Russia trying to keep below threshold of response, expert says, as EU chief plane GPS jammed

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00:00Let's get more analysis of this situation and bring in Patrick Berry.

00:04Patrick Berry is a Senior Associate Professor in Warfare and Counterterrorism at the University of Bath.

00:10Patrick, thanks for being with us here on France 24. We appreciate your time.

00:13To start with, what's your take on this incident involving the jet of Ursula von der Leyen?

00:19Good evening. Yeah, it's something that somebody, you know, others have pointed out,

00:24it has been going on much closer to the Ukrainian airspace or the Russian airspace in the past.

00:33It's fairly frequent. We've had the carrier Finnair being forced to turn around from a flight to Estonia, for example.

00:40But this is, as far as I can tell, given where Plovtiv is, the furthest geographically away from Russia

00:47where something like this has happened to such a high-profile person.

00:50So I think it's a signal. It's, you know, that's how I'd interpret it.

00:56It's too far, essentially, from the front line to be military jamming gone wrong, you know, or overextended, etc.

01:03And so, yeah, I think it's a signal. I think it should be interpreted as such.

01:06And hopefully, as your previous correspondent said, it results in extra investment in more lower-orbit satellites

01:15for the EU's use and better countermeasures, etc.

01:18Indeed. What one talks, and many experts talk, and many people with great insights, such as yourself,

01:24talk about the threat coming from Russia and that threat being not so much the threat of military ballistic action,

01:31but cyberterrorism, those kind of issues. There's such a thing that we're talking about.

01:35And this EU action plan that's been mooted as a possibility, how might that look in reality?

01:42How might that work? Speaking from a layman's position,

01:44it's hard to imagine how you start to combat this kind of cyberterrorism.

01:50Yeah, cyberterrorism is sort of one part of this. What you're talking about, some people call it hybrid war,

01:55other people, you know, I think a much easier way to actually talk about it is sub-threshold.

01:59There's a threshold which would have a conventional response so that the countries that it happened to

02:05would actually go to war over, yeah?

02:07And so the Russians are trying to keep their actions, coordinated actions across multi-domains,

02:13yeah, including targeting the population, targeting politicians, etc., etc., etc., disinformation.

02:19They're trying to keep it below the threshold of where there'd be especially an Article 5 response,

02:24but even a national response.

02:25And, yeah, I think it's a very difficult piece of work to do for the EU, for NATO, for the countries involved.

02:35I mean, anyone who wants to read, you know, the brilliant book, Putin's People,

02:38you'll just get a complete understanding of how Putin thinks, how the KGB think,

02:45what their strategy of Maskarovska is about in terms of attacking the West through numerous different means.

02:50And that's economic, that's sabotage. As I said, it's disinformation.

02:56And it's these other kind of issues where you have, you know, just sort of sowing a threat as well.

03:02You've got to remember, we've had a lot of lines cut, mysteriously cut, trains derailed, etc.

03:08It's a full-on campaign. It's in full swing across the whole of Europe.

03:13And I just wonder, the question is, how much does Europe take?

03:17Indeed, Patrick. Just to name-check that book again, Putin's People by Catherine Belton.

03:22I think you and I are reading the same material.

03:24It is a real detailed analysis of just what is behind Putin's movements right now

03:30and what Russia is aiming to do.

03:31And it is quite a scary read in many ways.

03:34The pilots of the Ursula von der Leyen private jet resorted to old-school navigational tools

03:39to get the plane where it needed to go. There we go.

03:42I'm wondering how ordinary people respond to the possible threat that they might face.

03:47It could be, as you say, bigger targets such as governments, such as businesses.

03:52But of course, ordinary people too have never been more vulnerable.

03:56It's about education. The main thing really in combating this, it takes cross-government,

04:01cross-national effort to build social resilience.

04:06And at a time when you can see that it's not the only thing that's happening,

04:09people are angry for a reason.

04:10Here in the UK, obviously, at the moment, it's about illegal immigration, and there are high rates of that.

04:16But some of that, there's evidence to suggest, is being driven by powers like Russia,

04:20who are leaning on General Haftar in Libya to allow people to come up from Africa and through and into Europe.

04:26And then, guess what? They make their way to the UK.

04:28So, you know, this has been a part of a tactic which is being used against the European Union.

04:32We saw it, you know, again on some of the other Eastern crossings as well.

04:37I think really it comes down to the workpiece.

04:39It's about education. It's about social resilience.

04:41I think, to be honest with you, probably there's, you know, how much you can say this,

04:46but like an information control angle here, like everybody's got basically now,

04:51they've got a portable studio connected to the Wi-Fi, you know, to the Internet in real time.

04:56I don't know how you actually end up in a thriving democracy when you've got varying degrees of education level

05:02and people, you know, struggling to interpret some of the information that are coming over their phones.

05:07You know, all of us included, we've all got it wrong at times.

05:12So, I mean, one of the things that kind of I think about, if you did end up in a conventional war,

05:17what is the information plan for day two of that conventional war at nation states?

05:21And what are they going to do? You know, because you can't have this.

05:24We had, you know, one of the reasons the West won the Second World War is because they have very strong and effective censorship,

05:31you know, give or take a couple of radio channels.

05:35So that's what we're dealing with, really.

05:37It's a very complex picture. It's got huge moral and ethical issues for democracies.

05:44But I think, you know, the longer term picture, if they stay the way they are

05:47and don't start to cohere and put effort into social resilience, societal resilience,

05:53they're going to find themselves undermined.

05:56Patrick Berry, Senior Associate Professor in Warfare and Counterterrorism at the University of Bath.

06:00Thank you, sir, for joining us.

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