Since 24 February 2022, Russia has waged a full-scale war against Ukraine. Moscow adjusted its repertoire of actions, targeting the west through malign activities and interference aiming to undermine support for Kyiv.
The ambiguous nature of malign activities and instruments deployed to wage hybrid war makes them often difficult to detect and attribute. Confirming the use of a specific tool and establishing a link between a cyberattack, non-state actors conducting it, and a state that is possibly behind them is equally difficult. Russia capitalises on the grey zone activities as they are hard for democracies to deter and can bring benefits through relatively low-cost non-military means of aggression. Despite measures to safeguard democracy, grey-zone aggression from Russia persists.
France is no stranger to those disruptive actions. Russian operations are highly interconnected, reinforcing one another, and operationally long-term as they continue even after being exposed by governments. Since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has carried out at least three destabilisation campaigns in France: RRN/Doppelganger, Portal Kombat, and Matryoshka. Some others have not been attributed to Moscow yet but bear all the hallmarks of similar and familiar patterns, such as the defacing of the Stars of David and Shoah Memorial, and the coffins at the Eiffel Tower.
Russia also targets French overseas territories, fuelling the anti-French, anti-imperial, and pro-independent sentiments in local populations. Lastly, Russia sought to dent France’s international image by targeting the Olympic and Paralympic Games and exacerbating existing tensions and fear of terrorism.
Disinformation and operations seeking to stoke tensions are promoted on social media and conveyed by state-funded global messaging campaigns, official government communications such as the foreign policy ecosystem and local proxies. AI and bot forms are used to promote and amplify disinformation.
Just as the Russian operations have evolved, so has the French response changed in two and a half years, with Paris now willing to retaliate politically by:
- exposing and describing the manipulation campaign;
- doubling down on support to Ukraine;
- enhancing collaboration with foreign partners to unmask Russian informational manoeuvres.
The French government, too, recognises and attributes actions to Russia. Paris has also set up a service to combat foreign digital interference, VIGINUM, which is in charge of detecting and characterising activities affecting digital public debate in France.
Nonetheless, the number of malign activities and hybrid attacks is likely to increase, as the attribution and the response do not deter Russia. Even though Russia has mostly worked on destabilisation campaigns to exacerbate tensions, we might expect it to resort to violence more frequently.
This analysis provides a list of recommendations on how to respond to and counteract Russian malign activities on the national and European levels, utilising and improving the tools that France, the EU, and NATO already possess. The end goal of our countermeasures should be to alter Russian calculations about the cost of attacking the west.
Download and read: Russian Malign Activities in France Since 2022: Stoking Tensions, Sowing Disorder, Disrupting Assistance to Ukraine (PDF)