Hybrid warfare is also about frying us with alarmist headlines.

Putin's Russia has done enough to deserve its international discredit, but I often find that the need to confront its presidential autocrat lowers journalistic standards when it comes to profiling the country. For example, I thought it was a mistake for the EU to censor the news. Russia Today. Not because I consider it a minimally reliable source of news, but because there are media outlets that equally poison other, more democratically healthy, or not, countries, and no one would consider banning them. The speed with which it was expelled from Eurovision or from sports competitions, compared to Israel, is another example of this unequal treatment.

I was thinking about this while reading the front page headline this Sunday in The Country"Russia seeks to destabilize Europe with its 'hybrid war.'" I have no doubt that's true, because Putin is a strategist who has the international counter in mind and loves to move bishops three moves in advance. But, at the same time, I detect a constant trickle of these pieces, which invariably have their source in some NATO or EU report and which speak more of ethereal threats than concrete ones. And I wonder if Putin's objective isn't to provoke these destabilizations: in the end, the great blackout wasn't a boycott; it was done by us alone, or by the usual suspects. Rather, it seems he's seeking to establish a permanent climate of fear, which already favors him because it strengthens him as a world leader. And it also suits the EU, or NATO, because it lubricates the current slogan of multiplying military spending. A clamor, by the way, that has taken a backseat now that Netanyahu has displaced Putin, albeit momentarily, as public enemy number one in the global news scene. He sees that these two events are unrelated.