EU must focus on combating hybrid threats - experts

RIGA - The European Union (EU) needs to focus on combating hybrid threats of various kinds, experts said on Thursday at a conference called The Future of the European Union and Latvia's Interests.

Maris Cepuritis, Director of the Center for Eastern European Policy Studies and lecturer at Riga Stradins University, pointed out at the conference that after Donald Trump's victory in the US presidential elections, in the next four years, the predictability of US decisions and their underlying logic will be much more challenging.

He explained that the first Trump presidency involved a "highly personalized decision-making system" where "sometimes a psychologist rather than a political scientist can give a better explanation of one or another choice or policy decision".

Cepuritis said that Trump becoming President of the United States was like rain or snow. "It is a burden, it requires some adjustment, but a number of movements that have taken place in the area of European security, also from Latvia's point of view, started earlier," Cepuritis said.

He cited the key moments in 2014 - the annexation of Crimea, the Maidan events in Kyiv, the subsequent Russian-backed invasion of the Donbas, which brought hybrid threat issues to the European agenda. And 2022, with Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, brought the possibility of conventional war into European security calculations.

Cepuritis also pointed out that the hybrid threat now matters to the EU and will have to be addressed. At the same time, he pointed out that since 2014 there have been a number of movements in the European Union, including the establishment of the East StratCom Task Force under the Latvian Presidency, which is aimed at helping to counter Russian disinformation.

Marija Golubeva, former Minister of the Interior and Chair of the Board of the Baltic Initiative for EU Reform think tank, added that with Trump becoming US President, Europe needs to focus in particular on much faster and more consolidated support to Ukraine, especially with arms. The EU also needs to think about its own arms production.

She pointed out that EU countries have so far been more like competitors on the market when it comes to military production. Golubeva said that the EU has common interests and these common economic interests should be subordinated to the common interests in arms production. "It would be high time to do this now, otherwise it will certainly be too late," Golubeva said.

The expert also stressed the need to rethink how the EU will deal with the hybrid threat. She pointed out that the EU is currently not ready to do so, as it does not have a governance structure to track hybrid threats, nor the resources to allocate on a large scale to fight hybrid threats.

Golubeva drew attention to the need to set up a body within the EU to look at hybrid threats, to create a common database in cooperation with NATO. She pointed out that currently not all EU Member States are members of NATO Centers of Excellence and not all of them receive information on hybrid threats.

"If we want to strengthen our defense capabilities, the democratic capabilities of our societies to defend against various authoritarian threats, which are very real in today's world, then we should do it now and we, the EU, should do it together," Golubeva added.