Russian Capability and Usage of Hybrid Tactics During the Intervention in Ukraine and Crimea in 2014

Abstract

The hybrid war in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine is linked to history, geography, demography, local and national power play, and International level power politics between the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and Russia. Russia has strong fraternal ties with Ukraine dating back to the 9th century and the founding of Kievan Rus, the first eastern Slavic state, whose capital was Kiev/Kyiv. The country has been under partial or total Russian rule for most of those intervening centuries, which is a big part of why one in six Ukrainians is actually an ethnic Russian, one in three speaks Russian as the native language (the other two-thirds speak Ukrainian natively), and much of the country's media is in Russian. It is also why the subject of Russia is such a divisive one in Ukraine: many in the country see Moscow as the source of Ukraine's historical subjugation and something to be resisted, while others tend to look at Russia more fondly, with a sense of shared heritage and history. Nikita Khrushchev and the Supreme Council of the Soviet Union transferred Crimea from under the government of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to the government of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954. As both republics were a part of the Soviet Union, the move was largely symbolic and of little practical consequence.