Thread by @HackingButLegal

We keep talking about "Russian hybrid warfare" but what we are facing is a deliberate pincer designed to break states without ever declaring war.​ Four blades close simultaneously: institutional capture, disinformation & psyops, legal attacks, and physical acts of sabotage.​ 1/🧵

2/ First axis: institutional capture.​

Moscow cultivates political parties, media outlets, churches, business lobbies, and "cultural" fronts that gradually bend key nodes of our own systems toward Russian interests while retaining plausible deniability.

3/ This capture often runs through oligarch money, energy dependence, and elite networks rather than open ideology.​ Intelligence-linked orgs, "patriotic" NGOs, and Orthodox-aligned initiatives provide cover for recruitment, financing, and narrative shaping inside target states.

4/ Second axis: Disinformation and Psychological Operations.​

Russian services treat information as a battlefield, fusing state media, troll farms, bots, & proxy influencers into long-running campaigns that shape perceptions, polarize societies, and erode trust in institutions.

5/ From downplaying atrocities like Bucha to seeding conspiracies about NATO "biolabs", the objective is to fracture coalitions and reframe aggressor as victim.

These narratives are iterated in real time, tested across platforms, & localized for each audience.

6/ Important: Information ops are synchronized with events on the ground.​

Cyberattacks, battlefield developments, and even terrorist or sabotage incidents are immediately wrapped in counternarratives designed to confuse attribution, blame victims, and paralyze decisionmakers.

7/ Third axis: Legal attacks, also known as "lawfare".

Internally, Russia uses foreign agent laws, the accusation of "extremism," and draconian defamation laws to crush independent media, NGOs, and opposition, turning its own legal system into a weaponized filter of reality.

8/ Externally, Kremlin-linked actors and their allies deploy lawsuits, regulatory complaints, and strategic defamation cases to tie up journalists, researchers, and activists in years of costly litigation.

9/ The purpose is not to win on merit but to raise the price of speaking out & to launder disinformation through court filings and "official" processes. This also provides opportunity for disinfo producers to present themselves as "fact checkers" to own/seed particular narratives

10/ The legal pincer complements the institutional and info lines. Captured or intimidated institutions cite restrictive laws+pending cases as excuses to deplatform critics, cut funding to NGOs, and sanitize debate in ways that align with Russian interests but appear "procedural"

11/ Fourth axis: Acts of sabotage.​

Russian military intelligence and affiliated networks have been linked to bombings, fires, rail derailments, infrastructure tampering, and plots against weapons factories and logistics hubs across Europe.

12/ New assessments show big uptick in Russian sabotage & subversion against energy, transport, & military targets via recruited locals, criminal proxies, or disposable agents. Undersea cables, pipelines, & warehouses are targets for physical disruption + signaling vulnerability.

13/ Again, this is integrated with the info domain.​

After a sabotage incident, Russian-linked channels flood the space with alternative theories, false flags, and blame-shifting to Ukraine or domestic "extremists," which muddies attribution and delays a unified response.

14/ When you zoom out, the synergy is the point.​

Institutional capture gives Moscow levers inside our systems; disinfo and psyops shape how societies interpret events; legal attacks neutralize watchdogs; sabotage creates controlled crises to be exploited by the other three.

15/ Viewing each incident in isolation: one lawsuit here, one fake news cycle there, a mysterious crash... is a strategic mistake.​ Taken together, they describe a coherent campaign to degrade our resilience, slow decision making, and normalize their coercion as background noise.

16/ Countering this pincer means building cross-domain defenses.

We need to shield institutions from capture, harden our info ecosystems, reform our legal frameworks against lawfare, and start treating acts of sabotage as part of a strategic pattern, not random crime.

17/ If we only react tactically to each blade, we’ll miss the hand that is closing the entire grip.

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