The Missing Pillar of European Resilience

A single fortnight spanning July and August demonstrates the escalation in Russia's hybrid war against Europe. A weapons factory in Italy was damaged by an explosion, while a similar factory in Bulgaria was damaged by fire. Both factories supplied munitions to Ukraine. A drone attack on a Ukraine re-supply aircraft at Leipzig airport in Germany was foiled. And disinformation helped encourage more than 70,000 young Moroccans to storm onto Ceuta beach, deepening Europe's divisions over migration. In each instance, political fingers are being pointed at an intensified summer campaign of sabotage, drone attacks and disinformation.

It is the nature of hybrid warfare that Russia's capacity to harm Europeans is largely shaped by our own vulnerabilities. European governments are mobilising political will and resources to bolster defences and protect critical physical and IT infrastructure from sabotage, cyberattacks and drone incursions. This is critical work. But Russia's hybrid war tactics are not just aimed at weakening European infrastructure – they are aimed at weakening European societies. The goal is to:

Demoralise: by attacking and sabotaging European critical infrastructure, Russia creates discomfort, discontent and fear across the continent, in the hope that this translates into grievances that governments cannot manage. Disinformation campaigns flood the information space with narratives that purport to show our liberal democracies underperforming economically and politically. Election interference, in Germany and Hungary among others, undermines faith in the democratic process itself. Through these low-cost tactics, hybrid warfare is steadily weakening the trust between states and their citizens.

Divide: by finding deeply ingrained grievances and perceived injustices that erode trust between communities, then amplifying them at speed. Russia deploys false-flag provocations, misinformation and election interference to amplify polarisation between communities. An arson attack on the then British Prime Minister’s private residence, was followed by a coordinated Russian disinformation campaign designed to amplify the incident and inflame tensions in British political culture. The placement of pigs' heads in front of nine Parisian mosques was aimed at fuelling pre-existing interreligious tensions in France. Hybrid war works to undermine the horizontal social cohesion that binds different groups together through trust, a sense of belonging and a willingness to help each other. As social cohesion diminishes, our societies become weaker and more conflictual.

Governments are Not Blind to These Dangers, but Their Approach Stops Short of the Mark

Given the central role that disinformation plays across the spectrum of hybrid war action, it is not surprising that government focus has been placed on countering it and building their populations' resilience to its effects. The EU has, for example, placed support to fact-checking ecosystems, increasing media literacy and regulation of digital platforms at the heart of its 'Hybrid Toolbox'.

At the individual state level, governments are adopting variations of the same approach. Poland has invested in an integrated approach that combines extensive real-time social media monitoring with training journalists and NGOs in disinformation recognition, and providing citizens with strong, independent fact-checking infrastructure. Sweden goes furthest, with an all-of-society approach to resilience and a dedicated Psychological Defence Agency serving as an institutional hub to coordinate government-wide situational awareness on influence operations, running public communications campaigns and providing training to municipalities on how to counter disinformation. France and Estonia have taken broadly similar paths, investing in technical detection systems and mandatory media literacy teaching respectively.

Yet across all these national strategies, policy effectively stops at disinformation. The EU’s 2022 strategic compass provides the basis for the EU Hybrid Toolbox, and recognizes the need to bolster societal resilience. However, neither the 2022 iteration of the toolbox, nor its 2026 update, dedicate funding or programming for social cohesion at the community level has been established within the hybrid resilience framework. Germany's 2023 National Security Strategy names 'fostering prosperity and social cohesion in our country' as one of nine security interests, but is vague on detail and implementation has lagged. Even where social cohesion is named explicitly as a strategic objective, as in France's 2025 National Strategic Review, efforts in practice still centre on exposing foreign disinformation and preventing cyber threats. What is missing everywhere is a plan for what to do once communities are already in tension with each other.

People Believe What They Want to Believe, Not Necessarily What is Correct

Investments in systems to detect, attribute and expose disinformation are necessary but not sufficient to maintain social cohesion. A Polish example illustrates the problem well. Coordinated Russian social media manipulation has been amplifying anti-Ukrainian narratives, blaming Ukrainians for Poland's economic burdens. Government data demonstrates that, in fact, Ukrainians pay more in taxes and social contributions than the value of benefits they receive from the state. The government has been quoting this widely but has done little to shift anxieties at the local level.

This disconnect happens because people process corrections through existing political lenses, personal grievances and partisan attachments, and often dispute corrections that contradict their broader worldview. That worldview has plenty to feed on. Economic decline for the middle class is demonstrable across the EU, and real and perceived financial insecurity is a key driver of low trust and democratic dissatisfaction. This is exactly what hybrid action exploits to create division and sow despair. Correcting a specific false claim does not touch the underlying anxiety that made the claim believable in the first place.

Media literacy has genuine value here, but it is not a crisis-response tool. Teaching citizens to evaluate sources and recognise rhetorical manipulation does improve people's ability to distinguish accurate from inaccurate information. Media literacy interventions aimed at sharing behaviours that propagate misinformation demonstrate their strongest impact in sustained multi-session programmes, particularly amongst university-level student populations. Scalable, single-session interventions of the kind deployable in the general population show more modest effects. Importantly, media literacy campaigns show little documented impact on beliefs that are already tied to identity or grievance. These are long-term interventions for a problem that often needs an answer today.

A Toolkit for Municipalities: Where the Real Work Has to Happen

The damage done to social cohesion by hybrid warfare often finds expression not just online but in local communities, where tensions over housing, migration and service pressures can boil over into confrontations between different groups. Every confrontation, if not managed well, tears further at both kinds of cohesion this piece has set out: it erodes trust between communities, and trust between those communities and the state. As a critical part of their resilience planning, governments across Europe must invest in building local infrastructure that can address these tensions swiftly and competently, and in a way that restores relationships. Governments should equip their municipalities with a toolkit to maintain and rebuild social cohesion in times of crisis.

There is a good reason to start at the local level. OECD Trust Survey and Eurobarometer data indicate that in many, though not all, European countries, trust in national government is lower than trust in local government, by a consistent margin of around six percentage points. Local authorities have more trust to work with than national governments do, which makes them the right place to invest. This toolkit should encompass at least the following:

1. A vulnerability mapping to identify those municipalities most at risk of tension between community groups as a result of disinformation or other forms of hybrid war. The mapping should highlight communities where high structural vulnerability (the pre-existing conditions that make a community susceptible to manipulation and tension) intersects with high dynamic threat exposure (communities actually being targeted by foreign disinformation or influence operations), so that governments can direct urgent support where it is needed most.
   
   
2. A structured capacity-building programme for local government in community tension management. Local governments are frequently the first institutional actors to observe signs of emerging community tension, and the least equipped to respond to them. Authorities either avoid engagement altogether, fearing reputational damage if an intervention misfires, or default to police-led responses. Many local authorities lack basic know-how on community tension management and are not prepared for the difficult conversations that engaging with group grievances requires. Over-securitisation damages the vertical trust between communities and local institutions that is itself a critical component of social cohesion. A dedicated programme should focus on four areas: mediation and facilitated dialogue, tension de-escalation, rumour control, and planning for recovery.
   
   
3. Community Early Response Networks in high-vulnerability municipalities. The relationships that make rapid response possible need to be built before they are needed. In municipalities the mapping identifies as highly vulnerable, local authorities should be supported and mandated to establish standing, cross-community structures with a specific remit for monitoring, rumour control and de-escalation, drawn from across the identity groups most likely to be in tension. Membership should be people with genuine standing and credibility in their own communities who are willing to engage in cross-community dialogue. The convening process is, in itself, a significant act of the horizontal cohesion this piece has argued for.
   
   

Providing this support to municipalities is a matter of urgency. The mere fact of Russia's increasing hybrid warfare against Europe can make communities feel they are living through sustained uncertainty and crisis. Social psychology research demonstrates that perceptions of intergroup threat increase in exactly those conditions. Unless actively counteracted through direct efforts to maintain and build social cohesion, increased intergroup threat perceptions can lead to communities withdrawing and becoming less willing to engage with and help each other. All without Russia even taking direct action.

© Fleur Auzimour Just, 2026, published by RUSI with permission of the author.

The views expressed in this Commentary are the author's, and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.

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