"There are many international actors who are interested in weakening Europe, which is the last bastion of liberal democracy". This warning from the former Italian Minister of Defence between 2014 and 2017, Roberta Pinotti, hovered over the room at the Sant Pau Modernista Precinct where 200 people invited by ARA attended the Enfoquem conference to analyse the state of European security. The diagnosis that Pinotti drew is very clear: Europe is a kind of garden in a wild world that has suddenly been left without its guardian and now has to run to protect itself. It must wake up. The most explicit threat is the Russian one, but there are many more.

The Cold War is a distant memory and a ghost is once again haunting Europe. At least, Western Europe. That of a hot war or, at the very least, a hybrid one, which manifests itself in many ways: sabotage, drones, cyberattacks, the use of immigration as a tool of destabilization... "We have entered a new era of deterrence," predicts security and defense expert Juraj Majcin. Eighty-one years after the defeat of Nazism, the outbreak of a widespread conflict, extending beyond what is now being fought in Ukraine following the invasion by Vladimir Putin's Russia, no longer seems an improbable scenario, and this will be, precisely, one of the topics of the new edition of Enfoquem, next Monday.

Last August, a drone loaded with explosives was located at Leipzig airport, near a Ukrainian cargo plane. The German government attributed the attempted attack to Russia, which denies responsibility. Leipzig is a major European logistics hub. The episode shows that Kyiv's ability to sustain the war also depends on factories, warehouses, and transport networks located in Europe that allow weaponry and equipment to reach Ukraine.

Russia, hybrid warfare, Iran, artificial intelligence. The head of MI5, the British domestic intelligence service, Ken McCallum, warned this Tuesday of the rise of increasingly growing threats against the United Kingdom, and against the West in general. And he did so by emphasizing Moscow and Tehran as the main agents responsible for destabilization operations.

Eitvydas Bajarūnas is a renowned Lithuanian diplomat and expert in foreign policy and international security. He has been ambassador to Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Russia, where he held the highest position in Lithuania's diplomatic mission in Moscow until three months after Vladimir Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. We speak with him in a context of growing threat due to Russia's hybrid war against Europe.

NATO is prepared to respond to Russia's hybrid attacks. This was defended by the organization's secretary general, Mark Rutte, who clarified that these "response options" will not always be "public" nor will they be "symmetrical or proportional". "It will not always be 'an eye for an eye', but we have the response options we need", asserted the leader of the military alliance in a press conference after meeting with the Prime Minister of Lithuania, Mindaugas Sinkevicius, in Brussels.

The European Union's defense ministers met this Monday with a question on the table: how can a coordinated response be provided to the hybrid warfare that Russia is posing as part of its strategy to prevent European partners from continuing to assist Ukraine in its war effort? The meeting coincided, by the way, with a strong Russian attack on the center of Kyiv that had nothing hybrid about it, but rather showed the horror of war in all its dimensions: bombed buildings, civilian victims and, what is worse, the feeling that this is just the beginning.

Russia's latest hybrid attacks have made it clear that Europe lacks a clear collective response to threats that do not reach the threshold of armed aggression. Faced with requests from various European capitals to take action (and announcements of some national plans to protect against Moscow's attacks), Brussels is looking for mechanisms to provide a joint response to these types of episodes.

"It is not only nonsense, but also an example of provocation." Vladimir Putin has grown tired of denying his responsibility for the acts of sabotage that European authorities attribute to Moscow and of dismissing Western intelligence reports that warn that Russia is preparing to attack NATO. On the contrary, in the Russian capital they claim to feel threatened by the growing militarization of Europe and fear that the allies will use Ukraine to try to inflict a strategic defeat on them. In fact, they are convinced that the Atlantic Alliance is already in conflict with Russia and that, therefore, European countries are legitimate targets, if not for a conventional war, then for a hybrid war.

Russia is increasing pressure on Eastern European countries with a mix of hybrid warfare and airspace violations as part of its military strategy to weaken aid from NATO and EU partners to Ukraine. The reality is that, almost five years after the invasion, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, knows that his only chance of winning the war is to cut off this aid. How? By deepening European divisions, intimidating the population of border countries, and, above all, placing his far-right pawns at the head of as many European countries as possible. To achieve all these objectives, he is deploying a whole series of actions of which we have had quite a few examples in recent days.

If you want to better understand the world we have started living in for the past few months, there are a couple of news items of the day that are very helpful.The day before yesterday, Pedro Sánchez stated that Morocco did not instigate the massive entry of people into Ceuta, that it had been the work of Russia and Israel, who had spread through the networks in Morocco that Spain was waiting for workers with open arms, so to speak. Putin himself has denied that Russia had anything to do with it, and the Israeli government has also denied it. But this morning, the digital newspaper El Español published that the Spanish police have informed the judge that the massive entry into Ceuta was guided by Moroccan gendarmes under the orders of plainclothes agents with the aim of collapsing the border control system and eliminating Spain's response capacity.

Although many Eastern European countries had already accused Russia of practicing what is called "hybrid warfare" against them, it is now Germany that has directly accused Moscow of being behind the incident in early August at Leipzig airport, when a drone loaded with explosives impacted a Ukrainian plane without exploding. A month later, the investigation by German authorities reaches this conclusion after analyzing the drone's operation and characteristics. In August, the German Defense Minister, Alexander Dobrindt, was already very clear when he stated: "We are the daily target of hybrid warfare".

Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Sweden, Romania, Lithuania, and now also Germany. Incursions and drone threats in NATO territory have become more frequent in recent months and have intensified. In early August, a drone loaded with explosives impacted a Ukrainian cargo plane at Leipzig airport without detonating, in one of the most direct sabotage attempts recorded so far at a key NATO logistics center and further into European territory. After nearly a month of investigations, this Tuesday, for the first time, the German government has directly blamed Russian intelligence services for the incident.