Belgian defence minister Theo Francken said "there will be more hybrid threat actions" in the coming months, as he starkly warned "it will be a dark winter for Europe." This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.
Speaking at Euronews's Defence and Space Summit, Francken said hybrid warfare "is not something that Russia [has been] doing for two or three years," but for much longer and it has "expertise" in this area, often making it difficult for western countries to investigate them and attribute responsibility.
Concerns over jet-powered drones
He particularly worried about Russia's increased use of jet-powered drones.
"We need to scale up our air defences and we need to have more stocks, scale up production. Everything has to go faster," he said.
He said Belgium used to be "the worse pupil in class" two years ago with low defence spending, but it has since improved and ramped it up its planning.
Europe's weak spot
He said Europe got too used to its comfortable welfare state protections at the cost of adequate spending on defence, and this is now changing.
"Europe has been very good in investing in soft power, in social security. And it's beautiful to have a pension system, to have social welfare systems [for] when somebody gets sick, when somebody lost his job – we have everything. But when there's war or there's hybrid threats, we don't have anything. So yeah, we're in a really difficult position."
Key takeaways
- 01Belgian defence minister Theo Francken said there will be more hybrid threat actions from Russia in the coming months.
- 02He warned that Europe faces a "dark winter."
- 03Francken said Russia has long-standing expertise in hybrid warfare, making investigations difficult.
- 04He expressed concern over Russia's increased use of jet-powered drones.
- 05The minister urged scaling up air defences, increasing stocks and speeding up production.
- 06He criticised Europe for being too used to welfare protections at the cost of adequate defence spending.