The NATO Secretary General demonstrated the alliance’s desire to strengthen its arsenal against hostile actions carried out by Moscow and Beijing, in particular by calling for artificial intelligence to better monitor maritime activities.
Mark Rutte, December 3, 2024, in Brussels (AFP / JOHN THYS)
NATO countries, increasingly concerned by hybrid attacks carried out by Russia or China on their territory, decided on Wednesday, December 4, new measures to respond effectively.
NATO foreign ministers, meeting Tuesday and Wednesday in Brussels, promised the implementation of a new strategy in the face of a “campaign of hostile actions by Russia which is intensifying”, according to the Secretary General of the Mark Rutte Alliance.
“What we see is Russia and China trying to destabilize NATO nations through acts of sabotage or cybercrime,” he said at a press conference in the outcome of this meeting.
At least 500 questionable incidents have taken place in Europe in recent months, and “nearly a hundred of them could be attributed to Russia: hybrid attacks, sabotage, espionage or influence operations”,
Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky assured Wednesday.
For example, two submarine telecommunications cables were cut in mid-November in the Baltic Sea, in Swedish territorial waters. Suspicion quickly focused on a Chinese ship, the Yi Peng 3, which according to maritime traffic monitoring sites passed over the cables when they were cut.
Gray areas
Faced with this upsurge, NATO wants to strengthen its arsenal. “We will examine ways to have better sharing of data collected by our intelligence services, but also to ensure that we are able to protect our strategic infrastructures,” said Mr. Rutte.
NATO also wants to make greater use of artificial intelligence to better identify threats, particularly at sea, explained a NATO official, on condition of anonymity. Right now, there are around 50,000 ships at sea in Europe, and without artificial intelligence tools, it is impossible to track them all, he explained.
Faced with these hybrid, unconventional attacks, retaliation is not always easy to implement. First there is the problem of attribution: who can we blame with certainty?
Then, we must take measures, but as Finnish Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen reminded us on Wednesday, the “response cannot be symmetrical because we cannot carry out acts of sabotage ourselves”.
