Europe's Other Battlefields: Foreign Hybrid Threats in the EU

ISD's February 2026 report is the most comprehensive mapping of the full spectrum of hybrid threats targeting EU member states produced by civil society — covering FIMI, cyberattacks, sabotage, malign finance, energy coercion, and interference in democratic processes as an integrated threat landscape rather than separate phenomena. The report's central argument is that existing EU regulatory and policy frameworks have failed to keep pace with the scale, coordination, and integration of authoritarian interference — and that the European Democracy Shield must be understood as a response to this integrated threat, not just to disinformation alone.

The integrated hybrid threat framing is the report's most important analytical contribution. Understanding FIMI in isolation from the cyber operations that support it, the financial flows that fund it, and the political capture that shields it from accountability produces an incomplete and ultimately inadequate analytical picture. For practitioners advising on EU democratic resilience architecture and for policymakers working on EDS implementation, this report provides the most current comprehensive threat baseline available from a credible civil society source.