Putin's Hybrid Wars

Years ago, Pope Francis described the era we are living in as marked by "a piecemeal third world war." A series of more or less localized conflicts that flare up and spread, with no apparent end to the fighting. Gradually, the pieces of this great global conflict are growing, with the ever-increasing risk that they will coalesce and explode into a borderless, global war.

Naturally—and rightly so—in this piecemeal Third World War, we are struck above all by images of destruction, death, and desperation. According to many analysts, however, alongside the traditionally conducted conflicts of bombs and cannon fire, there is also a clash between powers being conducted in a subtle manner, leveraging disinformation and the most modern internet technologies to influence the beliefs and certainties of ordinary people. This is a hybrid war, ultramodern in its means, viscerally ancient in its intentions, aimed at neutralizing the adversary's will and waged by agents of chaos, web TV, websites, undercover operations, priests inciting hatred, and hackers recruited for the occasion.

These are the actors under the magnifying glass of Jessikka Aro in her essay Putin's Secret War (Neri Pozza Editore, 2026, €22.00, 368 pages. Also available as an ebook. Translated by Nicola Rainò and Marcello Ganassini), which focuses on the lie machine deployed by the Russian government to destabilize the West. Of course, hybrid warfare is not unique to the Kremlin; all powers use it to embarrass their adversaries.

Aro thus shows us only one side of the coin, but she does so masterfully, and the bias of her investigation does not detract from the value of what she reports. This is further demonstrated by the number of attacks and threats the Finnish journalist has received over the course of a career as an investigative journalist spanning more than a decade. Because of her investigations into pro-Russian internet trolls and their influence on public debates outside Russia, Aro became the target of an international propaganda and hate speech campaign. She even had to leave Finland for years because her stay in her homeland was deemed unsafe.

Reading Putin's Secret War, it's not hard to imagine the reasons for Russia's aversion to Aro. The book first reconstructs a dark story from 2010, one that likely few in Italy remember. On April 10, almost sixteen years ago, Polish Air Force Flight 101, a Tupolev Tu-154M, carried Polish President Lech Kaczyński, his wife Maria Kaczyńska, and high-ranking public and military figures from Warsaw to commemorate the Katyn Massacre, a massacre committed by the Red Army against Poles during World War II.

The plane crashed while approaching Smolensk air base in Russia, killing all on board. The official version is that it was human error. According to Jessikka Aro, an alternative interpretation of the incident is possible, placing it within the broader context of Russia's so-called hybrid operations against Western countries, which combine cyber and media-based combat with paramilitary ones, unbeknownst to the global public, covert military operations, fake news, and targeted propaganda. This starts from a premise that we too often struggle to understand.

Russia is a country with a centuries-old imperial tradition, a tradition that many believed should have been almost necessarily interrupted with 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union. In reality, however, we are just over 35 years removed from 1989, and such a span of time in the history of a large country is a trifle. This is especially true if its political tradition is alien to the idea of democracy as a "government of the many," in which even opposition parties can voice their demands. Russian history is, in fact, characterized by a vision of strong power, by the "one man in command" who holds the reins and holds together a country of monstrous size and highly heterogeneous internal structure.

This is what the Russian people experienced for centuries, both in the Tsarist period and in the subsequent Soviet era. Therefore, there was never an opportunity for democratic principles to establish themselves long enough among the population to take root, a process that also requires considerable cultural time.

It's no coincidence that those who wield power are the heirs of those who held it in the Soviet era. Vladimir Putin was a member of the KGB, now the FSB, the Soviet and now Russian security service. These are things we should always remember when we think about Russia and its rulers. They are things we must not forget when we simplistically apply our behavioral categories and political norms to an entity as distant from us as the Kremlin.