Everyone is talking about Belarus' "hybrid war" - do they themselves know what they are crazy about?

How should Belarus' actions in the border dispute with the EU really be described?

Minsk has deported thousands of refugees to the EU border, where many have since become stranded and several have lost their lives.

According to a wealth of credible information, even though Belarus, to no one's surprise, denies it.

Is this a war?

Is it political influence?

Is it something completely different?

The solution to the problem has become the linguistic prefix "hybrid-".

Official statements mainly describe "hybrid attacks", which in news reporting has since become "hybrid war".

Broadly speaking, the word should capture the borderland between "war" and "unruly behavior that is not war".

For example, cyber attacks, espionage, propaganda, lies and much more.

Or, if you set the bar really low,

that rude behavior.

The fuzzy war

Some observers have dug deep into what hybrid war really is.

Some things that - very simply - stand out are:

1. There have seldom, if ever, been wars that consist only of people shooting at each other.

Propaganda, espionage, psychology and more have always occurred.

"Hybrid war" is thus not a new type.

2. When military assessors talk about the "hybrid" part, they usually mean part of a war where they also shoot at each other.

When political leaders talk about hybrid war, they are in fact rather

to shooting at each other when one country wants to squeeze another.

If you actually mean something that does not reach what we consider to be war, then maybe you should call it something else.

Or perhaps even better, see that power can be exercised aggressively between countries in many different ways.

Ways that flow together, which makes the very exercise of power more important.

Spending time on this may seem like a pedantic word marker, but the words we use also shape how we interpret our world.

Dividing conflicts into orderly but false categories also means risking preparing for the wrong things.

"Gerasimov-doktrinen"

But one thing that hybrid war talk can actually be good at is understanding how, for example, Belarus, or Russia, views the relationship with the West.

And to explain why you do what you do.

Because while hybrid war has mostly been used internationally to describe how Russia acts, from the beginning it is about what Russia thinks the West is doing.

In 2013, Russian Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov gave a speech which was then published as an article.

There he described a kind of total warfare that mixes hard and soft means of pressure.

It all came to be known as the "Gerasimov Doctrine", even though it is not a doctrine and Gerasimov probably did not come up with it.

The point was not that Russia had come up with a new way of waging constant war.

This was said to be something that the West was already doing (one example was the Arab Spring uprising) and that Russia had to defend itself against.

Geopolitical sacrificial cardigan

Russia and Belarus are, of course, different countries, but the worldview is present in both.

Belarus has recently seen mass demonstrations, and Lukashenko quickly singled out foreign powers as the real culprits.

If you think you are under attack, it seems easy and sensible to strike back.

If you see the world as a zero-sum game where you automatically win if the "opponent" loses and vice versa, the incentives increase.

This is by no means a matter of defending Putin, or Lukashenko.

You do not have to share their worldview on a single point.

However, it may explain why some countries try to harm others without any other gain:

That one sees oneself as the real victim of hybrid war, with a cynical back-cake as the only answer.