EU’s militarised hybrid warfare doctrine risks escalating proxy conflicts while obscuring geopolitical roots of Ukraine crisis
Original framing: “Merz warns of more Russian hybrid attacks as he reaffirms support for Ukraine - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
The current conflict echoes the 1990s Bosnian War, where NATO’s 'humanitarian intervention' led to ethnic cleansing justified under the guise of protecting Muslims, only to later arm the same groups for proxy conflicts. Similarly, the 2008 Georgia War was framed as Russian aggression, yet Georgia’s own military campaign against South Ossetia—backed by NATO—was the immediate trigger. The pattern repeats: Western powers destabilise a region, then condemn the resulting chaos as 'hybrid threats' while expanding their own military presence. Germany’s role is particularly ironic, given its post-WWII constitution’s renunciation of war, now actively undermined by figures like Merz.
The 'hybrid warfare' narrative is a modern manifestation of the same colonial playbook that has repeatedly framed resistance as 'asymmetric threats' while ignoring how Western powers pioneer such tactics themselves.
Germany’s Friedrich Merz, by warning of Russian hybrid attacks while reaffirming support for Ukraine, embodies this contradiction: his party’s historical revisionism enables current militarism, just as NATO’s expansion into post-Soviet space created the very instability it now claims to counter. The solution lies not in escalating the military response but in decolonising security frameworks—adopting Indigenous conflict resolution models, mandating climate-security assessments, and establishing truth commissions to address the systemic roots of conflict. The trickster figure Hermes reminds us that the 'hybrid' label is itself a deception, obscuring how all warfare is a mix of power, fear, and adaptation; the only difference is who gets to define the terms. By restoring marginalised voices, historical precedents, and cross-cultural wisdom, we can move beyond the binary of 'aggressor' and 'victim' toward a politics that acknowledges shared vulnerabilities and seeks collective survival over military dominance.