2023, offered another illustration of the transformation.

The struggle between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces was rooted in Sudan's internal political and military history.

Its consequences were catastrophic.

Civilian populations experienced killings, displacement, hunger and the destruction of essential services.

External involvement, regional interests and allegations of foreign military assistance complicated the conflict.

Sudan demonstrated that the increasing internationalisation of warfare did not require a conventional war between sovereign states.

Armed organisations could acquire substantial military capabilities, exercise territorial control and become participants in wider regional relationships.

The same broad structural problem appeared elsewhere in Africa, although the circumstances differed greatly from country to country.

In the Sahel, military governments, insurgent organisations, foreign security partnerships and struggles over political legitimacy created an unstable strategic environment.

These conflicts could not be reduced to a single African front.

Their causes were too different, their participants too numerous and their political objectives too diverse.

Nevertheless, they illustrated an important feature of the period.

The distinction between internal war and international competition had become increasingly difficult to maintain.

The formal borders of a state no longer defined the effective boundaries of a conflict.

Weapons, money, military expertise, displaced populations and political influence moved across them.

The wars remained local in their immediate origins.

Their strategic environments did not.

VI. The European Home Front

By the middle of the decade, European governments had begun to speak increasingly of hybrid threats.

The expression covered a variety of activities: cyber operations, information manipulation, sabotage, covert interference, economic coercion and threats against critical infrastructure.

The European Union and NATO treated these activities as important security challenges.

But the terminology introduced a difficulty.

Not every cyberattack was an act of war.

Not every industrial accident was sabotage.

Not every political controversy was the result of foreign interference.

Attribution remained essential.

So did evidence.

The danger of the hybrid-war concept was that it could explain too much.

A theory capable of classifying every inconvenience as an enemy operation was no longer a theory of warfare. It was a theory of universal suspicion.

Yet dismissing the phenomenon altogether was equally mistaken.

Modern states depended upon vulnerable technological systems.

Electricity networks, telecommunications, financial transactions, satellites, ports and transport infrastructure had become indispensable to civilian life and military operations alike.

An adversary seeking to weaken a state did not necessarily need to defeat its army.

It might instead seek to interrupt the systems upon which that army, its government and its population depended.

This was not entirely new.

Blockades, propaganda, espionage and economic warfare had existed for centuries.

What was new was the density of the networks connecting civilian life to strategic competition.

A railway could be both civilian infrastructure and a military supply route.

A satellite could serve both commercial communications and battlefield intelligence.

A social network could be both a public forum and a channel for coordinated manipulation.

The European home front was therefore not simply a geographical space behind the armies.

It was an environment in which the distinction between military and civilian vulnerability had become increasingly difficult to preserve.

VII. The Great Illusion of the Ceasefire

Perhaps the most characteristic error of contemporary journalism concerned the meaning of peace.

Whenever negotiations began, headlines announced a possible end to the war.

Whenever a ceasefire was declared, commentators spoke of a turning point towards peace.

Whenever fighting resumed, they announced a new escalation.

The language suggested a world oscillating between war and peace at intervals of a few days.

Historians had long known that wars did not behave in this manner.

The Thirty Years' War contained negotiations, truces, changes of alliance, temporary settlements and long intervals in which military activity varied enormously.

The Napoleonic Wars were interrupted by treaties and periods of relative peace, yet historians continued to examine them as a connected historical sequence.

The Korean War included prolonged armistice negotiations while military operations continued.

A ceasefire was an event within the history of a conflict.

It was not necessarily the end of that history.

A negotiation might be an attempt to terminate hostilities.

It might also be an attempt to improve a military position, obtain time, secure supplies or establish conditions for a later settlement.

The distinction was fundamental.

The absence of fighting did not establish the presence of peace.

Nor did the resumption of fighting necessarily signify the beginning of a new war.

What mattered was whether the underlying conflict had been politically and legally resolved.

The journalism of the 2020s often confused the daily tempo of military operations with the historical duration of the confrontation.

A battlefield might fall silent.

The conflict could continue.

A diplomatic meeting might begin.

The war could remain unfinished.

And a peace agreement might terminate one campaign without resolving the political antagonism that had produced it.

VIII. Why It Was Called Hybrid

The expression hybrid war was already in circulation before the Ukrainian invasion.

It generally referred to the combination of conventional military force with irregular operations, cyberattacks, information manipulation, economic pressure and other instruments of coercion.

In its narrower meaning, it described a method of conducting conflict.

In the broader historical interpretation proposed here, it described something more ambitious: an international condition in which multiple conflicts and coercive campaigns interacted across geographical and functional boundaries.

This interpretation required caution.

A collection of wars did not become a single war merely because they occurred during the same decade.

Nor did economic interdependence prove the existence of a unified strategic design.

To speak meaningfully of a hybrid world war, historians would need to establish relationships among conflicts: shared resources, strategic coordination, reciprocal escalation, common institutional consequences or competition for the same international order.

Some relationships were direct.

Others were indirect.

Some were only analogies.

The historian's task was to distinguish them.

The concept was valuable not because it abolished differences, but because it revealed connections that conventional geographical reporting tended to conceal.

Ukraine was not Sudan.

Gaza was not the Baltic.

The Red Sea was not the Donbas.

Yet military expenditure, energy markets, diplomatic alliances, shipping networks and technological systems connected their consequences.

The war, in this interpretation, did not possess a single front line.

It possessed a changing structure of confrontations.

IX. The Legal Paradox

International law was not entirely unprepared for these developments.

It had long distinguished the legal status of armed conflict from formal declarations of war.

The existence of an armed conflict depended upon factual and legal criteria, not upon whether a government chose to pronounce the word war.

The prohibition on the use of force, the right of self-defence, international humanitarian law and the rules of state responsibility provided distinct legal frameworks.

The difficulty was that the broader condition described by historians as a hybrid world war did not necessarily correspond to one legally unified armed conflict.

A cyber operation might violate international law without constituting an armed attack.

An economic sanction might be coercive without amounting to unlawful force.

A proxy relationship might create questions of attribution without establishing that every action of the proxy was legally attributable to its foreign supporter.

And several simultaneous armed conflicts might remain legally separate even when their strategic consequences interacted.

The historian could therefore speak of one historical process while the lawyer continued to identify multiple legal relationships.

There was no contradiction in this.

History and law were asking different questions.

The historian sought to understand the structure of an era.

The lawyer sought to determine the legal character and consequences of particular conduct.

The danger arose only when a historical metaphor was mistaken for a legal conclusion.

To describe the international environment as a hybrid world war was not to assert that every participating state was legally at war with every other state.

It was to suggest that the distinction between war as an isolated event and war as a condition of international order had become increasingly important.

X. October 2026: The War Continues

By October 2026, the international system had become accustomed to the coexistence of military operations and diplomatic negotiations.

Governments discussed ceasefires while maintaining military assistance programmes.

They negotiated economic arrangements while preparing for further disruption.

They condemned attacks upon civilian infrastructure while investing in the protection of their own networks.

The institutions of international society continued to function.

The United Nations met.

Treaties were negotiated.

Diplomatic relations were maintained.

International commerce continued.

But these activities did not prove that the international order had returned to peace.

They demonstrated that modern conflict could coexist with the ordinary institutions of international life.

This was perhaps the defining feature of the period.

The war did not suspend normality.

It entered normality.

People continued to travel, work, shop, vote and attend football matches.

Governments continued to announce budgets.

Financial markets continued to open every morning.

Newspapers continued to publish separate sections for politics, economics, technology and foreign affairs.

And beneath those classifications, the relationships among coercion, military force, economic vulnerability and political order became steadily more important.

The world had not necessarily entered a single war in the traditional sense.

It had entered an age in which war was no longer easily confined to the battlefield.

XI. The Historian's Verdict

Writing in 2060, one might be tempted to give the entire period a single dramatic name.

Historians are fond of names.

They transform disorder into chronology.

They establish beginnings and endings.

They turn uncertain experiences into recognisable periods.

But the essential lesson of the years 2022–2026 did not depend upon whether later scholars ultimately accepted the expression Hybrid World War.

It concerned the failure of contemporaries to recognise continuity.

They treated negotiations as peace.

They treated renewed fighting as a new war.

They treated economic coercion as a separate subject.

They treated cyber operations as a technological problem.

They treated African conflicts as regional emergencies and maritime disruption as a commercial inconvenience.

Each description contained an element of truth.

Together, they concealed the larger historical question.

Was the international order experiencing a succession of unrelated crises?

Or was it undergoing a prolonged struggle over the distribution, exercise and legitimacy of power?

The answer would not be supplied by the next ceasefire announcement.

Nor by the next diplomatic summit.

It would emerge from the history of the period as a whole.

The inhabitants of the 2020s possessed an extraordinary quantity of information about individual events.

What they lacked was an agreed conception of the historical process in which those events occurred.

They knew the names of the battles.

They knew the dates of the negotiations.

They knew the movements of the markets.

They knew the declarations of the governments.

What they could not agree upon was the name of their own age.

And perhaps that is how great historical transformations are most commonly experienced.

Not as a sudden announcement that the world has changed.

But as a succession of ordinary mornings, each accompanied by the reassuring promise that the real crisis is still to come.

A NOTE TO OUR READERS

From now on, The World Newsreel will report the unfolding international crisis under the historical designation HW1 — The First Hybrid War, bringing our readers dispatches from its various fronts. Not because every conflict is directed from a single headquarters, but because we believe that history will recognise connections where today's headlines see only separate crises. We intend to report this war as history in the making, rather than wait for historians to tell us when it began.

The war had already begun.

The news was still waiting for it to start.

---

Historical sources

The narrative is a retrospective literary device; its standpoint in 2060 does not claim knowledge of events after October 2026. Its historical basis includes the House of Commons chronology of the Ukrainian war, SIPRI Yearbook 2026, PRIO's global conflict study, European Council's definition of hybrid threats and UNCTAD's analysis of Red Sea shipping disruptions. These document the underlying conflicts and their consequences; the thesis of a single historical process is the essay's interpretation, not an established consensus. 

The World Newsreel — Historical Perspectives

Know today the truths of tomorrow.

THE WORLD NEWSREEL

THE STRATEGIC DESK · SPECIAL ANALYSIS

                    Reconstructing the Hybrid War

                                                  

How conflict escaped the battlefield, entered the institutions of everyday life, and changed the meaning of peace.

HYBRID WARFARE “Gentlemen, the advantage of modern warfare is that nobody needs to declare it.”

For much of the twentieth century, war was something nations declared, armies fought, and governments eventually ended.

There were exceptions, of course. There were secret operations, political assassinations, propaganda campaigns, economic blockades, and acts of sabotage. But the distinction between war and peace remained a central organizing principle of international relations.

That distinction is now increasingly difficult to maintain.

A submarine cable is damaged in the Baltic. A government ministry suffers a cyberattack. An election becomes the target of a foreign disinformation campaign. An airport closes because unidentified drones appear near its runways. Financial institutions confront coordinated digital disruptions. Political movements receive assistance from abroad, while intelligence agencies investigate sabotage against military supply networks.

Each incident can be described separately. Each may have an innocent explanation, a criminal origin, or an identifiable military purpose.

But what happens when they form part of a coordinated strategy?

What happens when the battlefield is no longer a particular territory, but the entire system through which a society functions?

Welcome to hybrid warfare.

I. AN OLD IDEA IN A NEW WORLD

Hybrid warfare did not begin with Vladimir Putin. Nor did it begin with the internet.

Ancient empires employed bribery, intimidation, commercial restrictions and political subversion alongside military campaigns. Napoleon understood the economic blockade as an instrument of strategic warfare. During the Cold War, both superpowers used intelligence operations, propaganda, proxy forces and political interference while carefully avoiding direct confrontation.

The novelty lies elsewhere.

In 2007, the American military theorist Frank Hoffman described hybrid warfare as the convergence of conventional military capabilities, irregular formations, terrorism and criminal activity, coordinated to produce combined effects.

His original concept was substantially military. It concerned the integration of different forms of combat within a common operational environment.

After Russia's intervention in Crimea in 2014, the expression acquired a much wider meaning. It increasingly came to describe hostile activities conducted across the entire political, economic, informational and technological structure of an adversary. 

The contemporary definition employed by NATO includes conventional and unconventional instruments, overt and covert operations, cyberattacks, economic pressure, information manipulation and irregular armed groups. The European Union similarly emphasizes coordinated activities intended to exploit vulnerabilities while remaining below the threshold of recognized armed conflict. 

This expansion has produced a conceptual difficulty.

If every hostile economic measure, cyber intrusion or propaganda campaign constitutes hybrid warfare, then virtually all international competition becomes war.

The term would explain everything and distinguish nothing.

We therefore need a more precise definition.

Hybrid warfare is the strategically coordinated use of heterogeneous instruments of coercion, disruption and influence against an adversary, exploiting the boundaries between military and civilian activity, domestic and international jurisdiction, and war and peace.

Three elements are essential: coordination, strategic purpose and the exploitation of institutional vulnerabilities.

Without them, we may be observing espionage, ordinary political competition, criminality or economic rivalry. Not necessarily hybrid warfare.

II. THE ARSENAL: HOW HYBRID WARFARE OPERATES

The traditional army attacks an enemy's military capacity.

Hybrid warfare may attack the systems that make military capacity, political authority and ordinary social life possible.

Its arsenal is correspondingly extensive.

The digital front

Cyber operations can target government networks, communications, financial services, logistics and critical infrastructure.

Their purposes differ.

Espionage seeks information. Disruption interrupts services. Manipulation compromises the integrity of data. Destructive attacks can disable equipment or impose substantial costs.

The strategic advantage is that an operation may achieve important effects without deploying troops across a border.

Attribution is frequently difficult. Technical evidence may identify infrastructure used in an attack without conclusively establishing who ordered it.

The attacker may therefore obtain two benefits simultaneously: operational disruption and political uncertainty.

The information front

Disinformation is not simply the circulation of falsehoods.

In a hybrid campaign, information operations seek to influence how a society understands events, institutions and political choices.

A coordinated operation may amplify existing grievances, circulate fabricated evidence, impersonate credible sources or encourage mutually incompatible narratives.

Its purpose need not be to convince everyone of one particular account.

Sometimes the objective is to make every account appear equally unreliable.

The resulting loss of confidence can be strategically valuable. A society unable to distinguish credible information from manipulation may struggle to reach collective decisions.

NATO explicitly identifies coordinated information manipulation as a means of deepening social divisions and undermining institutional confidence. 

The infrastructure front

Electricity networks, railways, ports, pipelines, undersea cables, satellites and telecommunications systems are indispensable to modern states.

They are also vulnerable.

An interruption may result from an accident, negligence, criminal conduct or deliberate sabotage. Establishing the cause matters.

When disruption is deliberately coordinated with other hostile activities, however, its significance changes.

A railway incident may interfere with military logistics. Damage to a communications cable may impose economic costs. A prolonged energy disruption may increase political pressure on a government.

Modern military readiness depends heavily on civilian infrastructure. NATO's resilience framework accordingly treats continuity of government, essential services and civilian support to military operations as central elements of collective defence. 

The economic front

Economic coercion can involve energy dependence, strategic commodities, market access, investment restrictions and pressure on essential supply chains.

Not every sanction or trade restriction is an act of hybrid warfare. Economic measures are also instruments of ordinary statecraft and may be lawful responses to internationally wrongful acts.

What makes economic pressure part of a hybrid campaign is its coordination with other coercive instruments.

A state facing cyber disruption, energy insecurity and a sustained information campaign may find its freedom of political choice constrained without ever confronting an invading army.

The political front

Political interference may involve covert financing, intelligence activity, corruption, influence networks and the exploitation of domestic divisions.

The central objective is to affect the adversary's decision-making capacity.

The distinction between influencing a government and controlling its decisions is important. Foreign governments have always attempted to influence one another. Hybrid operations seek more intrusive effects through concealment, manipulation or coercion.

The military front

Hybrid warfare does not eliminate conventional military power.

It incorporates it.

Troop deployments, military exercises, airspace violations, naval manoeuvres and threats of escalation may provide the coercive background against which non-military operations become more effective.

A cyberattack has one political meaning when relations are peaceful and another when an army is mobilized across the border.

The military threat changes the interpretation of every other event.

And this brings us to the essential characteristic of hybrid warfare: its instruments are not necessarily novel. Their strategic combination is.

III. THE METHOD: HOW SEPARATE INCIDENTS BECOME A CAMPAIGN

Consider a hypothetical European country.

Its government supports an international policy opposed by a foreign power.

First, its public debate becomes saturated with conflicting narratives about the policy's economic costs.

Then government networks suffer intrusions. A transport system experiences unexplained disruptions. Anonymous accounts amplify public dissatisfaction. An energy supplier threatens to revise commercial arrangements. Military exercises take place near the country's borders.

None of these developments, taken individually, necessarily proves the existence of a coordinated attack.

But suppose intelligence evidence establishes that several of them were planned together, directed toward the same political objective and timed to reinforce one another.

We would then be looking at a hybrid campaign.

The mechanism can be reconstructed in five stages.

First, vulnerability identification. The attacker studies the target's dependencies, institutional weaknesses, political divisions and critical infrastructure.

Second, selective pressure. Different instruments are applied against different vulnerabilities, often through intermediaries or concealed networks.

Third, synchronization. Operations are timed so that their effects reinforce one another. Economic uncertainty magnifies political dissatisfaction; information manipulation amplifies the impact of infrastructure disruption.

Fourth, ambiguity. Responsibility is obscured. Individual incidents remain open to competing explanations, delaying attribution and collective response.

Fifth, strategic exploitation. The accumulated pressure is used to influence the target's decisions, weaken its alliances or reduce its capacity to resist future demands.

The essential effect is cumulative.

A single incident may be manageable. Several synchronized disruptions may overwhelm institutions that were designed to respond to emergencies separately.

This is why the European Parliament's September 2026 resolution emphasizes coordinated, intelligence-led operations that appear isolated while potentially producing consequences comparable to conventional aggression. 

IV. THE STRATEGY: VICTORY WITHOUT CONQUEST

What does a hybrid aggressor ultimately want?

Not necessarily territory.

A successful campaign may seek to weaken military assistance to an ally, obstruct sanctions, fragment a coalition, obtain political concessions or reduce public confidence in the institutions of the targeted state.

The objective is to change political behaviour.

This produces a different strategic calculation from conventional conquest.

Occupying territory requires forces, logistics, administration and the assumption of considerable political responsibility.

Coercing another government into changing its decisions may require none of these things.

The adversary remains formally sovereign. Its institutions continue to function. Its elections may proceed. Its territory remains internationally recognized.

Yet the effective independence of its decisions may have been reduced.

Hybrid warfare therefore targets something more subtle than territorial possession: the capacity of a political community to determine its own conduct.

But the strategy has limitations.

Disruption does not automatically produce compliance. Coercion can strengthen national solidarity. Information operations can fail. Sabotage can generate retaliation. Economic pressure can encourage diversification.

Hybrid campaigns may also expose the aggressor to sanctions, diplomatic isolation and military countermeasures.

They are not an inexpensive substitute for victory in every circumstance.

They are an attempt to achieve strategic effects without necessarily paying the full costs of conventional war.

V. THE LEGAL PARADOX: A WAR THAT MAY NOT BE WAR

Here we encounter the most consequential problem.

International law does not classify every hostile act as an armed conflict.

Espionage, propaganda, economic coercion, cyber intrusion and sabotage may fall under different legal regimes. Some acts may violate international obligations without amounting to an unlawful use of force. Others may constitute a use of force or, in sufficiently grave circumstances, an armed attack.

The classification depends on the facts, including the nature, scale and effects of the operation.

A government's declaration that it is experiencing hybrid warfare does not, by itself, establish that an international armed conflict exists or that the legal conditions for self-defence have been satisfied.

Nor does the absence of conventional combat necessarily establish the absence of an armed conflict.

This creates a distinction between three different realities.

Hostility describes antagonistic conduct.

Armed conflict is a legal classification governed by its own criteria.

Hybrid warfare describes a strategic method involving the coordinated employment of different instruments.

The three categories can overlap. They are not interchangeable.

This distinction explains much of the political attraction of hybrid methods.

A state may conduct operations that produce significant cumulative harm while keeping individual incidents below the thresholds associated with military retaliation.

But the thresholds are not magical legal safe harbours. A sufficiently grave cyber operation or other use of force may engage international law regardless of the label applied to it. Multiple operations may also require assessment as a connected campaign rather than in artificial isolation.

The deeper problem is institutional.

Traditional legal systems are comparatively comfortable with identifiable acts, identifiable perpetrators and recognizable categories of responsibility.

Hybrid campaigns exploit precisely the spaces between those categories.

They operate across different jurisdictions, institutions and evidentiary standards.

The difficulty is not that international law has ceased to exist.

It is that the strategic organization of hostile conduct increasingly differs from the institutional organization of legal responses.

VI. EUROPE: THE EVIDENCE

We can now return to the European situation.

On March 16, 2026, the Council of the European Union adopted conclusions condemning persistent hybrid activities, including sabotage, malicious cyber operations, electoral interference, information manipulation and the instrumentalisation of migration.

The Council specifically identified coordinated Russian campaigns directed against European security and support for Ukraine. 

The European External Action Service has likewise documented a pattern of hostile activities involving sabotage, disruption of critical infrastructure, cyberattacks and political interference. It attributes a significant part of this pattern to Russia, while acknowledging that other actors also employ hybrid methods. 

On September 16, the European Parliament adopted a resolution concerning hybrid warfare and the protection of territorial integrity and critical security infrastructure. The vote was 470 in favour, 129 against and 62 abstentions. The resolution identified Russia, including operations conducted through proxies, as the principal state source of hybrid threats against the Union. 

These are not isolated rhetorical statements.

The European Union has established a hybrid-response framework, developed mechanisms for coordinated sanctions and created rapid-response capabilities. NATO has similarly expanded its work on hybrid threats and civil resilience. 

The institutional response demonstrates that European governments regard the threat as sustained rather than episodic.

It does not follow that every unexplained drone, damaged cable, suspicious fire or cyber incident is necessarily part of a Russian operation.

Attribution must remain evidence-based.

That distinction is essential. Otherwise the analytical concept of hybrid warfare risks becoming an explanation for every accident and every political disagreement.

Nevertheless, the existence of a broader campaign is no longer merely a theoretical proposition. It is the stated assessment of the principal European security institutions.

In September, European officials warned of increasing sabotage and airspace incidents while distinguishing those activities from an imminent conventional Russian attack against NATO. 

That distinction is precisely the point.

Europe may be experiencing sustained hostile operations without experiencing a general conventional war on its territory.

VII. HOW LONG CAN SUCH A WAR LAST?

Traditional wars possess recognizable, although not always clearly defined, mechanisms of termination.

An army surrenders. A government capitulates. Territory changes hands. A ceasefire takes effect. A peace treaty establishes new obligations.

Hybrid warfare has no equally reliable ending.

Its campaigns may be interrupted, reduced, redirected or suspended. Their instruments can remain available even after the immediate political dispute has been settled.

Cyber capabilities do not disappear when diplomats sign an agreement. Intelligence networks may survive a ceasefire. Information operations can be reactivated. Economic dependencies may endure for decades.

The duration of a hybrid campaign therefore depends on three conditions.

The first is the persistence of the strategic dispute. So long as an aggressor seeks to alter another state's political conduct, the incentive to employ coercive instruments may remain.

The second is the cost of continuing operations. Successful attribution, sanctions, counterintelligence, defensive improvements and international cooperation can reduce their effectiveness and increase their price.

The third is the resilience of the target.

A society capable of maintaining essential services, protecting institutions and distinguishing credible information from manipulation is more difficult to coerce.

This explains why NATO places civil preparedness at the centre of its security strategy. Resilience is not merely an administrative precaution. It is a form of deterrence. 

A hybrid campaign can last months, years or decades. Its intensity may fluctuate substantially.

The Cold War provides an instructive historical comparison: sustained hostile intelligence and influence operations existed for decades without continuous direct warfare between the principal antagonists.

Yet an analogy is not a prediction.

There is no evidence-based timetable establishing when Europe's present hybrid confrontation will end.

Nor does a settlement in Ukraine necessarily guarantee its termination.

A settlement might reduce important incentives for hostile operations. It could also leave unresolved the wider confrontation over European security, military alliances and the political order of the continent.

VIII. THE NEW GEOGRAPHY OF WAR

The fundamental transformation is not simply technological.

It is geographical, institutional and political.

Conventional war distinguishes the front from the rear.

Hybrid warfare deliberately weakens that distinction.

The port, the railway, the data centre, the electricity grid, the election campaign and the public information system become potential elements of a common strategic environment.

This does not mean that every citizen is a combatant or that every civilian institution is a lawful military target. International humanitarian law continues to impose protections and restrictions wherever it applies.

It means that the functioning of civilian society has become central to the strategic contest.

There is also a paradox.

Modern states have become extraordinarily powerful in their ability to collect information, organize resources and project military force.

Yet their increasing technological sophistication has created new dependencies.

The more interconnected a society becomes, the greater the number of systems whose disruption may have consequences beyond their immediate location.

A bridge can be repaired. A damaged database may be restored. An energy supply can be diversified.

Confidence in the reliability of institutions is harder to reconstruct.

That is why hybrid warfare is ultimately a contest over political authority.

The attacker seeks to demonstrate that the state cannot fully protect the systems on which its citizens depend.

The defender seeks to demonstrate that those systems can withstand disruption without surrendering political independence.

The battlefield is not everywhere in the literal sense.

But the strategic contest can reach almost anywhere.

IX. THE QUESTION EUROPE CANNOT AVOID

We began with a simple question.

Is there a hybrid war in Europe?

The answer depends on what we mean by war.

If we mean a formally declared conflict between Russia and the European Union, the answer is no.

If we mean a general international armed conflict between Russia and NATO, that description is likewise not established by the evidence considered here.

But if we mean a sustained, coordinated campaign employing cyber operations, sabotage, information manipulation, covert interference and coercive pressure to weaken European institutions and influence European strategic decisions, then the answer is yes.

That is the assessment expressed by the European Union and reflected in the security policies now being adopted across the continent.

And how long can it last?

Potentially for as long as the underlying strategic confrontation persists.

It may continue after a ceasefire in Ukraine. It may fluctuate between periods of visible escalation and relative quiet. It may end gradually rather than through a recognizable diplomatic event.

This creates an unsettling possibility.

Europe may not be approaching a war that will begin on a particular date.

It may already be living through a form of confrontation whose beginning was never formally announced and whose conclusion will not necessarily be marked by a peace treaty.

For generations, Europeans learned to recognize war by the arrival of armies.

Today, the warning may arrive as a railway failure, a compromised network, a suspicious explosion or a political crisis whose origins are difficult to establish.

None of these events proves the existence of war by itself.

Together, when coordinated and strategically directed, they can constitute a method of warfare.

The decisive question is therefore no longer simply whether Europe is at war or at peace.

It is whether the distinction itself still adequately describes the security environment in which Europeans live.

And if the conflict has no formal beginning, no continuous battlefield and no necessary peace treaty, one final question remains.

How will we know when it is over?

Good night, and good luck