FOREIGN INTERFERENCEKinetic Operations Bring Authoritarian Violence to Democratic Streets
Foreign interference in democracies has a multifaceted toolkit. In addition to information manipulation, the tactical tools authoritarian actors use to undermine democracy include cyber operations, economic coercion, malign finance, and civil society subversion.
Foreign interference, or what the EU now calls FIMI (foreign information manipulation and interference), has a multifaceted toolkit. In addition to information manipulation, the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) has identified cyber operations, economic coercion, malign finance, and civil society subversion as tactical tools authoritarian actors use to undermine democracy. Since 2018, ASD’s Authoritarian Interference Tracker (AIT) has documented Russia’s and the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) use of these tools in more than 40 countries across the transatlantic community. Yet FIMI operations have evolved since ASD first developed its methodology, and recent trends dictate that the AIT must evolve to include a new tool: kinetic operations.
Europe in particular has seen a growing number of cases involving state-directed orchestrated violence and physical disruptions—acts of sabotage and assassination attempts, among others—to intimidate individuals and destabilize democracies. To capture this reality, the AIT’s methodology has been expanded to include kinetic operations, defined as “the deliberate use of—or credible threat to use—physical violence and/or physically disruptive actions to undermine security, damage confidence in democratic governance, and/or destabilize democratic society”.
This growing use of kinetic operations challenges existing security protocols and raises urgent questions about how democracies should respond. Countering these tactics requires more intelligence-sharing among European democracies, stronger legal frameworks, and targeted sanctions to deter perpetrators while protecting democratic institutions.
Kinetic Operations in Practice
Kinetic operations represent a dangerous escalation in the playbook of authoritarian state-sponsored interference in democracies. A recent Wall Street Journal report on Russia’s new spy unit, the Department of Special Tasks (SSD), within the country’s military intelligence underscores this shift. In the recent past, Moscow’s kinetic operations mainly targeted political opponents and former intelligence operatives, but also fomented instability in neighboring countries like Ukraine and Moldova. However, since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia has broadened its scope to go after the supporters of Ukrainian resistance across Europe. The attempted assassination of Rheinmetall’s CEO in Germany in July 2024 illustrates this new phase of Russian aggression. That operation, aimed at a figure central to Europe’s defense industry, clearly demonstrates Russia’s expansion of what it views as acceptable targets of state violence.
