
November 08, 2023
Did China and Russia just sabotage critical infrastructure in the Baltic?
During the past several weeks, a string of attacks on critical infrastructure in the Baltic Sea has highlighted the challenges NATO faces in protecting itself against hybrid threats. After the discovery of damage done to a gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia, news soon broke that a data cable connecting Estonia and Sweden had also been damaged. While investigations point to a Chinese commercial vessel as the most likely culprit, the difficulty of attributing the incident directly to Beijing illustrates a common problem in defending against grey zone aggression more broadly. On this episode of Brussels Sprouts, Bruce Jones and Elisabeth Braw join Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Jim Townsend to help us make sense of recent incidents and what they can tell us about future threats posed by hybrid warfare.
Bruce Jones is a Senior Fellow with the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution.
Elisabeth Braw is a Senior Associate Fellow at the European Leadership Network and a columnist with Foreign Policy. Her work focuses on deterrence against emerging forms of aggression, such as hybrid and grey zone threats.
More from CNAS
-
Transatlantic Security / Energy, Economics & Security
From Russia with RiskHere on the Bear Market Brief, a lot of what we focus on is, simply put, risk: what might happen, and what might it mean? On this episode, Rachel Ziemba, an adjunct senior fel...
By Rachel Ziemba
-
Trump Should Walk from Putin Negotiations
Trump will walk from the Ukraine-Russia negotiations as his lack of “patience” means its “just a matter of time”, says Jim Townsend, adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a ...
By Jim Townsend
-
Transatlantic Security / Energy, Economics & Security
Putin’s Pressure PointTrump’s handling of Russia diverges sharply from his approach to every other country....
By Edward Fishman
-
Transatlantic Security / Technology & National Security
Ukraine Strikes Military and Psychological Blow to RussiaUkraine attacked targets deep inside Russia yesterday, in what Kyiv called “Operation Spiderweb.” The Security Service of Ukraine claimed responsibility for the attack using d...
By Samuel Bendett