In recent years, and especially since Russia's 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Europe has seen a dramatic rise in events labeled as hybrid attacks, such as undersea cable cutting, cyberattacks, drones grounding flights, and attacks on infrastructure.

Rusinaitė, who is director of research and analysis at the Helsinki-based center, gave an in-depth interview to the Baltic Sentinel website about hybrid threats, what countries should do to defend themselves and why "classic prevention" often fails.

She said that in the past – in the "good old" era of nuclear deterrence – it was assumed "if there was no war, deterrence was working." But "with hybrid threats, things are much murkier. Preventative deterrence often isn't possible."

"Hybrid tactics are "death by a thousand cuts": small actions that add up to a bigger cumulative effect. You can't prevent many of those actions in advance —and it would be outrageous to threaten nuclear use over some of them," she said.

"So, instead of assuming you can prevent everything, the goal is to shrink the adversary's maneuver space: increase your resilience so systems can withstand and recover quickly, and threaten punishment so the costs of certain actions are clearly higher than the benefits. Greater resilience plus credible punishment should, in theory, narrow the space in which an adversary can operate."

Read the full interview here.

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