FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Natalia Arno, President
Phone: +1 202.549.2417
Email: [email protected]
FREE RUSSIA FOUNDATION RELEASES A TRANSLATION OF A REPORT ON THE KREMLIN’S HYBRID WARFARE
The report by British Member of Parliament Bob Seely discusses how Russia engages in a broad campaign against the West and how to combat these new challenges.
Washington, DC, January 18, 2019. Free Russia Foundation has released a Russian translation of a report by British Member of Parliament Bob Seely (Isle of Wight, UK) A Definition of Contemporary Russian Conflict: How does the Kremlin Wage War? (Russian translation is available at Дом Свободной России website)
The original report is available at Henry Jackson Society website.
“Too often, Russian citizens remain unaware of the geopolitical implications of Putin’s dangerous brinkmanship,” said Free Russia Foundation founder Natalia Arno. “We hope, that once this important report is published in Russian, it reaches a wider Russian speaking audience, and people in my native Russia, perhaps for the first time, will realize the political risks incurred on their behalf by Putin, as well as enormous budgets expended — the funds that could have been better spent on building schools, fixing roads and paying for pensions.”
Mr. Seely’s report defines the characteristics of a new style of the Kremlin’s hybrid war against the West. It discusses various tools and elements used by the Kremlin and examines the reasons why Russia is using them in its dealings with the West.
“The West faces a new kind of conflict where Russia combines the full range of its military and non-military tools in a dynamic, efficient and integrated way to achieve political aims,” writes Seely. “It is important that both Western but also Russian citizens understand the current and future nature of a form of aggressive competition/low-level conflict that goes by a variety of names such as non-conventional warfare, political warfare, grey zone war, and in the Cold War was known as Active Measures or, more vaguely, the Ideological Struggle.”
Mr. Seely who has previously conducted research at the Changing Character of War Programme at the University of Oxford (2017) and covered former Soviet Republics and Eastern Europe for The Times newspaper (1990-1994), sees strong links between the Kremlin’s current development of its ‘political warfare’ techniques and those of the old Soviet Union, and in particular the KGB’s active measures. Through his extensive interaction with the Russian people and studies of the Russian history, he has come to the conclusion that such confrontation with the West is a strategic mistake made by the Russian leadership and is not in the interest of the Russian people.
The study, originally published in English this past summer by the Henry Jackson Society’s Russia Studies Centre, has been translated by Free Russia Foundation and is now available in the Russian language.
Free Russia Foundation will host Mr. Seely for a discussion of his report at the U.S. Congress in Spring 2019.
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For more information, please visit Free Russia Foundation’s website, www.4freerussia.org, or contact Natalia Arno at +1 202.549.2417 or at [email protected].