Is the European Migration Crisis Caused by Russian Hybrid Warfare?

Abstract

Recent developments in European security situation, starting with the Russia-Ukraine conflict, followed by the complicated Brexit and political instability in the Middle East and North Africa, have given rise to instability in the European Union. Yet, none of the other factors could be compared with the risks caused by the massive influx of refugees into the EU that challenges both solidarity and responsibility of the member states. In this context, it is extremely important to understand the actual security threats related to the refugee crisis and the root causes of growing refugee flows. This article discusses the roots of large-scale migration flows in the European Union (EU) over the present decade and investigates the potential link between migration flows and modern hybrid warfare, referring to the coordination of various modes of warfare, such as military and non-military means, conventional and non-conventional capabilities, state and non-state actors with an aim to cause instability and disarrangement. It is intriguing to investigate whether the increase in migration flows could be linked to present confrontation in the global arena on the Russia-West axis. Common patterns of migration flows from Syria and Ukraine to the EU are discussed, as well as policy recommendations are given to diminish the negative impact of similar events in the future.

Migration processes and determinants: the case of the Slovak Republic

“…On the other hand, another branch of literature distinguishes between pull and push factors leading to immigration and emigration in a given country (Mohamed & Abdul-Talib, 2020;Unguren et al, 2021;Garelli & Tazzioli, 2021;Piras, 2021;Khalid & Urbański, 2021). The push factors leading to high emigration rates from a country are mainly corruption (Matallah, 2020;Arif, 2022), unemployment (Baumann et al, 2015;Cimpoeru, 2020;Espinosa & Díaz-Emparanza, 2021), unstable political environment (Mourão et al, 2018;Agadjanian & Gorina, 2019;Žižka & Pelloneova, 2019;Grumstrup et al, 2021;Kang, 2021), military instability (Habchak & Dubis, 2019;Veebel, 2020), climate changes (Barassi et al, 2018;Schutte et al, 2021;Reichman, 2022), low wages and income (Fischer & Pfaffermayr, 2018;Delogu et al, 2018), low or negative economic growth (Tolmacheva, 2020;Lupak et al, 2022;Gavurová et al 2017). The pull factors leading to high immigration rates to a country are high wages and income (Laajimi & Le Gallo, 2022), low level of poverty (Hager, 2021;Urbański, 2022), high standard of living (Hager, 2021), high economic growth (Schwabe, 2021), immigration and integration policy (Beverelli, 2022), welfare (Cebolla-Boado & Miyar-Busto, 2020;Ferwerda & Gest, 2021), immigrant networks (Kaplan et al 2016;Kabir, 2021).…”