Hybrid CoE Trend Report: Putin’s Trends 4.0

Russia is the country most often cited when it comes to hybrid threat and actors who pose threats to Western countries. The Hybrid CoE Trend Reports produced a report analyzing different trends related to Russian politics, internal, external developments and even certain people. The report largely refers to Putin’s tendencies, past and present.

Hybrid CoE Trend Reports identified five trends:

I. Non-institutional delegation of policy-making and outsourcing;

II. Growing tensions within the Russian ruling elite in the run-up to 2024;

III. Economic policies in Putin’s Russia in 2018–2024;

IV. Strategic solitude and the effects of the strategic culture of the military and security services;

V. Pretending to be a global power by reaching out to non-Western partners.

The five trends in this report, have three features in common: duality, unpredictability and longue durée thinking.

Duality with deception attempts materializes in the form of contradictory messages; on the one hand, Russia signals readiness to cooperate with Western and other countries, while on the other hand, the methods used are disrupting, undermining and hurting the selfsame countries Russia is talking with in a cooperative tone.

Unpredictability in association with Russia is no surprise, and yet Russia keeps on surprising. However, we are still poor at predicting when and where the next surprise is going to crop up. All fi ve trends give reason to expect unpredictability

Longue durée is a concept coined by French historian Fernand Braudel, combining social science with history, and presented as a structuring element of a temporal construction. It focuses on events that occur nearly imperceptibly over a long period of time and eventually change global relationships, as opposed to short-term perceptible events. It can duly be applied to Russia and Russia’s longterm goals.

Sursa: https://www.hybridcoe.fi/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Russia-trend-report_web.pdf