Lithuania Prepares For Hybrid War – Analysis

 eurasiareview
By Published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute

By John R. Haines*

The more powerful enemy can be vanquished…by the most thorough, careful, attentive, skillful, and obligatory use of any—even the smallest—rift between the enemies […] and also by taking advantage of any, even the smallest, opportunity of winning a mass ally, even though this ally is temporary, vacillating, unstable, unreliable and conditional.  Those who do not understand this reveal a failure to understand even the smallest grain of Marxism, of modern scientific socialism in general.[1] — Vladimir Ilʹich Lenin, No Compromises?

Mickiewicz or Mickevičius?  For years, Lithuanian citizens of Polish origin have been asking for the right to keep their names in Polish spelling.  Is it just a question of name?  The situation of the national minorities in Lithuania has been discussed by world and regional organisations for already over ten years. And still it creates tensions between Vilnius and Warsaw.[2] -Nouvelle Europe, The Polish national minority in Lithuania : three reports later.

A few weeks ago, Pravda published a vitriolic denunciation of Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaitė:

[Her] recent outburst of emotional anti-Russian rhetoric seems very odd given her biography. […] The Soviet education system gave her the opportunity to graduate from the prestigious St. Petersburg State University.  In 1983, Grybauskaitė became a member of the Communist Party—though it didn’t accept just anyone.  Perhaps this privilege was due to the fact that for many years, her father worked for the NKVD, the KGB’s forerunner.  There’s no evidence she joined against her will.  So, was she really a committed socialist?  Or did she simply decide to use Party membership as a springboard for her career?  In any case, it’s unlikely she dreamt of spending her entire life working as an apparatchik.[3]

The commentary concludes sardonically, “It’s fair to assume these anti-Russian outbursts are just as ‘sincere’ as Grybauskaitė’s once-passionate belief in communist ideals.”
For its part, Lithuania is warning that Russia is preparing for a hybrid war—a class of warfare “President Putin understands better than any other Russian leader.”[4] One of the best articulations of hybrid warfare is by Margarita Šešelgytė of Lithuania’s Vilnius University.

During the crisis in Crimea, the mass media have learned a new buzzword—hybrid war—to label operations of insignia-less ‘green men’ on Ukrainian soil. But in fact, neither the concept nor the essence of the operations was completely original.

The activities of the ‘green men’ and the separatists in Ukraine could be described as hybrid warfare according to a number of criteria. […] However, the main innovation in this conflict is not the use of irregular forces but rather the hybrid instruments of attack used by the Russian side.  Along with the military dimension, a broad array of political, economic, information, and cyber instruments are employed to reach political goals. These instruments are used interchangeably to expose vulnerabilities…and to undermine the government’s credibility.[5]

Major General Jonas Vytautas Zukas, Lithuania’s defense chief, defined some of those instruments last October, including “manipulating national minorities, provocations, attacks by non-state armed groups, illegal border crossing, [and] breach of military transit procedures.”[6]  Russia also positioned military aircraft at the Baranovitš and Lida airfields in western Belarus that could reach Lithuania’s (and NATO’s) Šiauliai airbase in ten minutes, too quick for aircraft positioned there to react.[7]

Source: http://www.infoplease.com/atlas/country/lithuania.html.

While it may (to some) appear improvised, there is a coherence and consistency to hybrid war. For Russia, “all conflicts are actually means to political ends—the actual forces used are irrelevant—[and] in the modern realities, Russia must look increasingly to non-military instruments.”[8]  The key element to understand is that hybrid war is essentially staged in the minds of the target population, the toxic effects of which, a former Latvian defense minister noted, “are there for all to see in Ukraine.”[9]  Russia has been notably successful so far if the results of a late March 2014 poll conducted by the weekly magazine Veidas are to be believed. The poll shows that 87 percent of respondents “believe that Russia could attempt to occupy Lithuania or part of it.”[10]

“The past is a weapon to some. Its ghosts are friends to many.”[11]

In the minds of Russian leaders, the European and American foreign policy establishments caricature Russian geopolitical interests.  That caricature might fairly be described as follows:

While Russian geopolitics may appear, at one and the same time, pragmatically nationalist and identity-perpetuating, it is in reality “only Realpolitik discourse about regaining control over the ‘near abroad’.”[12]  It has been used to reinvigorate the idea of Russian civilizational distinctiveness—“a needed response to ‘Atlanticism’”[13] that is intended to characterize the post-Soviet space as a whole—and to lend credence to it.[14]  Russia’s is a zero-sum geopolitics, one of conflict and competition as opposed to benevolent, positive-sum cooperation.  It is dependent upon the failures of Western efforts, particularly those of the United States.  In this view:

Russia’s post-Soviet recourse to geopolitics…reflected a thoroughly traditional stance of viewing the world through the prism of the balance of power and an age-old concern with reinstating Russia as a great power in possession of its own sphere of influence.[15]

The clear implication is that Russian policy—activist, assertive and interventionist—is thoroughly anachronistic, irrational, and in the end, illegitimate.  Similarly, Russia’s geopolitics-informed understanding of power and security—simply put, controlling territory—is expressed as a nostalgic and crude nationalism that demands the reintegration of the post-Soviet space through Russia’s continuing politico-military primacy in the region.[16]  It is an anachronism in conflict with the modern view that “geopolitical expansion and empire-building are outdated forms of international conduct […] and that interests have to be promoted through multilateral approaches and participation in international institutions.”[17]

The recent Pravda commentary took an interesting tack.  If “the dogmatic assertion that Russia is the successor-state to the Soviet Union” preemptively delegitimizes any Russian assertion of interests in its near-abroad, are Western nations, too, held accountable?

The belligerent EU ruling elites are undoubtedly pleased to hear the ex-communist Grybauskaitė constantly demand action to counter Russia’s ‘open and brutal aggression,’ her warnings that ‘Russia is trying to rewrite the post-war borders of Europe.’  But wait!  Remember how Lithuania acquired Vilnius and Memel.[18]  Is Grybauskaitė really that ignorant, or instead, is she willfully distorting well-known historical facts?  Does she really not remember how the European Union provoked the collapse of multi-ethnic Yugoslavia in the 1990s?  After that geopolitical dismemberment, the EU dictated how Balkan states’ borders were re-drawn.  It certainly wasn’t Russia.[19]

It then tries to turn the argument—if all successor-states bear responsibility for historic wrongs, then so, too, does Lithuania—to dislocate and condition Lithuanian identity:

Grybauskaitė might also thank the Federal Republic of Germany, as the Third Reich’s successor-state, for eradicating Lithuania’s Jews.  In 1939, more than 260,000 Jews lived in Lithuania.  By 1945, just 26,000 remained. ‘The Jewish Question’ in Lithuania was settled by the Third Reich, which today is admired by Lithuanian ultra-nationalists.[20]

The analogy, if obscene,[21] is nonetheless instructive.  Jacques Derrida wrote, “If language never escapes from analogy…it freely takes up its own destruction.”[22]  He was addressing the intentional use of language to subvert language, to decenter and turn it back on itself.   Peter Pomerantsev called it “the menace of unreality,”[23] a term he used to characterize “how the Kremlin weaponizes information, culture and money.”[24] An article published on the Russian government news portal Rossiyskaya Gazeta quoted approvingly State Duma Speaker Sergei Naryshkin that while “until recently, it seemed that dialogue and the quest for understanding would become a norm of international relations,” it is now the case that “NATO’s eastward expansion has returned a state of war to Europe.”[25]  That war—an information or “hybrid” one—defines Russian actions in its near-abroad.

Playing the ‘Polish Card’ in Russia’s Hybrid War against Lithuania[26]

“The regime is moving towards the censorship of dreams.” — Pussy Riot, Putin Zassal

The Danish international relations theorist Ole Wæver argues that “difference only collapses into opposition in special situations.”[27]  One way to foment those conditions is the use of wedge strategies, a long established practice to prevent hostile alliances from forming or to disperse those that have formed.  In some sense the obverse of Russia’s recurring paranoia over the presence of ethnic klin’ya or “wedges” within its own territory,[28] many analysts point to Russia’s growing willingness to use ethnic groups in the near-abroad as a political wedge. The Pravda commentary continues:

In all her tirades, Grybauskaitė never misses the chance to point out Russia’s failure to protect human rights.  To paraphrase the Latin proverb Terra terram accusat, ‘people living in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.’  Lithuania, it seems, is not so eager to share all the beliefs and practices of Western European democracies.  For example, Lithuania’s Polish-speaking citizens live under constant government pressure to give up their cultural identity and language. Meanwhile, in and around Vilnius, Polish is spoken by more than 50 percent of the population.[29]

This statement is not totally without foundation if a November 2013 report by the European Foundation for Human Rights—a non-governmental organization established in 2010 to protect and promote the rights of ethnic minorities living in Lithuania, particularly the Polish minority—is to be believed:

At the onset, the EFHR wishes to emphasise one of the main conclusions of this Report: the position of minorities has generally—and unfortunately—not improved markedly since Lithuania’s independence gained in 1990 or the ratification of the FCNM [Framework Convention on the Protection of National Minorities] on 17 February 2000 and Lithuania’s accession to the European Union in 2004.  It is unfortunate because one would expect a trend towards increased compliance with Lithuania’s treaty obligations after ratification and the impact of more than 12 years of monitoring and recommendations by the FCNM’s Advisory Committee of Experts.  This has unfortunately not happened.[30]

As Lenin wrote, the smallest rift is useful, even if it is temporary and conditional.  Defence24 is a news portal focusing on Polish defense and security issues. It recently asserted that “Moscow is preparing a hybrid conflict with Vilnius,” and went on to speculate whether Russia would use ethnic Poles instrumentally to destabilize the region, or worse, to establish a pretense for a Crimea-like intervention into Lithuania launched from Russian Kaliningrad.[31]  It questions whether the effort by Lithuania’s ethnic Poles to find common cause politically with ethnic Russians “is a clever political strategy…or an action inspired by the Kremlin?” A Ukrainian human rights group noted the appearance in cyberspace of the heretofore unknown Wileńska Republika Ludowa (“Vilnius People’s Republic”), a name clearly intended to reference self-declared “people’s republics” in Ukraine’s Donets’k and Luhansk regions.[32]
While some are quick to minimize these fears, others are more cautious. The Polish language business news portal Forsal recently published an article—provocatively titled “The sum of all fears. Lithuania trembles before ‘the little green men’ from Russia”—in which it avers that “one realistic scenario is where a group claiming to represent local Poles occupies a government building in Vilnius and demands a plebiscite on the region’s autonomy.”[33]  What may seem like an intemperate comment comes only a few months after reports:

The conflict between Lithuania and Poland, which share a 104-kilometer (65-mile) border, has escalated over the past two weeks after Poland’s ambassadors to Lithuania and Latvia criticized the treatment of ethnic Poles in the local media.  Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry responded that the statements [that ‘Polish Foreign Minister Radula Sikorski said Lithuania failed to live up to commitments to ethnic Poles and Polish investors’] were inaccurate and inappropriate for diplomats.[34]

What if…?

We see NATO’s airplanes, we hear them overhead, and it reassures us a bit—but will they really protect us?  [T]hese thoughts keep coming into my head: What if…?[35] — unnamed Lithuanian citizen.

In late January, the Lithuanian Defense Ministry published a manual titled, What you need to know: emergency preparedness and readiness in times of war.[36]  Marijus Girša wrote a skeptical commentary in the conservative daily, Lietuvos Žinios:

The word ‘threat’ has become part of our everyday […] Popular news portals race to interpret everything that might be harmful as imminent threats, and politicians speak menacingly of them. […] The [Defense Ministry’s] publication was presented as a valuable, 100-page booklet full of specific, concrete advice about what to do if war breaks out.  Some of is supposed to be ‘effective in fighting the enemy’s use of so-called hybrid methods of war’.  So, we’ll whip our enemies with this booklet, but what the Defense Minister says is most important is to keep a cool head and don’t panic.[37]

Girša continues with an allusion to a recent incident in the Lithuanian port of Klaipėda[38] in which a suburban home was defaced by anti-Russian graffiti.[39]  The property belongs to the daughter of Seimas[40] member Irina Rozova. She sits as a member of the Electoral Action of Poles in Lithuania, a political party that caucuses with another party, the Union of Russians in Lithuania.[41] Calling the incident “an ugly and pathetic provocation,” Rozova alleged it was retribution for attending a rally the previous day to commemorate the seventieth anniversary Klaipėda’s liberation from Nazi occupation by the Soviet Army.  Eugenijus Gentvilas, a European Parliament member, said he “doesn’t rule out the possibility that the perpetrators are associated with external forces who accuse everyone of fascism except themselves.” [42]  Former Minister of National Defense Rasa Juknevičienė claimed the vandalism was transparently a Russian provocation, “since it was in every sense only useful to them.”[43]  With “misinformation and propaganda that are part on an ongoing information war,” Klaipėda’s mayor, Vytautas Grubliauskas, said the incident “has nothing to do with Lithuania and inter-ethnic relations in Klaipėda.”[44]
Girša concludes his commentary with this observation:

Let’s not fool ourselves.  No books or practical advice will help us identify and combat real threats if we can’t overcome our inner demons.  After all, they pose the greatest threat.[45]

Those “inner demons” were in full display elsewhere. Some claimed the Klaipėda incident was a provocation intent on showing that Russians are “a disadvantaged minority in Lithuania.”[46] Arvydas Anušauskas[47] dismissed the incident as “a puppet show, where we only see and hear what they want us to.” Anušauskas’ “they” is Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVF,[48] which he claimed uses ethnic minorities to inflame the political situation in Lithuania. “The slogans weren’t professional,” he said, “Next time, they’ll have to write in proper Lithuanian.” He speculated the perpetrators were likely affiliated with the Electoral Action of Poles in Lithuania (known by the acronym “LLRA”) or its ally, the Union of Russians in Lithuania (known by the acronym “LRS”), either of which might expect to gain “a political advantage.”[49]
Valiuškevičiūtė’s Lyrtas article continues that “At almost the same time” as the Klaipėda incident:

The People’s Republic of Vilnius started a Facebook page that openly talks about the need for ‘little green men'[50] in the Vilnius region.  You ask why?  In order to protect the interests of Vilnius’ Polish minority.[51]

According to the Wileńska Republika Ludowa Facebook page:

We are not ‘Russians’.  We are not ‘Putin’s provocateurs’.  We are Polish patriots, and as such, we seek cooperation among Lithuania’s Poles, Belarusians, and Russians.  We strive to throw off the yoke of the chauvinist Samogitian[52] government that discriminates against minorities and persecutes them.[53]

The group’s views were quickly eschewed by other Lithuanian Poles such as Edward Trusewicz of the Union of Poles in Lithuania, who dismissed it as a “cheap provocation” and “incitement to ethnic hatred.”[54]  Anušauskas demanded Lithuania’s Prosecutor General identify the persons behind the Polish-language Facebook account, alleging “Russia’s special services’ methods are evident.”[55]
An interesting, if distinctly minority, view cautions against succumbing to hybrid war provocations. In a commentary titled “National Minorities Policy,” political scientist Kęstutis Girnius wrote, “You should not overstate the importance of disputes with ethnic minorities, nor rush to a judgment that they indicate disloyalty or the hidden hand of Moscow.” [56] Yet of all the alternatives available to address the grievances of its ethnic minorities, “the Lithuanian government has chosen to ignore them.”  “Actions like revoking authorization for Russian Culture Day in Vilnius,” he continued, “allow Moscow propagandists to say that it was done to limit the rights of Russians and to discriminate against them, that Russians are treated as second-class citizens, and that Russians should understand that Lithuania can never become their homeland.” While it is true that the Russian language remains an important tool for spreading Russian influence in the Baltic States, Girnius may have a point.  Consider how the Lithuanian government’s actions were refracted in the recent Pravda commentary:

President Grybauskaitė now wants the Lithuanian Parliament to pass a law to criminalize the act of spreading “hostile propaganda and disinformation,” In effect, all anti-Dalia public opinions will henceforth be considered to be anti-Lithuanian and subject to criminal prosecution.[57]

Concluding Thoughts: Lithuania & Russian Kaliningrad

Late evening in the Empire
in a destitute province. — from Joseph Brodsky’s Lithuanian Nocturne.

The coercive effect of Russian soft power, in Joseph Nye’s words, is the ability to manipulate the agenda of political choices.[58]  That being said, to the question of Lithuania’s ethnic minorities:

Russian practices emerge in a context that needs to temper judgments.  Much of Russia’s influence in the Baltics is inherent, the result of Tsarist and Soviet legacies as much as current policies.  Russian diasporas and Russian culture have been part of the social matrix…and the survival of transnational affinities is hardly remarkable.[59]

Even Lenin acknowledged the necessity of demonstrating a minimal amount of conciliation.[60]  The ultimate  determiner of whether Lithuania’s ethnic Poles and Russians constitute a political wedge may be whether the actions of the Lithuanian government unwittingly conform to Moscow’s propaganda narrative.
Encapsulating (albeit unintentionally) Russian exertions to hybridize Lithuanian ethnic minorities as a wedge, Russian publisher Oleg Vavilov proclaimed in 2009, “History is the art of interpretation.”[61]  Russia, as in the past, purports today to seek security and stability in Europe, if only Russia were granted a sphere of influence.  The precise boundaries’ are negotiable, if the West—and first of all Washington—agree to the Russian interpretation of collective security.  A key element in Russia’s campaign is the rehabilitation of the 1945 Yalta conference, when Western leaders de facto accepted a Russian sphere of influence in Central and Eastern Europe.[62] Thus the flurry of references to Yalta, including the existential one directed squarely at Lithuania in the recent Pravda commentary, viz., “Had Stalin not persevered at Tehran and Yalta with Churchill and Roosevelt regarding Eastern Europe’s post-war borders, the capital of Lithuania still would Kaunas.”
The Russian economist Yegor Gaidar wrote in his 2009:

It would be naïve to think that communist regimes simply lost control of the situation and failed to persuade citizens to wait, to be patient […] For Lithuanians who defended their parliament…their reason for undermining the regime was not a clear cut commitment to building a market economy.  They no longer wanted to allow leaders they had not elected and organizations they did not respect to decide their fate.[63]

Lithuania has achieved a remarkable transformation to democracy in an extraordinarily brief time.  It stands in stark contrast to its Russian neighbor, the Kaliningrad Oblast—to which the Lithuanian government advanced a political claim in the 1990s, calling it “the Russian-occupied area of Lithuania”—which two decades ago was being held out as a “Baltic Hong Kong.”  The reality, as one commentary notes, is less “economic miracle” than a geopolitically brittle “Potemkin village.”[64]
Returning in conclusion to the new Lithuanian civil defense booklet, it reminds Lithuanians that hybrid war uses information and psychological attacks to break citizens’ will to resist.  Here, Ukraine’s experience is instructive:

Where Crimea was concerned, rather than overt intervention, […] propaganda…and subterfuge were more effective […] in the tangled, precarious landscape of an empire that had never quite finished breaking up.[65]

So, for the Lithuanian nation and for its citizens, the message is clear: “Remember if you’re taken hostage that you only have one goal—to survive.”[66]
About the author:
*John R. Haines is a Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and directs the Princeton Committee of FPRI. Much of his current research is focused on Russia and its near abroad, with a special interest in nationalist and separatist movements. The translation of all source material is by the author unless noted otherwise.
Source:
This article was published by FPRI.
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newtalk 

立陶宛總統：與俄羅斯已經開打

新頭殼newtalk | 洪聖斐 編譯報導

發布 2015.03.06 | 09:10 PM

陶宛總統格里包斯凱特提醒波羅底海3國要小心俄羅斯的侵略。圖片來源：達志影像/美聯社

儘管烏克蘭政府與叛軍已經達成停火協議，周邊國家對局勢發展仍相當憂心。立陶宛總統格里包斯凱特(Dalia Grybauskaite)最近便提醒波羅底海3國要小心俄羅斯的侵略。

俄羅斯史普尼克通訊社(Sputnik)昨(5)日報導，立陶宛總統格里包斯凱特指出，波羅底海3國周邊的地緣政治局勢已經改變，俄羅斯對這些國家已經構成實質的威脅，波羅底海國家已經處於前線，與俄羅斯的戰爭已經開打。

格里包斯凱特表示，現階段打的是資訊戰與網路戰，無人知曉究竟會不會演變成動槍動砲的傳統戰爭。現在波羅底海國家必須要武裝起來，抗拒這些侵略的行徑。

《歐亞評論》(Eurasia Review)今(6)日報導，立陶宛當局認為俄羅斯會進行的，是普亭(Vladimir Putin)最擅長的「混合戰」(hybrid war)。

被認為是對「混合戰」最有研究的立陶宛維爾紐斯大學(Vilniaus universitetas)國際關係與政治學學院研究部主任佘舍莉姬特(Margarita Šešelgytė)曾在去年撰文指出，在克里米亞危機爆發時，有一群穿著綠色服裝的武裝份子出現在烏克蘭的國土。在這場衝突中，最重要的不是非正規部隊 的投入，而是俄羅斯混合各種侵略工具。為了達成政治目的，除了軍事之外，也運用了政治、經濟、資訊和網路等工具。俄羅斯交替使用這些工具，來找出對方的弱 點。

立陶宛國防部長祖卡斯(Jonas Vytautas Zukas)去年10月也曾指出，俄羅斯操縱少數族群，利用非正式武裝團體進行挑釁與攻擊，非法前進他國疆界。在距離立陶宛甚近的白俄羅斯，就有俄羅斯戰 機駐紮。10分鐘之內，就可以抵達立陶宛的希奧莉亞(Šiauliai)基地，讓後者的空軍根本來不及反應。

英國國家廣播電台(BBC)今(6)日也報導，立陶宛當局為了避免戰爭爆發時人民措手不及，已經緊急印製了《戰爭手冊》，放在各個圖書館。他們想告訴人民：不要驚慌，保持冷靜，槍聲在你家窗邊響起，也不要以為這就是世界末日。

在立陶宛的街頭，年輕人正在討論的話題是，一旦發生戰爭，要不要入伍抵抗外敵。

此際，俄羅斯正在被他們兼併的克里米亞和從喬治亞奪走的區域進行演習；北大西洋公約組織也正在黑海演習。當地氣氛相當緊張。

（圖片來源：達志影像/美聯社）