Why Western democracies are struggling against Russia's and China’s 'hybrid war'

On the weekend, Denmark reported unidentified drones had appeared above its major military bases. It was the country’s third drone alarm in a week and one of five European nations in a month to experience incursions - from either drones suspected of Russian origin or from the Russian Air Force itself.

So why is Russia violating Europe’s skies, seemingly with impunity?

Political and international editor Peter Hartcher says it’s all part of a "hybrid war", and one that Australia is no stranger to. And, Hartcher argues, the West has been blind to these attacks.

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Episode Transcript

S1 (00:00):
From the newsrooms of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
This is Morning Edition. I'm Chris Payne, filling in for
Samantha Salinger Morris. It's Thursday, October 2nd. Over the past weekend,
Denmark reported unidentified drones had appeared above its major military bases.

(00:22):
It was the country's third drone alarm in a week,
and one of five European nations in a month to
experience incursions from either drone suspected of Russian origin or
from the Russian air force itself. So why is Russia
violating Europe's skies seemingly with impunity? Political and international editor

(00:44):
Peter Hartcher says it's all part of a hybrid war,
and one that Australia is no stranger to. And Hartcher
argues the West has been blind to these attacks. So, Peter,
we've been hearing more and more about these unidentified drones

(01:06):
flying into European countries. Can you briefly explain what exactly
has been happening?

S2 (01:11):
Absolutely. An increasing number of drones, as you say, unidentified,
has been repeatedly flying into countries in Europe, most notably
the close neighbors of Russia. And while they are unidentified,
there's a strong suspicion that they are all from Russia.
And the governments of the affected countries are saying so.

S3 (01:35):
Earlier this month, Russia sent some 20 drones into Poland's airspace.
Then it sent a drone into Romania. And for 12
minutes on September 19th, three Russian fighter jets lingered over
the skies in Estonia before NATO mobilized F-35 jet fighters
to repel them.

S2 (01:53):
And the poles have convened urgent meetings of the NATO alliance.
The Estonians did the same. They've appealed to the UN
Security Council because they're all concerned that this is a
deliberate and systematic program of harassment and intimidation by Russia
against its European neighbors.

S1 (02:15):
You say these drone incursions are not a coincidence. Surprise, surprise.
Part of a strategy you describe as the so-called mush response.
Can you talk us through what that means exactly and
what the bigger picture here is?

S2 (02:28):
Yeah, absolutely. The mush response that comes from a quote
which supposedly was uttered by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the founder
of the modern Soviet Union. And he had a quote
where he was supposed to be talking about clearing mines,
land mines. And he said, probe with a bayonet if

(02:50):
you encounter mush. Keep going. If you encounter steel, withdraw.
So what? His successor, Vladimir Putin, is doing today is
like probing with a bayonet. Except he's probing with drones
and aircraft, but also other kinds of sabotage attacks on
these countries. One of the purposes is to test them,

(03:12):
to test their responses, to see what they do, how
they deal with these incursions, whether they have the steel
to stop him or whether he encounters the mush, which
will just encourage him to keep going. I should add
that on a much less publicized level, this has been
going on in various elements. Not just drones, but with

(03:34):
sabotage attacks, cyber security attacks, and all sorts of things.
This has been going on for years, but it's really
ramped up in these last few weeks, the last month
or so. And you ask, what's the bigger picture? Well,
this is a pretty big picture right here. Since Donald
Trump invited Vladimir Putin to Alaska last month, literally rolling

(03:56):
out the red carpet in the US. US soil to
an indicted war criminal. Putin has since then shown signs
of being. Encouraged that the US will not act against him.
So the timing coincides with the stepping up of these
drone and Russian air force incursions into Europe. But also
we have reports from Bloomberg News Service quoting unnamed Kremlin

(04:20):
insiders saying that Putin concluded, as a result of that
Alaska summit with Trump, that the US would not stand
in his way. And so that apparently seems to have
encouraged him to really step up this testing of the
European members of NATO with drones, but also with other
elements of his probing bayonet to test their strength, to

(04:43):
confuse them. And with any luck, he hopes to divide them.

S1 (04:47):
So is it fair to say, then, that the rolling
out of the red carpet, so to speak, in Alaska
was a mush response. It was encountering mush and not steal.
And is Vladimir Putin encountering Marshal steal from other countries?

S2 (05:04):
Yes, I would say it absolutely is. The US under
Trump has gone to mush on anything to do with Russia.
When Trump rolled out his so-called Liberation Day tariffs on
almost every country on Earth, even including penguin colonies in
Australian territories in the Antarctic, there were a few countries
notably exempted from his tariffs. Russia was one of them,

(05:27):
believe it or not. And the excuse for that is, oh,
we don't have any meaningful trade with Russia. Well, that's
not so. It's in the billions of dollars. And Putin
boasted at Alaska that the trade with the US and
Russia is growing. So that's just one indicator. But Donald
Trump's refusal to lift a finger against Russia's incursions invasion
of Ukraine is another. Now some might say, but hang on,

(05:52):
didn't we hear the news that Donald Trump, just a
few days ago was asked, should European countries shoot down
Russian military assets that fly into their airspace? And he said, yes,
they should. Isn't that a tough response? How could that
be a mush response? The answer is in the second
part of his answer, which didn't get much publicity at all.
He said, yes, they should shoot them down. The reporters

(06:12):
next question was Will you use US military assets to
do so? And he said, depends on circumstances.

S4 (06:20):
As you said, that you thought that they should shoot
down the Russian aircraft. Would you back them up? Would
the United States help them out in some way?

S5 (06:27):
Depends on the circumstance. But, you know, we're very strong
toward NATO.

S2 (06:31):
In other words, he's once again casting doubt on the
US's willingness to enforce its own treaty commitments under NATO.
That article five, which says an attack on one NATO member,
is an attack on all, including the US. And once again,
we see that he's leaving some doubt and ambiguity and
giving again Putin an entry point.

S1 (06:54):
And of course, Peter, just on Wednesday morning, we've seen
Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump hauling their top military brass, really,
and deliver quite an extraordinary politically charged address about their expectations.
How should we interpret that?

S2 (07:10):
Well, apart from the political rhetoric employed, I think the
larger part, the larger meaning of that is that Donald
Trump and Pete Hegseth are turning the attentions of their
warrior leadership class internally into the US, rather than externally
to look at foreign foes. Hegseth talked about needing to

(07:31):
bring punishing levels of pain on America's enemies. But the
only enemies that Trump talked about when he addressed the
leadership of the troops, 800 generals and admirals was the
enemy within.

S5 (07:44):
Well, America is under invasion from within. We're under invasion
from within. No different than a foreign enemy, but more
difficult in many ways because they don't wear uniforms. At
least when they're wearing a uniform, you can take them out.
These people don't have uniforms, but we are under invasion

(08:04):
from within. We're stopping it very quickly.

S2 (08:06):
He's talking about the radical left. He's talking about the
Democratic Party, and he's deploying US troops city by city
around the country. That's where his focus is. So my
interpretation is Trump's political project of an authoritarian consolidation of
power in the US is his priority. Foreign wars are

(08:28):
just not okay.

S1 (08:30):
So you've talked about the use of drones, but you've
also talked about other means, other forms of sabotage, if
you will. What is it that happened in Lithuania recently?
And what else is Russia up to?

S2 (08:42):
The Lithuanians arrested just in the last few days, 15 people,
all of whom it alleges, have links to Russian military intelligence.
And they're all charged with putting bombs, explosive parcels onto aircraft,
cargo planes in Germany, in Britain, elsewhere in Europe. And

(09:04):
the idea, apparently, is that they will explode or catch
fire in mid-air and crash civilian cargo planes. As it happens,
all of these, these ones in particular did start fires,
but they were in planes while they were still on
the ground where they were detected and extinguished and no
real harm was done. But there are lots of other

(09:25):
sabotage radar jamming, GPS jamming.

S6 (09:28):
A plane carrying the EU Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen,
was targeted by GPS jamming while trying to land in Bulgaria.
A spokesperson has said it's believed the interference was carried
out by Russia. The plane landed safely after the pilots
used paper maps.

S2 (09:46):
The cutting of undersea communications fiber optic cables in the
Baltic Sea. There's been quite a few of those in
the NATO and Baltic countries have had to step up
their maritime patrols to prevent that continuing. There have been
dozens of attacks, small scale, but all sabotage aimed at
destabilising energy systems in Europe, health systems in Europe, cyber

(10:09):
attacks on banking systems. This is persistent. But now, finally,
it looks like the Europeans are getting organized to do
something more about it. But they are far yet from
shooting down Russian assets, Russian, certainly military jets. And they're

(10:29):
far from declaring it the war, which it is. I mean,
it's not a conventional shooting war, but it's a hybrid war.
Hybrid war is simply a mixture, a mixture, a combination
of military and non-military strategy and assets, entirely flexible, completely
wide open, and used to try to keep just below

(10:50):
the threshold of conventional war to make it much harder
for democracies to respond.

S1 (10:55):
Well, let's talk about that a bit. You just mentioned
quite a lot of examples of opportunities to hit steel,
if you will. We talked a little bit about Trump's
response to this. Talk about the West's response, Europe's response
more broadly. Where are we at?

S2 (11:11):
Yeah. Well, let me start with a illuminating quote from
the Prime Minister of Poland. And by way of preface,
Poland is perhaps the most hard headed and best armed
of the NATO countries. Proportionate to its size. It spends
more of its GDP on defense than the US does

(11:33):
over 4%. It's got an army now of armed forces
of 200,000 people, which is the biggest in NATO after
the US and Turkey for a smallish country. It's a
it's a very serious country. Its prime Minister, Donald Tusk,
said recently in March. Actually, he said, here's the situation.
We have 500 million Europeans begging. 300 million Americans to

(11:55):
protect us against 120 million Russians. What is wrong with
this picture? His point is, and he said this. He
said Europe can be a great power, but we have
to stand up and we have to unite. So that's
the view from Poland that the European Union, the major
powers of Europe, are trembling on the brink of acting seriously.

(12:21):
But they aren't yet there. Donald Trump, as you know,
cajoled and pressured the European members of NATO to step
up their defense spending as a percentage of GDP currently
averaging 2%. He's pushed them where they've now all agreed
to go to 3.5% of GDP on defence. Australia is,
by the way, is two at the moment and pledged
to go up to two and a half. And with

(12:44):
another 1.5% of GDP equivalent to be spent on military
related infrastructure. So, you know, there's there's direction, there's momentum,
there's promised funding, there's a rearmament program in a in
a number of European countries, the Germans have got a
very major and serious one underway. Half a dozen countries
have resumed their national service. So they're all getting there,

(13:08):
and yet they're trembling on the brink of saying, this
is a hybrid war. It's coming from Russia. We're under threat.
And the two logical responses there, Chris, would be first
to do much more to help Ukraine, recognising that Ukraine
is the first barrier, the first hurdle that Putin has
to cross to get into Eastern Europe and then Western.

(13:30):
And second, to simply take a tougher approach on all
these Russian incursions. They're still buying large quantities of Russian gas,
for example, which is fuelling Putin's war machine. They simply
have to find an alternative. They have oil. They have
to shut that their purchases down because they're putting billions
of dollars directly into Putin's hands. Second thing is to

(13:52):
get tougher on his military assets. Fry the drones, shoot
down the jets, and maybe even go further. It's all
defensive action, but it's all got to be much firmer.
There's no steel there yet.

S1 (14:04):
Well, Tusk, the Polish PM, who you mentioned, said that
this is the closest in his opinion that we've been
to open conflict since World War II. That's an extraordinary
thing to say. What are his counterparts saying in Europe?
Talking about tougher action? Are any of them actually talking
about that?

S2 (14:24):
The pluckiest and most assertive states are the small Baltic states,
because they're the ones right on the border. The three
Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia plus Poland. They're the
boldest and the most assertive, but they're small, and they're
going to be very reluctant to take more aggressive action

(14:45):
against Russia unless they're confident of the backing of the
bigger powers. The Germans, the French, the Brits are the
major ones. And remember, too, that the French and the
Brits both have nuclear weapons programs. So we're talking about
highly sophisticated countries with long histories and great expertise. But

(15:05):
the missing ingredient is willpower, political willpower. And this is
why hybrid war is such a brilliant invention. The term
was only invented in 2007. By the way, an American
strategist called Frank Hoffman came up with the term, but
the Russians have been using it for well over a decade.
The Chinese have been using it since before Frank Hoffman

(15:27):
came up with the term. And it's a genius move
because Western democracies are very reluctant to confront it by
saying this may be a hybrid war, but it's still
a war and we're going to act. We are much
more comfortable saying to ourselves, oh, it's just a bit
of provocation. Everything's normal. It's fine. Let's not worry. We

(15:48):
don't want to alarm our people. We don't want to
be unpopular by saying, there's a big problem and we've
got to do something about it, so we're just going
to let it slide. No country has yet come up
with an effective response that stops or deters hybrid war.

S1 (16:07):
We'll be right back. Well, let's talk about hybrid war
a little more. And the context of China. You believe
a similar complacency is happening here with China. How so?

S2 (16:24):
Well, we were very complacent for a long time and
content to ignore Nor China's operations covert, mostly because China
was such a fantastic export partner and big investor into Australia.
Now we snapped out of that in 2017. The Sam
Dastyari scandal. You'll remember the labor senator who was really

(16:47):
exposed himself as being under the sway of a Chinese billionaire.
The billionaire Huang Xiangmo was an agent of influence for
the Chinese Communist Party. And that was a real wake
up moment for Australia, because it showed how easily a Chinese,
in this case, apparently a businessman with a lot of
money and making investments in Australia, could win over an

(17:10):
Australian senator from one of the major parties of government
in the country. And everything he was doing, by the way,
everything that Sam Dastyari did in taking money and favours
from this guy was legal. Turnbull was in power. That
forced him and the Labor Party to snap out of
the torpor that they'd been in, and the Turnbull Government,

(17:32):
with Labor's support, imposed a foreign interference law to ban
foreign interference and created a register where foreign agents have
to put their names on a register and a new
law against espionage to toughen up against covert Chinese Communist
Party activity, including united front activity in Australia. And we've
jailed the first convicted agent in Australia. Now under those laws.

(17:55):
Huang Zhimo, the billionaire, was named persona persona non grata
because he was undermining the rule of law. So that
was a wake up moment. But governments since have gone
a bit soft, and the current government, I would include
in that they don't want to confront our Chinese friends.
They're happy to have the trade sanctions, the $20 billion

(18:15):
in trade sanctions removed. The trade sanctions, by the way,
are part of a hybrid war. And the Australian government
loves to talk about. And I quoted Mick Ryan, the
retired Australian general who's a prominent strategic commentator around the
world these days, saying that the Australian government loves to
talk about stabilising the relationship. The Chinese government loves that

(18:37):
just as much because it means the Australian government is
content and not prepared to do anything more. And one
of the military elements that our Chinese friends have deployed
as part of this hybrid war was famously the Flotilla,
the task group of three Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy
vessels that circumnavigated the country in a demonstration of of

(18:58):
ability reach and an attempt to intimidate.

S7 (19:01):
The drama involving Chinese warships in the Tasman Sea has
escalated with a second live firing drill this afternoon. It
comes just a day after a similar incident, in which
passenger jets were forced to change course with little warning.

S2 (19:16):
And Mick Ryan's very critical that the Australian government first
didn't even announce that it was leaked to the media.
That's how from the US. Actually, that's how it became public.
And second, that the Australian response was to make excuses
for it to say, oh, it's innocent passage. It's okay,
we don't need to do anything. And he thinks that
Australia is giving a mush response to those provocations.

S1 (19:37):
So what do you think China's actually seeking when it
comes to Australia? Like yeah we're not actually talking about
the W word here are we.

S2 (19:45):
Well we're talking about the hybrid W word hybrid war.
That's what they've been practicing. And I would say I
would say two things. Their big ambition is not something
they've made a secret of. XI Jinping, the president of China,
from the moment they made him general secretary of the
Chinese Communist Party at the end of 2012, said my
aim we will take the initiative and establish dominance. The

(20:09):
word he used was dominance, and he didn't qualify that
by saying dominance over the Pacific or dominance over the
South China Sea. He said dominance and he means it.
In other speeches, he's talked about being at the centre
of global affairs. It's all about asserting global dominance, global
dominance in an intelligent, shrewd and yet unrelenting way when

(20:32):
it comes to Australia. Of course, Australia. He wants Australia
to be a part of that dominance he wants to dominate.
There are two particular things, aspects that I mentioned. One
is we have a list from our Chinese friends which
actually spelled out what they want from Australia. It was
called the 14 grievances or the 14 complaints that the
Chinese Embassy in Canberra delivered to a channel nine reporter

(20:56):
around the same time that China was imposing those $20
billion in trade bans on Australian goods. And those 14
demands or grievances started with that. Australia had too many
constraints on its foreign investment regime. In other words, the
Chinese government was saying, let us invest in your country
as we please. Well, the second one, by the way,
was don't ban Huawei from your communications system. We want

(21:20):
Huawei to be fully embedded in your system all the
way through to members of Parliament, must stop criticising China
and the Australian media must stop criticising China. So that's
the Chinese log of demands. Australia should change its laws
to suit China's interests and censor ourselves. And Chris, the
second particular of what China is trying to achieve when

(21:42):
it comes to Australia is exhibited by what they're doing
with the Pacific island states, where they want to make
those island states subservient to Beijing. And one of their
aims is to establish a military presence in the Pacific.
And the idea there is to sever the sea lines
of communication between Australia and the US, so that the

(22:03):
US can't use Australia as a base in a contingency.

S1 (22:07):
Okay, so with all that in mind, what is it
that Australia really needs to be doing? Getting back to
the mush response. How does Australia show?

S2 (22:15):
Steel Australia is prepared to show a bit more steel
when it comes to the Russian invasion of Ukraine than
it is about Chinese activities in our region. Because Russia
and Ukraine is far away, Australia is beyond Russia's reach.
So you'll notice the government talking very tough about about
Russia and Russia is a much clumsier and more obvious

(22:37):
warrior warfare state than the Chinese. The Chinese have achieved
everything that they've achieved without having to fire a shot.
They use military assets. Sometimes they use civilian assets. Sometimes
every week they're flying sorties into Japanese airspace, and the
Japanese are scrambling their air force every week. Sometimes they're
using their Coast Guard, for example, to push Philippines vessels

(23:02):
around and assert Chinese dominance over the Philippines coasts. So
that's all going on. But they've never had to fire
a shot, which is genius. Absolute genius. Perhaps their greatest
achievement to date is that because Cause Putin has thrown
Russia into this actual, you know, shooting war against Ukraine
that has so weakened Russia that Russia now depends on

(23:24):
China for its fiscal survival, for its political cover, and
for a range of other things. So really, Russia is
now a vassal state of China's. China is the big
is the big one here. It's the big beast in
the room, much more so than than Russia, which is
dependent on China. China's economy is more than ten times
the size of Russia's, by the way. So what does

(23:46):
Australia need to do? It's demonstrating steel by supplying Ukraine.
It's going soft on China. Uh, sure. We are waging,
as the Foreign minister, Penny Wong, has said, a permanent
contest is her phrase, a permanent contest against China to
keep influence in the Pacific Islands, in northern approaches to

(24:07):
our country. So that's going on. They're active. They're reasonably outspoken.
Yet the flow of Chinese money into Australia. China is
such a good export market once again. The government is
reluctant to do much more than that. Mick Ryan, for example,
wants the government simply to talk openly about warfare. To
say that we have to prepare for war, that, you know,

(24:30):
you avoid war by preparing for it, by being a
hard target, not a soft one. The government's not increased
the defence budget sufficiently to accommodate both our mainstream traditional
defence assets plus aukus. The traditional defence budget is being
bled to pay for aukus, so we really have to

(24:51):
confront some pretty difficult choices here. And the first one
that Mick Ryan says is we have to say the
W word openly to the Australian public to prepare our mindset.

S1 (25:00):
Okay, so finally, let me ask you about that. We're
talking a lot about prodding and poking and staying in
just the right side of the line here. But what
are the chances that Russia goes beyond Ukraine? What are
the chances that China goes after Taiwan takes those next steps.

S2 (25:16):
Well, the expert in fighting Russia is Volodymyr Zelensky, the
president of Ukraine, of course. And he said just in
the last few days that he fully expects that Putin
will attack another European country. He won't wait till he's
finished invading Ukraine. Which one? He said, who knows? And
Putin likes to keep it like that. So he thinks

(25:38):
he is going to invade the rest of Europe. The
trend and direction of everything Putin is doing would support that.
And his own rhetoric, his own language supports the idea
that he wants to restore all the states which were
part of the Soviet Union, and that would mean taking
a bunch of countries in Europe. And he will take
what he can get in terms of China. China hasn't

(26:02):
built the world's biggest navy for nothing. China is not
a massively building up its stock of nuclear weapons for
recreational purposes. Its built a first class military in every
aspect and continues expanding, by the way, at breakneck speed.

(26:22):
While you've got the American president ranting to troops about
the enemy within, within America and deploying them to US cities.
XI Jinping continues to expand and increase the capability of
the Chinese military. Taiwan is one of their aims, and
they've made that very clear that if it won't come peacefully,

(26:42):
they'll take it forcibly. But as I say, I mean,
he's talked about dominance generally and their program to use
soft power, hard power, sharp power, every other kind of
power to dominate wherever he can, from Africa to Antarctica
and everything in between rolls on.

S1 (27:00):
Well, Peter, thank you as always for your insight.

S2 (27:03):
Always a pleasure.

S1 (27:20):
Today's episode of The Morning Edition was produced by Kai Wong.
Our executive producer is Tammy Mills. Tom McKendrick is our
head of audio. To listen to our episodes as soon
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(27:40):
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Subscribe and to stay up to date, sign up for
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day's most important news in your inbox every morning. Links
are in the show. Notes. I'm Chris Payne. This is

(28:04):
Morning edition. Thanks for listening.