Russia Seizes French Firms' Assets Amid Rising Hybrid Threats in Europe
Russia Is Fighting a War Europe Pretends Not to See
By seizing French assets and escalating hybrid attacks while warning against troops in Ukraine, Moscow practices virtù, and Europe answers with the middle course that loses wars before they start.
Russia has just given us a clean lesson in how a hard state behaves when it feels encircled. On one side, the Russian president signs a decree pulling the Russian operations of French firms into a new entity run by a general of the Ministry of Interior. On the other, his foreign minister repeats that sending European troops to Ukraine would be treated as a declaration of war, while the president insists Russia does not plan to attack Europe. At the same time, the French president speaks openly of Russian hybrid attacks on France and across Europe. Here is the effectual truth: everyone is already fighting; only some still pretend they are not at war.
When I wrote in *The Prince*, as translated by W. K. Marriott, that a ruler must learn to be both fox and lion, I had exactly this double movement in mind. The decree on the French firms is lion: a visible use of state force to punish and to terrify investors from hostile countries. The hybrid operations and the talk of not planning to attack Europe are fox: snares in opinion, designed to confuse publics and split allies, mixing plausible reassurance with clear menace. The rule has not changed in five centuries: those who rely only on the lion “do not understand what they are about”; those who master both tend to keep their state.
The choice of a Ministry of Interior general to manage these seized assets is revealing. To hand economic spoils to a man of internal force is to weld together police power and property. This consolidates loyalty at the center and creates a new patronage channel, all under the cover of legal forms. In *The Prince* I compared fortune to a flooding river, and said the wise build dykes in fair weather; here the Russian leadership is building its dykes out of confiscated foreign wealth, channeled through coercive organs. The message to domestic elites is simple: your fortunes depend on the regime; the message to foreign ones is clearer still: your factories are hostages.
Across the river, Europe answers in the language of procedures. The French president speaks of intensified hybrid threats, orders a plan to protect critical infrastructure and sensitive defence sites, and calls for a G7 meeting on energy and gas stocks. This is not nothing; prudence does require shoring up dykes once you finally admit the river is rising. Yet I hear more clerk than captain. Plans, meetings, vigilance — these are good servants but bad masters. As I argued in the *Discourses on Livy*, in Ninian Hill Thomson’s translation, good laws without good arms do not suffice, because men obey paper only when they fear the steel behind it.
You also see the managed conflict I praised in Rome, but turned inside out. In that republic, tumults between the people and the great produced tribunates and laws that strengthened liberty. Here the conflict is between Moscow and Europe, yet it runs through European politics: hybrid attacks aim to inflame parties, discredit leaders, and fracture coalitions, so that foreign pressure becomes internal discord. This is still managed conflict, but managed by an external hand for hostile ends. The free states of Europe face a choice: either they give this conflict institutional outlets they control — clear red lines, joint sanctions, common defence measures — or they will suffer it as unregulated turmoil.
What strikes me most is the middle course. Moscow, whatever one thinks of its justice, acts as if survival is at stake and so uses all instruments short of open war: asset seizures, hybrid operations, calibrated threats. Europe, by contrast, half accepts the war and half denies it. Leaders speak of an intensified Russian hybrid threat, yet remain vague about the arms — military, economic, informational — that will actually defend their order. In my time I saw that this middle course buys the costs of severity and the dangers of indulgence together: you provoke your adversary without breaking his will, and you alarm your people without preparing them.
If I were advising these free governments as I once advised my Florentines, I would not tell them to imitate every stroke of the Russian hand; republics rightly reject many princely arts. I would tell them to imitate the seriousness. Call things by their proper names: seizing the assets of your firms and attacking your infrastructure is not commerce, it is combat. Then align your laws, alliances, and force with that truth, so that when you issue warnings they are believed, and when you suffer blows they are answered from strength, not from indignation alone. In politics as in war, the side that admits the conflict first has already won half of it.
From the works cited
- The Prince — The fox and the lion: force and fraud are both necessary and neither is sufficient; the half-beast is part of the job description.
- The Prince — Virtù versus fortuna — the raging-river figure: preparation in fair weather is the whole difference between the drowned and the dry.
- Discourses on Livy — Managed conflict between the great and the people is the source of a free state's vigor — Rome's tumults produced its liberty. Never ask how to abolish conflict; ask whether its outlets are institutional or violent.