Samenvatting

In the tenth issue of last year’s Militaire Spectator, Colonel Han Bouwmeester elaborated
on the use of maskirovka and reflexive control prior to and during the planned Russian
annexation of Crimea.1 Subsequently, in the twelfth issue, Ruben Tavenier addressed the
numerous concepts that have been used interchangeably to explain Russian contemporary
warfare, which all significantly deviate from one another and some of which are even foreign
to the Russian military lexicon.2 This article about the war in Donbas appears as a sequence
in two successive issues and aims to follow up on both; first, by outlining the historical
development and explaining the various interpretations and misuse of the concept of
hybrid warfare and second, by determining to what extent and according to which definition
the war in Eastern Ukraine can actually be described as a hybrid war. Agreement on a
generally accepted unambiguous definition of what is called hybrid warfare is a necessary
precondition for both the academic and military discourse in order to be able to properly
engage in a discussion on the subject.