Russia, Hybrid Threats and Recruitment in Global Gaming Ecosystems
This project examines Russia-linked recruitment to fight and mobilisation for sabotage and disruption via gaming and gaming-adjacent spaces, producing actionable findings and an analytic toolkit.
Introduction
Gaming and gaming-adjacent online spaces are part of the hybrid threat frontier, as they can provide low-visibility environments where relationships form quickly and users move easily between platforms. This project examines how Russia-linked actors may exploit these ecosystems to recruit foreign nationals to fight or to mobilise them for hostile state activity such as sabotage and other disruptive proxy actions, harassment campaigns and supporting roles such as coordination or target identification.
Because these incidents can appear fragmented and are often treated as isolated 'one-offs', it can be difficult to anticipate risk or build proportionate resilience in the spaces most likely to be targeted.Â
This year-long project will identify repeatable enabling conditions and escalation patterns across gaming-adjacent 'contact zones', while staying within clear evidential boundaries.
The project is led by RUSI’s Terrorism and Conflict team, with support from Associate Fellows and engagement with the Extremism and Gaming Research Network (EGRN).
Project sponsor
This project is supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) [grant number 4774].
Project team
Dr Jessica White
Director of Terrorism and Conflict Studies
Terrorism and Conflict
Claudia Wallner
Research Fellow
Dr Antonio Giustozzi
Senior Research Fellow
Terrorism and Conflict
Petra Regeni
Research Analyst and Project Officer
RUSI Europe
Dr Suraj Lakhani
RUSI Associate Fellow, Terrorism and Conflict
Galen Lamphere-Englund
RUSI Associate Fellow, Terrorism and Conflict
Aims and objectives
The project aims to strengthen understanding of Russia-linked recruitment and mobilisation in gaming and gaming-adjacent ecosystems and translate that evidence into practical outputs for researchers and relevant practitioners. It brings together three lines of inquiry that are rarely integrated: (1) the social dynamics of gaming communities (including group norms and identity dynamics), (2) platform and governance conditions that shape what behaviours are enabled or constrained, and (3) the strategic logic of hybrid threats aiming to cause disruption without clear attribution.
The project has two main objectives:
- To analyse how community norms, identity dynamics, platform features and governance approaches in gaming (-adjacent) spaces can increase or reduce susceptibility to manipulation, recruitment and mobilisation.
 - To develop and test a lightweight, reproducible analytic approach – combining targeted digital ethnography, structured comparative case briefs and expert validation – that can be adapted to other contexts where direct observation of recruitment is rare.Â
Outputs will be validated through an expert workshop and a red-teaming exercise and published through RUSI. Ultimately, the project aims to support the further development of the evidence base as well as more informed, proportionate prevention and upstream resilience-building efforts without securitising gaming communities.