Fake Bomb Threats: Hybrid War, or the Art of Proving Nothing

According to France 24, the proliferation of false bomb alerts has sown confusion across Europe and disrupted flights. The broadcaster sees possible episodes of "hybrid war" waged by certain states, Russia at the top of the list, but notes that nothing allows Moscow to be formally accused. Another detail: a claim signed by the "fighters of the male state", a masculinist fringe group that seems linked to an obscure far-right Russian network. That is what we know. It is not much.

What we don't know: who launched these alerts, how many perpetrators there were, with what means, and whether the claim is sincere or a smokescreen. The dispatch does not say. Neither do we.

Then there is the awkward question, the oldest in journalism: who benefits from the crime? Let's be careful. A false alert costs the sender almost nothing and the target a great deal: delayed flights, security services mobilised, jittery public opinion. The cost-benefit ratio is unbeatable. If a state is behind it, it is low-cost harassment. But that remains a hypothesis, not a fact.

Our reading, then. The great powers squabble over markets, resources and spheres of influence. Sanctions, gas pipelines, arms contracts and military alliances are, as Lenin put it, the political shell of these economic rivalries (this is our analytical framework, not proof). Within that frame, disrupting European skies is one more skirmish in a competition where each side seeks to wear the other down without firing a shot.

But the framework has a flip side. A climate of diffuse threat, attributed in advance to the designated enemy, also serves those who sell the response. The vaguer the fear, the easier it is to justify the security budget. The makers of scanners, surveillance systems and defence equipment do not need to have organised anything to cash in. We accuse no one: we ask who is cashing in, and the answer is rarely the passengers.

The detour through a far-right masculinist fringe group should encourage caution. An obscure network, a strange claim: this could be a front, opportunism, or a simple distraction. Pinning the whole thing on Moscow without evidence is geopolitics by guesswork. Ruling it out on principle is naivety. The state, here as elsewhere, will only say what serves its interests, and intelligence services have never been organs of transparency.

Until verifiable facts emerge, one simple demand: give us the facts before the doctrine. Air transport workers are already bearing the brunt of the delays and the pressure. It is they, and the travellers, who pay the bill for this "hybrid war", whoever is behind it.