The Deputy Minister of National Defence Mr. Nikolaos Chardalias delivered a speech, on Wednesday 15 June 2022, at the opening session of the “2nd Forum on Hybrid Threats, Cyber–security, and Artificial Intelligence”, the topic of which was “Hybrid Threats and Greece: Developments, Τendencies, Ιnstitutional Framework and state endurance”.
This Forum is a field of development and exchange of views by various personalities, prominent Greek and foreign speakers from the field of politics, academic and entrepreneurial community, Armed Forces and Security Services, high-rank officials serving in ministries and state agencies, International Organisations (NATO, European Union) and representatives of foreign diplomatic missions.
During the opening session, address was also delivered by the representative of the Minister of Foreign Affairs Mr. Nikos Dendias, the Chief of Staff of Hellenic National Defence General Staff Lieutenant General Konstantinos Kellaris as representative of the Chief of Hellenic National Defence General Staff General Konstantinos Floros and the Head of the Steering Committee of the Foreign Affairs Institute Mr. Loukas Katsonis.
The Forum is hosted at the Armed Forces Officers Mess, on 15 and 16 June 2022, by the Foreign Affairs Institute and is organized under the auspices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and NATO.
The Deputy Minister of National Defence stated the following in his speech:
“It is a special honour for me to be here today, in order to share with you some thoughts regarding the sensitive and always topical question of hybrid threats.
The current concern about the risk for our national security which is posed by hybrid threats coincides with exceptionally critical – allow me to say – circumstances for our country as well as for our allies. And I call it critical, because everybody sees a revival of the conflict between the liberal, open democratic societies of which Greece has been undoubtedly a part across time, and the closed, revisionist and autocrat regimes which move actively in order to undermine values, institutions and the Western way of life. In this context, the discussion of how hybrid threats interact with more open forms of dispute of national sovereignty and political independence is more topical than ever.
The unjustifiable and cruel Russian invasion of Ukraine is an open challenge to the liberal international legal order. Commanding a blatant invasion of a sovereign state under the pretext of unsubstantial arguments, outside of the context of international law, President Putin overtly undermines the foundation on which the peoples of the United Nations have been trying for approximately eight decades to build an international community, free from the plague of war. This puts into question a legal order, in which the “diplomacy of power” and armed conflicts were excluded from international legitimacy, giving their place to the peaceful resolution of disputes. However, the Russian attack should not be considered as the consequence of a few months’ crisis. On the contrary, it is the culmination of a premeditated – allow me to say – plan which was implemented across several years and it includes, if not anything else, various forms of hybrid war.
Speaking of hybrid threats, we refer to various forms of aggressiveness exercised in a physical, electronic, as well as mental manner, under or, obscurely, around the limits of armed conflict. There is not a “definite” – if I may call it so – list of methods and strategies: After the cyber attacks, the deliberate misinterpretation of International Law (the so-called malicious lawfare), the spread of fake news in the cyberspace and the illegal interference in the election procedures of independent states, we have been observing, over the last years, that new forms of hybrid tactics, such as the deployment of military forces who bear no military insignia, the targeted use of migrant flows as weapons, as well as the manipulation of energy security are added to the arsenal of revisionist and autocrat powers. As Ukraine ascertained it in a painful manner, such malicious practices are often a harbinger of generalized conflicts.
For our homeland, nevertheless, and particularly for our Armed Forces, these tactics are not just hypothetical threats. For Greece, facing various forms of hybrid threats has been an inextricable part of its war preparation and its broader national alertness since several decades. In some cases, forms of hybrid war which are faced by some of our partners, for the first time, had previously been tested against Greece. And that, because the Russian Federation is not the only source of disturbance of the international legal order, nor is it the only malicious agent in the wider region of the West.
Let’s take the migration issue as an example. The entire planet witnessed, in February and March 2020, an orchestrated hybrid attack launched by Turkey against Greece. Tens of thousands of desperate people were pushed violently by the Turkish authorities into the Greek territory through the Evros border and the islands of the Aegean Sea with one and only purpose, to destabilize Greece and to put pressure on the European Union. One and a half year later, we found out that Turkey’s malicious methods are imitated by other totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe. I remind you that, in the second half of the 2021, the European Union faced the challenge set by the President Lukashenko of Belarus who threatened to inundate Europe with illegal migrants as a reaction to the European sanctions against the autocrat regime.
Greece is used, therefore, to facing and repelling hybrid threats. Armed with the international Law and the strong and constantly improving infrastructure of national security, we defend our national interests from every form of malicious attack, overt or covert: On our land, air and sea borders, in cyberspace, in our energy infrastructure and during discussions and negotiations, no international troublemaker can feel confident that they will be able to threaten us. And, of course, trust me; everybody is well aware of our “red lines”.
Of course, there is no room for complacency: hybrid threats are evolving and they constantly take new forms. Would you ever imagine, for example, that the climate crisis, this so important and vital challenge for the future of humanity in our time, instead of being combatted, would be instrumentalised by malicious actors, in hybrid operations? However, due to the dynamic nature of hybrid threats, this may happen! So, permanent alertness, study and analysis are required.
Ladies and Gentlemen, over the last three years, the government has been called on to handle a number of successive emergency situations which, as far as their intensity or frequency is concerned, have exceeded every other emergency that any other government has been called on to face over the last decades. Almost all these crises came from abroad, as a result of unscrupulous, as a result of authoritarian policies.
Our reactions have been immediate and effective in all cases. Under the robust leadership of an indefatigable and decisive – allow me to say – Prime Minister, we restored our national defence and security which are, indeed, our exclusive objective on the first line of our government’s priorities. We fulfilled and we will keep fulfilling our patriotic duty without complaining, with consistency, continuously and looking always to the future, to a future in which our Greece will be even stronger, prosperous, inside a united, secure and self-sufficient Europe.
Distinguished guests, the history of the states from which hybrid threats come from is nothing else, but a register of kleptocracy, a register of murders, tortures and human pain. Unfortunately, the last page of this chronicle has not yet been written, but, on the contrary, you will allow me to say, new chapters of misery and calamities are added as time passes by. Against this always present threat of totalitarianism, as well as the ambiguous stance of various of its “wily neutral” companions, Greece, as the last Western outpost to the East, will continue to fulfil its historical mission as a bastion of liberty, democracy and supreme liberal values.
My warmest congratulations on your forum; warm congratulations on your effort.
Thank you very much for your attention”.
