Do we remember the panic last fall over the wave of “certainly probably Russian” drones flying over Denmark?

Alas! On June 25, the Danish police announced that they had been unable to prove the very presence of drones over Copenhagen Airport (DR.dk, June 25)! The news went by much more quietly than the “ghost drone” epidemic—one wonders why.

It’s somewhat reminiscent of the story here of the police helicopter mistaken for a Russian drone by  by Belgian Defense Minister Théo Francken...

Clearly, “Russia’s hybrid attacks” are having a hard time living up to their hype. As early as March, Finnish intelligence services acknowledged that Russia was most likely not behind the underwater cable breaks in the Baltic Sea, and, worse still, “that damage to underwater infrastructure in the Baltic Sea was not uncommon and that the number of such incidents in recent years had not been unusual,” end of quote. (TVP World, March 12)

Information that was just as discreetly swept under the rug by our media.

In short, when you look a little too closely, “Putin’s hybrid attacks” seem to take on the same substance as UFOs and ectoplasm. Fortunately, the range of possibilities is very broad, and one story replaces another.

For example, on the Belgian public radio station La Première, Major General Frédéric Linotte implied that the massive wildfires that ravaged France this summer might very well be part of Russia’s hybrid threats! “There are plenty of ways to view hybridity,” as he himself put it. How convenient. (RTBF, August 11)