Driving the news: The report, Defending Europe Against Hybrid Warfare, was produced jointly by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) and the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats (Hybrid CoE).
- Published on October 22 and formally presented on October 23, the study outlines a resilience-deterrence strategy intended to address the growing intensity and operational sophistication of hybrid warfare across Europe.
The reference. In the section devoted to saturation, the authors examine how large-scale hostile operations can overwhelm defensive systems, deplete institutional resources, and gradually undermine democratic resilience.
- The report explicitly references the analysis Cyberattacks and Infowarfare Targeting Milano–Cortina 2026. Anatomy of a Hybrid Campaign, written by Jacopo Marzano and published by Decode39 on March 3, 2026.
- The analysis also appeared in Italian on Formiche.net, examining the intersection of cyber disruption, information manipulation, and reputational attacks during one of the world’s most visible sporting events.
Why it matters. The citation connects a documented episode of hybrid pressure against Italy’s Olympic ecosystem to a broader European conceptual framework for understanding saturation.
- The original Decode39 analysis reconstructed a series of hostile information operations directed primarily against the Ukrainian delegation and the credibility of Olympic institutions. These included fabricated reports imitating established international broadcasters, AI-assisted audiovisual manipulation, voice cloning, and coordinated amplification across digital platforms.
- Alongside the information campaign, DDoS operations associated with pro-Russian hacktivist collectives, including Noname057(16) and Z-Pentest, targeted digital infrastructure linked to the Olympic environment and institutional actors.
- The informational dimension involved networks such as Matryoshka and Pravda, whose dissemination mechanisms contributed to the circulation and persistence of narratives aligned with Russian strategic interests. The analytical significance lay in the convergence of these activities. Different operational vectors generated cumulative pressure across the information and cyber domains, exploiting the visibility of the Games and the sensitivity of the wider European security environment.
- The JRC-Hybrid CoE study cites the article as a reference for this broader saturation mechanism. It does not independently attribute the individual Olympic incidents or constitute a formal endorsement of every finding in the original analysis.
The bigger picture. The European report identifies three operational developments reshaping the contemporary hybrid threat landscape: saturation, cascading effects, and high-impact operations.
- Saturation concerns the volume of hostile activity and its capacity to exhaust defensive resources. Cascading effects describe how the consequences of an operation can generate additional vulnerabilities across interconnected systems, including when the initial attack fails to achieve its immediate objective.
- High-impact operations introduce a further dimension of strategic risk, targeting critical societal functions and potentially generating enduring disruption. Taken together, these dynamics complicate conventional approaches to escalation management.
- Hostile actors can distribute pressure across multiple domains, exploit uncertainty over responsibility, and generate cumulative effects without crossing the threshold of open military confrontation.
The strategic shift. The study’s central proposition is that resilience alone cannot provide a sustainable answer to increasingly sophisticated hybrid operations. Its proposed resilience-deterrence strategy combines proactive anticipation, active defence, and reactive response. The framework seeks to strengthen European preparedness while influencing the adversary’s calculation of costs, expected benefits, and operational risks.
- In practical terms, this requires more effective intelligence integration, earlier detection, improved attribution, stronger protection of critical infrastructure, and credible responses to hostile operations.
- The report also examines deterrence by denial, deterrence by punishment, and deterrence by disclosure, the latter designed to expose hostile preparations and erode the operational advantages associated with secrecy and plausible deniability.
- In his foreword, European Commissioner for Defence and Space Andrius Kubilius places these recommendations against the backdrop of sustained Russian sabotage, cyberattacks, and interference targeting Europe’s security and defence infrastructure.
What comes next. The research also contributes to the European discussion surrounding the proposed Emergency Security Protocol and the counter-Hybrid threats playbook, both intended to strengthen collective assessment and coordinated action against hostile activities.
- For European security policymakers, the unresolved challenge concerns implementation: developing sufficient common situational awareness, establishing credible attribution procedures, and ensuring that decisions translate into timely, proportionate countermeasures.
- The inclusion of Decode39’s Milano–Cortina analysis illustrates the relevance of individual operational cases to this evolving strategic debate. The report’s wider conclusion is that Europe’s security institutions must increasingly assess hostile activities as interconnected campaigns, with effects that accumulate across borders, infrastructures, and information environments.
- The effectiveness of the proposed approach will ultimately depend on whether European governments can turn these analytical principles into operational capabilities and a credible collective deterrent.
