Marco Rota – Strategic Advisor and Geopolitical Analyst: Geopolitics, Country Risk, Narrative Warfare; Associate Researcher: Gino Germani Institute for Social Sciences and Strategic Studies; Former Consultant: Senate of the Republic of Italy; Advisor: Pacifici & Associates, Israel; Inspire America Foundation, United States of America

Series: Russian Political, Economic, and Security Issues; American Political, Economic and Security Issues
BISAC: POL062000
DOI: https://doi.org/10.52305/HVUL2471

“Equipped with strong analytical skills and a clear vision, Marco Rota presents a sound and meticulous study on the challenges that disinformation and hybrid threats pose to the stability and security of the West, undermining freedom and eroding the founding principles of the rule of law and human rights. Rota’s contribution should lead to a strengthening of Transatlantic cohesion at all levels through the adoption of solid measures designed to ensure the enforcement of the people’s right to know in the face of ever mounting Orwellian manipulations orchestrated by autocracies and dictatorships exploiting new technologies.” – Giulio Maria Terzi di Sant’Agata is member of the Italian Senate, the current President of the Permanent Senate Commission of EU Affairs and the President of the India-Italy Parliamentary Friendship group. He previously served as Italy’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Ambassador to the United States

“Marco Rota’s well-organized book, his latest, focusing on Russia’s all-pervasive interference in Europe’s internal affairs, highlights a broad range of “special operations” including sabotage, murders, financial, political and cultural establishment disruptions. Not to mention the hybrid hi-tech war, and the widespread propaganda infiltrating the enemy camp or manipulating electoral campaigns in the West. Rota is an outstanding Italian strategic advisor and scenario planner, and his findings are consistent with a lot of murky events in our current climate. And if revealing, publishing and making sense of such a mess is what deciphering analysis is supposed to do, then this book sounds a fierce warning.” – Pialuisa Bianco is a publisher and essayist. Since 2008, she has also advised Italy’s Minister for Foreign Affairs and directed the Strategic Forum at the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs

This book is an introduction to the events in Russia after the fall of the Berlin Wall up to the large-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022. Between the lines you will notice that the Russian intelligence apparatuses, most often and for ease, are called “Russian intelligence services,” but this is not the exact diction. Without wishing to be overly punctilious, a clarification is in order. According to the British school, the Russians speak of “special services” to refer to their community of spy agencies; an all-encompassing expression of acronyms, functions and jurisdictions. Western intelligence predominantly hunts for objective facts and information, to monitor threats and prevent consequences; Russian espionage, on the other hand, hunts for narratives; it seeks out and monitors people’s psychological and mental aspects, moods, social issues, sentiment.

As experts in London have made very clear, the special services of the Russian Federation sift through information, but this function is ancillary to their primary responsibility, which is political warfare, involving the use of data, manipulation, and influence to shape the perceptions and choices of adversaries.

This short essay shows how Russia over the past three decades has managed to remain at the center of Western interests, even after losing the Cold War; just think of the depth and ubiquity of Russian espionage in many countries around the world. In the essay, Xi Jinping’s China recurs with great frequency: it is shaping the new Cold War together with the United States as it deploys information warfare with a very powerful narrative, only hinted at here but directly connected to Putin’s foreign policy.

One cannot understand Russia apart from the age-old fear of encirclement that grips it, and that need to project its power from within to without in a turbulent form. A kind of geopolitical claustrophobia, which has been shaped for centuries up to the current war in Ukraine and the many crises that are repeated and again announced, from Europe to the Middle East to Taiwan.

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