Hybrid Actors &
the Instrumentalisation
of Migration

The concept of hybrid warfare is widespread today, whether in media reports, academia or the actual use of hybrid attacks. The European Union (EU) in particular has been confronted with hybrid attacks and threats in its geopolitical space for some time. These include various types of sabotage, airspace violations, nuclear threats and disinformation. However, in recent years, Belarus and Russia in particular have increasingly used so-called instrumentalised migration (IM) — also a hybrid means of influence — against the EU, leading to a series of migration crises, mainly at the eastern EU external borders of Poland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia.

The aims of sabotage and disinformation are sufficiently clear. However, what hybrid actors hope to achieve by exploiting migration is not necessarily obvious and often not immediately apparent. This paper therefore provides a structured overview of some of the objectives that hybrid actors pursue with this hybrid attack vector. Since Russia in particular has used IM in recent years, this hybrid actor serves as the accompanying example throughout.

From the EU's perspective, the consequences of the Syrian civil war manifested themselves in particular in the form of an unprecedented refugee crisis triggered by the large number of refugees arriving in Europe. The asylum management systems of EU countries were not prepared for such a crisis. Southern Europe was particularly affected. However, during the crisis, when migration flows were mainly across the Mediterranean, up to 5,000 Syrian, Afghan and Iraqi refugees suddenly crossed the Arctic Circle border from Russia to Norway to apply for asylum there (Pavlakis, 2021). These irregular border crossings were initiated by the Russian authorities.

This was an attempt to spread the consequences of the refugee crisis to less affected European countries. Moscow wanted to use the war situation and the flow of refugees to overwhelm Finnish and Norwegian authorities by opening the otherwise strictly controlled Russian border crossings (Elonheimo, 2021). The EU's inability to cope with the refugee crisis should be exploited and exacerbated in order to weaken it in the long term. Russia therefore attempted to deliberately exacerbate the crisis in European migration management (Dyner, 2024).

In 2021, Russia and Belarus engineered an artificial migration crisis on the eastern external border of the EU. Among other things, Belarusian authorities eased visa regulations for people from the Middle East and arranged for domestic travel agencies to offer transport as part of a new migration route (Bryjka, 2021). Foreign airlines, smuggling networks and Russian and Belarusian authorities were also integrated into this artificial migration route, with the latter forcing irregular border crossings despite border fortifications and actively assisting migrants in the process.

A fundamental goal that hybrid actors seek to achieve with IM is therefore to overload the asylum systems of target countries and confront them with crisis situations, thereby forcing political and economic destabilisation. The intention in the narrower sense is to use instrumentalised waves of migration to force destination countries to expend resources on measures they would not otherwise need for border protection. The sudden influx of thousands of immigrants is intended to paralyse operations and necessitate the deployment of additional personnel. Particularly socially and politically important domains are to be targeted and overwhelmed — border, police, military, judicial, health and security personnel (Bryjka, 2021).

By instrumentalising migration, Russia created migration crises that, in typical hybrid warfare fashion, remained below the threshold of major military escalation. Nevertheless, these were political crises that had to be overcome. The manner in which they were overcome plays a decisive role for the hybrid actor, as it can gain information from this that can in turn be used for further actions. It has already been suggested that Belarusian President Lukashenko wanted to use the 2021 migration crisis to test EU border security for future operations involving instrumentalised waves of migration (Fakhry, 2022).

When a migration crisis escalates due to violent riots at the border and destruction of border infrastructure, a hybrid actor can force the opponent to deploy its military to maintain border security. In the past, there have been repeated violent clashes between border guards and irregular migrants at Poland's external EU border. During the migration crisis of 2021, the Polish government therefore decided to send soldiers to the border to support border guards (Bryjka, 2024). Similarly, the Lithuanian and Latvian governments deployed military and police forces to their border areas with Belarus (Bryjka, 2024).

In this regard, it has been claimed that the crisis may have been an attempt by Russia to test which military units could be deployed operationally in eastern Poland, how quickly and by what routes equipment and soldiers could be transferred, how logistical support could be organised, and how large the forces could be in terms of troop numbers and weapons (Dyner, 2024a). The IM would act as a kind of trigger, forcing the target country to disclose military information and accept the enemy's intelligence gathering. Russia was able to use this tactic to force EU countries to concentrate police and military forces in border regions, while closely observing their procedures, response times and modus operandi (Bryjka, 2024).

Migration is an issue that provokes conflicting opinions within a society and between its social and political groups. Rising numbers of refugees in Western Europe are particularly associated with a polarisation of anti-immigration attitudes (van der Brug, 2021). Populations can be understood by hybrid actors as elements that have destabilising effects on their states. Since populations are an important part of political discourse — especially in democratic states — they can become targets for hybrid operations in the form of IM.

IM is a suitable means to this end, as it allows hybrid actors to exploit the political explosiveness of migration and use the origin of migrants to fuel potential conflict among the population. This is precisely why hybrid actors select migrants from specific ethnic, religious or demographic groups — such as young men — who can have a polarising effect on the target country (Fakhry, 2022). Russia exploited people from Africa and the Middle East in particular. In this way, it focused on creating tensions between local populations and newly arrived migrants, leading to the rise of right-wing extremist and populist governments with a pro-Russian agenda (McBride, 2023).

The aim of the hybrid actor may therefore be to politically divide societies and the party landscape of target countries through the forced immigration of foreigners, thereby weakening governments in terms of domestic policy. A particularly large wave of migration is not necessarily required. The effectiveness of IM depends less on size and more on the policies of the destination country and the attitudes of its population, with the origin and religious and cultural identity of migrants being a key criterion (Greenhill, 2024).

Ultimately, every migration crisis divides the society of the destination country into opponents and supporters of immigration (Greenhill, 2024). Kremlin documents suggest that Russia believes it can gain control over elections in Europe by controlling migration routes — either by curbing the influx or flooding countries with migrants (Greenhill, 2024). This is hybrid influence operating at the level of democratic legitimacy itself.

When using IM, control and decision-making power lie solely with the hybrid actor. One of Russia's key advantages in the 2021 crisis was that Russian officials were able to decide not only how many people would cross the border into the EU, but also who would do so and when (Praks, 2024). This applies to any hybrid actor who uses IM. EU states have often suspected that infiltrated migrants were assigned tasks by the Russian secret service, or that at least attempts were made to recruit them for such purposes. Fears like these were based on the knowledge that Russian secret services have a decades-long tradition of training extremists, separatists and proxy militias (Kuzio, 2021).

There is therefore at least the possibility that a hybrid actor may intend to use migration flows as human cover with the aim of moving selected individuals or small groups to the target countries. Irregular migration flows are considered an ideal cover for smuggling in agents, spies, saboteurs, agitators, partisans, activists and terrorists (Schmid, 2024). Frontex also concludes that, in addition to terrorists, especially during times of increasing tension between Western and Eastern Europe, saboteurs, agitators and intelligence agents could be among migrants who have entered illegally (Frontex, 2024).

The goal of a hybrid actor could therefore be to smuggle individuals into target countries who would then carry out one-off attacks from within the enemy state. It would also be conceivable to use IM to establish networks or terrorist cells that would later carry out various actions — including sabotage, contract killings, attacks on critical infrastructure or political activism. There is therefore an argument that, due to Russian IM, there is a risk of social conditions arising in Europe that could be exploited by external actors (Schmid, 2024).

In addition to the typical goal of a hybrid actor who systematically exploits migration to overload the asylum system of the destination country — thereby plunging it into a migration crisis and destabilising it — there are other goals that may not be obvious at first glance. If a hybrid actor forces the target country to deploy its military to maintain national security and border sovereignty, military information may be disclosed that the actor intends to use for future activities.

Similarly, a target country must expect a hybrid actor to aim to divide its society in order to provoke destabilisation from within. In doing so, the actor primarily exploits the party landscape and the fears and political views of the population. However, since this only works if there is a multi-party system, a free press and freedom of expression — that is, if the target country is democratic — it must be assumed that this application of IM can only be used effectively against democracies.

Finally, a hybrid actor may intend to infiltrate individuals, including activists and terrorists, who are supposed to cause damage to the target country from within. It must also be made clear that a hybrid actor may well pursue several or even all of these lines of action simultaneously when deploying instrumentalised migration against one or more target countries. The challenge for liberal democracies is to respond robustly without foreclosing the very openness that defines them.