Russia is currently deploying a strategy of global confrontation that dares not speak its name, transforming the entire European continent into a permanent theater of asymmetrical operations. By applying the multi-domain and multi-field (M2MC) saturation doctrine, Moscow substitutes an invisible war of attrition for frontal military confrontation. This method relies on the methodical and synchronized accumulation of physical, cybernetic, and informational micro-crises, designed to operate below the threshold of triggering NATO's Article 5 and to exhaust the assessment and response capacities of all allied countries.
This asymmetrical offensive targets the vital components of the continent's democracies across the board. The primary targets are European critical infrastructures, defense industrial facilities, and the supply chains delivering military aid to Ukraine, which are regularly subjected to discreet sabotage, electromagnetic jamming, and state-sponsored cyberattacks. The institutional apparatus and the political class are also directly attacked through destabilization campaigns, while media, journalists, and fact-checking cells across Europe are harassed to drown their capacity for discernment. Finally, the ultimate target remains public opinion and civil society, whose identity, economic, and social fractures are systematically weaponized to fracture the social fabric and break continental solidarity.
Faced with this threat, European diplomacies and institutions are making a major doctrinal shift by formally qualifying cognitive interference as a direct attack on national and collective security. The various European ministries of Foreign Affairs and the European External Action Service (EEAS) have clearly distinguished freedom of expression from hybrid warfare: while the free expression of an opinion is a fundamental right, coordinated, inauthentic dissemination guided by a foreign power constitutes a hostile act. The manipulation of information is now treated on a continental scale as a strategic weapon aimed at hindering the sovereignty of states and paralyzing the bandwidth of their internal security services.
To counter this logic of saturation without infringing on civil liberties, the European response is built around transparency, societal resilience, and judicialization. Thanks to the pooling of intelligence and the cooperation of specialized national agencies, defensive action favors the public and technical attribution of attacks to their sponsors to defuse toxic narratives before their proliferation. Combined with criminal prosecutions, coordinated diplomatic expulsions, and reinforced inter-allied solidarity, this unified approach establishes the protection of the informational and civic space as an unshakable pillar of Europe's defense against hybrid operations.
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