Anna Linford 
In the week since, the label has kept spreading — and now it cuts in every direction at once.
The West is widening its net. The European Union issued a fresh assessment reinforcing its warnings on hybrid threats, according to Decode39, while commentary cited by Novinite cast Bulgaria's Black Sea coast as "Europe's new front" in Russia's hybrid war.
But the political will to answer it is fracturing, not hardening. In Rome, Il Foglio reported that Italy's cyber-defence plan exists on paper but that politicians have yet to act on it. The same outlet reported that foreign minister Antonio Tajani condemned the hybrid war while his coalition partner, deputy premier Matteo Salvini, played down Russia's responsibility for it — showing a government can agree the threat is real yet disagree over who is behind it.
Moscow, meanwhile, is not just rejecting the term — it is appropriating it. In Minsk, security official Volfovich accused unnamed "external players" of deliberately turning the post-Soviet space into a battleground of hybrid warfare, according to Belarusian state outlet SB Belarus Segodnya. Days later, secretaries of the Commonwealth of Independent States' security councils met in Moscow to discuss what they called NATO's "militarization" alongside hybrid warfare, according to News.by — using the Western vocabulary to recast NATO itself as the aggressor.
The sabotage the term was coined to describe is also spreading into directions that resist a clean East-versus-West story. Kyiv Post reported that Russia itself is now facing what it called a domestic sabotage epidemic. UPI described a "double escalation" by Russia and North Korea, each pursuing distinct end goals. And The Telegraph argued Putin is taking a leaf out of the IRA's book — reaching for a decades-old template of deniable, low-intensity attacks on infrastructure, precisely because today's vocabulary struggles to capture what is happening.
Hypothesis: "hybrid warfare" is doing less analytical work than rhetorical work — a label both sides now reach for to claim victimhood and justify a posture they already wanted. Supporting this: the same week saw the EU and Bulgarian commentary invoke it to demand more defence spending, while Belarus and the CIS invoked the identical word to accuse NATO of exactly what NATO accuses Moscow of. Against this: Italy's unbuilt cyber plan and Russia's own sabotage wave are concrete, uncontested problems the term is simply attached to after the fact — suggesting it labels real but disconnected troubles rather than functioning as a weapon in itself.
What to watch: whether the EU's new assessment produces funded capability before the next incident, whether Rome's coalition resolves its Tajani-Salvini split before the next vote, and whether Moscow's CIS framing of NATO as the hybrid aggressor gains any traction beyond its own bloc.
