The FINANCIAL — EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini on October 2 said that the EU “could not take the issue of hybrid threats more seriously.”
Mogherini was speaking ahead of the inauguration on October 2 of the new European Center Of Excellence For Countering Hybrid Threats in Helsinki, according to RFE/RL.
The center, which is a Finnish initiative, brings together 10 EU member states, as well as Norway and the United States, to focus on research, training, education, and exercises.
Both NATO and the EU will be part of the steering board, with Mogherini describing the center as “an essential contribution to our capacity to respond to crisis.”
The European Union has in recent months ramped up its activities to counter hybrid threats of different sorts.
Last month, EU defense ministers held a cyberexercise aimed at testing the bloc’s ability to respond to a potential attack by hackers on its military structures, and last week various EU institutions launched a first-ever exercise to test EU’s crisis response in countering cyberattacks and hybrid warfare threats.
The European Commission recently also proposed establishing a new, beefed-up European cybersecurity agency.
Mogherini noted that the EU’s Stratcom East team that deals with Russian disinformation uncovered over 3,000 disinformation cases since its founding two years ago.
She said the EU would continue to “talk about what we are doing, to explain with a maximum of transparency our policies, [and] spread the real stories about the positive impact that our European action has on the lives of so many people.”
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