Purpose

The Hybrid War Tracker (HWT) captures weak, under-threshold signals of Russian hybrid activity and preserves them in structured form for longitudinal OSINT analysis.

Hybrid operations appear fragmented when viewed incident-by-incident. Over time, recurring methods—border pressure, fifth-column activity, and legal-political manipulation—form observable patterns.

Russia's Blueprint blends sabotage, espionage, coercive pressure, and information campaigns. These operations tend to remain deniable, distributed, and below the threshold of conventional conflict, including activity that can accumulate into Article 4/5 relevance. Institutions often respond to isolated incidents and lose continuity; HWT is built to retain it.

By combining under-threshold signals with a century of Russian Blueprint knowledge, HWT links events across domains and time, enabling correlation, early warning, and risk identification for analysts, journalists, and policy institutions.

Why call it a “hybrid” war?

“Hybrid war” is an imperfect label. It’s often used as a catch-all that obscures agency and intent—sometimes as a polite euphemism for coercion, sabotage, and subversion. We agree with much of that criticism.

We keep the term for one pragmatic reason: it is the language most people search for. The name persists; the work is what matters.

In substance, HWT tracks undeclared, unconventional warfare conducted below the threshold of open armed conflict—often below Article 5—but warfare nonetheless: synchronized pressure across information, legal, economic, cyber, and grey-zone domains designed to weaken institutions without triggering a clean casus belli.

In plainer terms: coercion short of invasion. HWT exists to preserve these signals in structured form so patterns become visible over time.

What We Track

HWT tracks hostile activity across domains used for disruption, coercion, and denial. We track:

  • Electronic Warfare: GNSS jamming/spoofing, RF interference.
  • Undersea, Maritime & Seabed: cable/pipeline anomalies, port/AIS irregularities, naval shadowing.
  • Aviation & Airspace: violations, unmanned incursions, ISR pressure flights.
  • Cyber Operations: infrastructure disruption, probing, coordinated intrusions.
  • Information & Cognitive Ops: disinformation clusters, synchronized narratives, intimidation signaling.
  • Border Pressure & Gray-Zone Coercion: weaponized migration, sabotage, proxy actions near borders.
  • Economic, Energy & Sanctions Pressure: sanctions evasion, illicit procurement, supply leverage, commodity coercion.
  • Espionage, Active Measures & Covert Influence: undeclared agents, expulsions, political subversion, funding channels.
  • Proxies, Front Organizations & Hybrid Enablers: state-linked NGOs/media shells, diaspora manipulation, auxiliary networks.

How It Works

  • 1

    Collection

    Raw signals from media, social platforms, and primary trackers (maritime/aviation), plus direct submissions.



  • 2

    Enrichment

    Entity, location, and timeline extraction; evidence capture and normalization.



  • 3

    Review

    Analyst validation to enforce schema, confidence scoring, and source quality.



  • 4

    Synthesis

    Weekly briefs surface clusters, trends, anomalies, and gaps.

Governance & Principles

  • OSINT-only: No classified sources; transparent provenance.
  • Schema-first: Enforced fields for time, location, category, confidence, and evidence.
  • Human-in-the-loop: Analyst review and approval before publication.
  • Durability: Versioning and audit logs resist narrative drift over time.

Contribute

HWT is built by OSINT practitioners, analysts, and technically literate observers. Unsourced claims, opinion threads, and commentary-only links are rejected.

You can submit signals directly —or clip sources in one click using the Chrome extension and send them straight to HWT .

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