How to defend society? Baltic responses to hybrid threats

ENIn 2007, ethnic divisions and conflicting interpretations of Estonia’s World War II legacy were exposed in the Bronze Soldier war memorial incident. The Estonian government relocated the controversial statue and war graves, which resulted in riots and massive cyberattacks by Russia. It was a sure sign that the security environment had changed for Estonia and its Baltic neighbours. Protracted deterioration of the relations between Russia and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) after the annexation of Crimea has turned Baltic states into NATO’s "new front-line states" and exposed them to recurrent Russian interference activities, which, however, fall under NATO’s Article 5 threshold. Due to the dominant traditional security concept in all three states, the nature of Russian interference activities and the particularities of an external shelter mean that societal security remains the main security challenge in the Baltic states. This chapter investigates the main societal security challenges in three Baltic states to identify the ways Russia attempts to manipulate them and to discover the strategies and tools that Baltic states employ to respond to these challenges. Keywords. [From the publication]