The narrative clearly serves a variety of interests. For starters, it helps governments maintain support for an increasingly unpopular war in Ukraine and for a continental rearmament campaign that will require painful cuts to spending on other sectors. As a report by the Latvian Institute of International Affairs put it, the “nebulous tagline” of hybrid warfare would appear to be driven “by the need to goose flagging defense budgets and waning NATO cohesion.” It has worked: the drone panic has led to increased counter-drone spending at both the EU and NATO levels. Meanwhile, intelligence services have invoked the threat of sabotage to gain broader powers.

The specter of “Russian interference” also offers a broader authoritarian dividend, justifying everything from online censorship to the repression of dissent to election management — most egregiously in Romania, where an entire election was annulled because of an alleged Russian disinformation campaign for which no evidence of Russian involvement was ever provided. More recently, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham, amid a push for greater EU ties, said it was “clear” that Russia interfered in the Brexit referendum, without providing any evidence, even though several investigations have found little or no evidence to support this claim.