There has been a silent frontline since the outbreak of Russia's war on Ukraine in February 2022, one that is far from the dead in battle, the artillery fire, and the muddy trenches. Russia's hybrid war against Ukraine and its allies – through cyberattacks, misinformation, and the infiltration of agents responsible for destabilization operations – is another side of Moscow's war against Kyiv; a war of attrition.

This type of Russian action, which already existed before February 2022, has taken a more unbridled and unabashed turn against NATO member countries, Kyiv's supporters, according to those involved in the French defense apparatus. "It's hard on the services and the armed forces because it's not always easy to find a response," said a source close to the matter.

Minister of the Armed Forces Sébastien Lecornu, for example, recently reported "around a hundred" aggressive interactions, 70 of which concerned Europe. For France, he clarified on February 22, on the French radio network RTL, "You have attempts by the Russians to take control of a certain number of our patrols. A month ago, a Russian air traffic control system threatened to shoot down French aircraft in the Black Sea even though we were in an internationally free zone which we were patrolling."

This tension is most evident in the cyberspace. Although there has been no major escalation in Moscow's attacks since the start of the war, "Ukraine has become a digital firing range," said Guillaume Poupard, head of the French Information Systems Security Agency (ANSSI), in an interview published in December 2023 in the new journal Intelligence and Cyber French Studies. Yet these attacks, which began with the annexation of Crimea in 2014, constitute a real "long-term nuisance," he said.

In support of Ukraine, its allies have divided up the "axes of effort" to monitor attempts to penetrate Kyiv's digital networks, according to a French security source. But Moscow has turned up the pressure in response.

Like other countries, France is now facing a veritable "cyber guerrilla war," as Cléo Collomb, senior lecturer at Paris-Saclay University, and Nicolas Hernandez, president of Aleph Networks, a company specializing in open-source intelligence, said in the Intelligence and Cyber French Studies journal. According to them, the number of cyber incidents worldwide linked to the war in Ukraine, fewer than 25 per month between January and June 2022, climbed to 47 in July 2022, before approaching 200 from February 2023.

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