Not all European Union countries are prepared to counter Russia’s hybrid threats, but proximity has increased awareness and readiness in its nearest neighbours.
Due to their location and history of occupation by their increasingly belligerent neighbor, the Baltic states are perhaps the most aware of the danger of hybrid attacks and, after Finland, the best-prepared to face Russia.
The threats faced by Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania include sabotage of their defense capacity and connectivity, such as repeated damage to undersea cables, all types of cyberthreats and disinformation, and the weaponization of migration by Belarus, Russia’s proxy state.
As Keir Giles, from Chatham House, points out, the pattern of Russia’s activities in Europe is “not only actual sabotage but also reconnaissance, probing, and testing in the physical and digital domains, with a focus on communications, logistics, and emergency preparedness.”
Russia tests the scope of its potential impact on Western-aligned countries, the reactions of the authorities and institutions, and the resilience of their societies, which it pollutes daily with hefty helpings of disinformation.
The experience of the Baltic states shows that, while awareness does not necessarily directly translate into readiness to counter any threat, it does contribute to the speed of political decisions to boost resilience.
In Latvia, the newly founded Crisis Management Center will keep track of all threats to the civilian population and coordinate the government response to national level crises, including hybrid attacks. While the Center is yet to start its work, its establishment is a big step forward and follows the example of neighboring Lithuania, which launched its own national center in 2023.
While most experts agree the Baltics are well ahead of many Western European countries in hybrid threat monitoring and prevention, they have lagged behind events when it comes to working together. The ability to discern the patterns of hybrid warfare could be improved by joint monitoring, leading to something like a virtual switchboard for information on hybrid threats in the region.
Fragmented monitoring and decision-making also affects action at the EU level, where existing coordination mechanisms, such as Integrated Political Crisis Response and the Hybrid Fusion Cell at the European External Action Service, are insufficient for the scale of the hybrid attacks.
Even harder than establishing a rapid-response monitoring and decision-making body is ensuring that coordination is truly effective. The public administrations of the Baltic states, despite being innovative in many ways, still practice top-down approaches to crisis management and civilian protection, at a time when Finland and Ukraine demonstrate that bottom-up citizen mobilization (for example, through local volunteer networks) is a better approach.
While leading a recent simulation exercise for municipal crisis managers and civil society in Latvia, I witnessed a heated exchange between an official responsible for civilian protection and a local community volunteer.
It boiled down to municipal authorities seeing crisis response in terms of coordination with emergency services, while local community activists wanted a clearer role and accessible channels for bottom-up communication. This is not much to ask, and such mechanisms should be established quickly if a “whole of society approach” is to be more than just a slogan.
Trust is another key factor in resilience to hybrid threats. In the Baltics, as elsewhere in Europe, Russian disinformation seeks to undermine the population’s trust in democratically elected governments.
Latvia faces an additional challenge, as local politicians in the region of Latgale, close to the Belarusian and Russian border, sometimes lean towards pro-Russian narratives in public communications. This, in turn, leads to a lack of trust in either local or national authorities – depending on which is regarded as the opinion leader among local people.
At another crisis simulation, in Daugavpils, Latgale, an NGO leader told me: “Sharing information in a crisis is a matter of trust. We would not share it with our city’s authorities.”
Vulnerabilities such as this are being tackled by Latvian legislators, who have introduced a requirement that, from summer 2025, heads of municipalities must have security clearance. The measure is intended as a firewall against Russia-leaning mayors.
Acting together and in close cooperation with the EU, the Baltic states have demonstrated remarkable capacity for strategic moves to reduce their vulnerability to Russian threats. One high profile example was the well-prepared and beautifully executed disconnection from the old BRELL power grid, cutting reliance on Russian electricity.
Even before the current joint efforts of Baltic and Nordic NATO members to guard critical infrastructure in the Baltic Sea, experts argued that closer cooperation was needed to guard against undersea hybrid threats. Given the uncertainty about NATO under the new US administration, an effective response in the future is unlikely without greater cooperation and investment from the EU.
The need for united European response to counter hybrid threats was recognized in the Niinisto Report for the European Commission, which argued that at least 20% of the EU’s budget should contribute to the bloc’s security and crisis preparedness.
But the new approach has been slow in coming due to the uneven growth of political awareness across Europe. Knowledge of the threats is finally there — not just in the Baltic and Nordic countries, but also in Poland and Germany.
However, knowing about the problem is one thing, and acting is another, as many decision-makers from the region admit.
The Baltic states can serve as an example in the changing security landscape, taking bold steps to secure energy infrastructure and improve cyber security, as well as measures to secure democratic institutions from Russia’s proxies.
Resilience to hybrid threats in Europe’s security architecture needs to be achieved by joint effort, and the Baltic states can continue showing the way.
By Marija Golubeva. Marija Golubeva is a Distinguished Fellow with the Democratic Resilience Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA.) She was a Member of the Latvian Parliament (2018-2022) and was Minister of the Interior from 2021-2022. A public policy expert, she has worked for ICF, a consultancy company in Brussels, and as an independent consultant for European institutions in the Western Balkans and Central Asia. Article and pictures first time published on CEPA web page. Prepared for publication by volunteers from the Res Publica - The Center for Civil Resistance.
