MILAN RIOT SUSPECT HELD!

THE WORLD NEWSREEL

FROM CAMPUS TO COURTROOM: 

THE MAN BEHIND THE MILAN PROTEST NETWORK

From University Politics and Middle East Research to a Police Cell: The Extraordinary Career of Youssef Siher

Italian investigators examine a digital protest movement, alleged terrorist incitement and the possible connections between international political activism and street violence.

An editorial sketch-illustration of the Milan protest investigation.

MILAN, October 25, 2026.

He studied political movements. He studied the Middle East. He studied communication. He served in university politics, worked with a prestigious international affairs institute, wrote for national newspapers and developed a particular interest in the relationship between Islamic political movements and the modern state.

Now Youssef Siher, 30, is in custody.

Italian prosecutors ordered his detention late Saturday, identifying him as the suspected administrator of the digital network known as Movimento 17 Ottobre, which emerged after violent demonstrations in Milan and attempted to organise further protests across Italy.

The allegations are serious: incitement to commit crimes, organised violence during public demonstrations and offences involving alleged terrorist purposes.

His wife is also under investigation but remains at liberty.

None of the allegations has been established by a court.

The case has already produced a remarkable political controversy. It also raises a question extending beyond Milan: how does a man trained in the analysis of international political movements become associated, according to investigators, with the organisation of mass protest through digital networks?

THE POLICE FOLLOWED THE DIGITAL TRAIL

The demonstrations of October 17 and 18 left parts of central Milan shaken by clashes, stone-throwing and damage to property.

In their aftermath, a new organisation appeared online.

Its name was Movimento 17 Ottobre.

The movement used Instagram to broadcast messages and Telegram to organise communications between participants. The network called for additional demonstrations in several Italian cities on Saturday, October 24.

Meeting places were to be announced shortly before the gatherings began.

The authorities responded with extensive preventive security operations.

Police investigators, working with specialists in digital communications and counterterrorism, concentrated on identifying those responsible for administering the movement's online infrastructure.

According to Italian press reports, investigators obtained technical information associated with the Instagram account, working with Meta and internet service providers.

The trail led to Siher.

Police searched premises associated with his family in the province of Brescia and seized electronic devices and other material.

Siher was subsequently located in an apartment in Milan's Corvetto district.

He was questioned and later detained on the orders of prosecutors.

Investigators are examining his electronic communications, contacts and possible collaborators.

The investigation remains open.

FROM THE UNIVERSITY TO THE INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS WORLD

Siher's background is unusually substantial for a figure suddenly appearing in the headlines of a street-disorder investigation.

He attended the Fermi secondary school in Salò before enrolling at the University of Milan.

There he studied humanities and communication, subsequently pursuing political science and government.

His academic interests included political language, the history and politics of North Africa and the Middle East, geopolitics and Islamic political movements.

He also participated actively in university affairs.

He served as a student representative in the university's Academic Senate and was president of its Muslim students' organisation.

His subsequent research examined political Islam, Islamic political ideologies and the relationship between Islam and Arab nationalism.

His master's research focused on Islamic movements in Morocco and their relationship with the monarchy.

According to a biographical profile formerly published by the Italian Institute for International Political Studies, ISPI, he spoke Arabic and Italian as native languages and was fluent in English and Spanish.

This was not merely an education in political theory.

It was an education in how political movements emerge, organise, communicate and interact with institutions of power.

THE ISPI CONNECTION

Siher's professional record included a research traineeship at ISPI, the Milan-based Institute for International Political Studies.

His work was associated with its Middle East and North Africa Observatory.

ISPI is an established Italian institution specialising in international affairs, foreign policy and geopolitical analysis.

Its researchers examine the same international conflicts, political movements and strategic developments that increasingly dominate European public debate.

The connection attracted immediate attention after Siher's identification.

But the institution has issued a clear clarification: Siher's traineeship took place in 2024, and he has had no subsequent collaboration with ISPI.

There is no publicly established evidence that the institute had any involvement in the activities under investigation.

THE JOURNALIST, THE ACTIVIST AND THE ORGANISER

Siher also worked in journalism.

His professional history included an internship and subsequent collaboration with Il Fatto Quotidiano, ending approximately eighteen months ago, as well as contributions to other Italian publications.

He was active in pro-Palestinian political circles and had publicly commented on developments in the Middle East and North Africa.

His professional activities were not confined to research and journalism.

Press accounts also describe a period working as a delivery rider and more recent work connected with artificial intelligence.

The combination is striking: academic research, university representation, journalism, political activism, digital communications and ordinary employment.

The significance lies not in any single occupation, but in the movement between different social environments.

The university provided political and organisational experience.

Research supplied familiarity with international political movements.

Journalism offered experience in communicating political arguments to a wider public.

Social media provided a means of reaching audiences without conventional organisational structures.

Whether prosecutors can establish that these experiences were used to facilitate criminal activity remains a separate question.

AN INTELLIGENCE FILE DATING BACK TO 2024?

The case acquired a further dimension on Sunday.

According to reports published by Il Tempo and subsequently described by Sky TG24, Italian domestic intelligence had previously examined Siher's activities.

The reports attribute to intelligence sources concerns dating to 2024 about an organisation called Alba Nascente.

The organisation was reportedly associated with the circulation of propaganda linked to Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, logistical activity connected with pro-Palestinian demonstrations and contacts with radical-left political environments.

These are press accounts of intelligence assessments, not independently verified findings establishing criminal responsibility.

Their significance is nevertheless considerable.

If confirmed, they would indicate that investigators were examining not simply a recently created Instagram page but a longer history of political organisation and connections between different activist networks.

The distinction is essential.

The existence of international political contacts is not itself evidence of foreign direction, clandestine financing or participation in a terrorist organisation.

Those propositions require separate proof.

THE MANUAL FOR THE STREETS

Another element has attracted the attention of investigators and journalists.

Material circulated through the movement's Telegram environment reportedly included a document entitled Revolution: Instructions for Use.

According to Sky TG24, it contained sixteen points dealing with collective tactics during demonstrations, movement through urban areas, responses to police intervention and mutual assistance among participants.

The document also discussed the coordination of groups arriving from different locations.

Its circulation illustrates the importance of written tactical material in contemporary protest networks.

Investigators must still determine who produced the document, who distributed it, how it was used and whether any criminal acts can be connected to it.

The existence of a tactical manual does not establish responsibility for violence.

But it adds another dimension to an investigation already centred upon digital organisation.

THE PROTESTS THAT DID NOT MATERIALISE

The police intervention coincided with the movement's plans for further demonstrations on October 24.

The online network had announced that gathering places would be communicated shortly before the events.

The announcements did not proceed as originally planned.

Across Italy, security forces deployed in substantial numbers. Thousands of people were identified, hundreds were temporarily taken to police stations and several arrests were reported in connection with the day's disturbances.

The widespread disorder feared by the authorities did not recur on the scale of the previous weekend.

Whether this resulted primarily from police intervention, the disruption of online organisation, the movement's limited mobilisation capacity or other factors remains uncertain.

There is also a crucial chronological point.

Movimento 17 Ottobre emerged after the original Milan disturbances.

Identifying an administrator of the subsequent network does not automatically establish who organised the earlier demonstrations or who was responsible for the violence committed during them.

THE HYBRID-WAR QUESTION

The broader strategic significance of the investigation concerns the relationship between international conflict and domestic political mobilisation.

Modern hybrid conflict is not confined to military operations, cyberattacks or attacks on infrastructure.

Information campaigns, political influence and the exploitation of social divisions can also form part of the strategic environment.

In this case, the available evidence establishes a domestic investigation into alleged criminal incitement and the administration of a protest network.

It also establishes a biographical connection between its suspected administrator and the study of Middle Eastern political movements.

Reports concerning possible links with transnational activist networks remain under examination.

What the evidence does not establish is direction, financing or operational control by a foreign government.

No public evidence presently demonstrates that Siher acted on behalf of Iran, Russia or another foreign state.

That distinction matters.

A political movement may be influenced by international events without becoming an instrument of foreign intelligence.

Equally, an international conflict may acquire a domestic political dimension without the involvement of a foreign command structure.

The question for investigators is whether the relationships in this case extended beyond ideological affinity and political mobilisation into coordinated unlawful activity.

For students of hybrid warfare, the case illustrates a potentially important phenomenon: the movement of political knowledge, communication techniques and organisational experience from specialised intellectual environments into mass mobilisation.

Whether that phenomenon forms part of a foreign-directed campaign in this instance remains unproved.

THE CASE NOW BEFORE THE PROSECUTORS

Siher is in custody. His wife is under investigation. Electronic devices and communications are being examined.

The Milan prosecutor's office must now establish the legal significance of the material collected and the extent of any responsibility for the activities attributed to the movement.

A judicial determination has yet to be made.

The next stage will concern evidence rather than biography: who administered the accounts, who issued instructions, who coordinated participants, whether unlawful conduct was encouraged and whether the allegations involving terrorist purposes can be substantiated.

One question remains particularly important.

Did the digital network merely attempt to capitalise upon demonstrations that had already occurred, or did its administrators possess wider organisational relationships extending beyond the events of October 17?

That is where the investigation moves from the streets of Milan to the larger question of how political movements operate across national and digital boundaries.

ISPI'S CLARIFICATION

Following reports identifying Siher as a former research trainee, the Institute for International Political Studies clarified that he completed a traineeship at the institute in 2024 and has not collaborated with ISPI since that time.

The institution has not been accused of involvement in the alleged offences.

Its previous professional association with Siher should not be confused with participation in, knowledge of or responsibility for the activities under investigation.

---

SOURCES

ANSA — Detention and allegations, October 25

Corriere della Sera — Profile and investigation, October 24

Sky TG24 — Investigation, intelligence reports and professional background, October 25

Sky TG24 — The protest manual, October 24

Il Tempo — Reported intelligence interest and Alba Nascente, October 25

La Repubblica — Origins of the movement, October 24

Giornale di Brescia — Academic and professional background, October 24

The World Newsreel — Special Investigation

Know today the truths of tomorrow.

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.

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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.

 SATURDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2026 · MORNING EDITION

THE WORLD NEWSREEL

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