Last week the students from AUK’s Global Management program participated in a keynote discussion with Ambassador Shota Gvineria, former Deputy Secretary at the National Security Council of Georgia on the topic “The Caucasus and the Black Sea in Russia’s Strategy”. Shota Gvineria is a lecturer in Defence and Cyber Studies at the Baltic Defence College and a non-resident fellow at Economic Policy Research Center. He has over 18 years of progressive working experience in the government sector, mainly in foreign relations and security policy areas.
Describing the pattern of how Russia's hybrid warfare always worked, Mr. Gvineria mentioned two things – the blackmailing pattern and the Kill Chain. Russians were able to convince everybody that they were stronger than they really were by using blackmailing and escalatory potential.
The Kill Chain that they have developed is the following: сreate the problem, invite everybody around the table to discuss the problem which you just created, escalate to the maximum and get everybody scared to death over the Third World War or whatever, when everybody's scared, sufficiently just push some more and extract concessions and some actions from the other side of the table, because responsible players are sitting on the other side and they do not want escalation and an armed conflict with nuclear power, secure these gains, repeat it again in different geographies, at a different point in time.
“Unfortunately, this Kill Chain has worked every time, since at least in Georgia in 2006, 2008 up until February 2022. So what Ukraine actually did – it broke this Kill Chain. The ambitious objectives that were set for russian strategy in Ukraine were never supported by sufficient resources and this paper tiger has actually collapsed as it was supposed to be at the moment when it met sufficient resistance from the Ukrainian side”, - stressed Shota Gvineria.
We are highly thankful to Mr. Gvineria for his profound presentation and engaging discussion with AUK students, as well as to Mark Voyger, Program Director for the MSc in Global Management at AUK for organizing this meeting.
Dnipro
