\nNations across Europe face a growing and diversifying array of threats within their borders and beyond. Readiness to meet these threats is improving, but unevenly. While some European nations are taking increasingly prudent steps to counter hostile state-sponsored threats, others risk delaying their responses to the detriment of their readiness to withstand crises.
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National preparedness must be founded on a whole-of-society approach to meet, contain and deny new threats.<\/p>\n
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\nEurope is already confronted on its own soil, with hybridised and non-linear Russian threats directly affecting national security, economic activity and critical infrastructure. The number of Russian state-sponsored acts of sabotage across Europe continued to increase<\/a> in 2025 after almost tripling in 2024 compared to preceding years. In 2024, 34 Russian attacks in Europe were documented, many of which were connected to the ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
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\nFor instance, several companies supplying arms to Ukraine\u2014including BAE Systems, Rheinmetall, the German Diehl Group and EMCO\u2014have been targeted in recent years. The largest proportion of attacks however, over a quarter, were directed at the transport sector<\/a>. As before, these attacks have targeted perceived weaknesses<\/a> in European societal structures, industry, infrastructure and government and military premises.
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\nSuch attacks do not only incur physical damage. They are also intended<\/a> to test European cooperation, its readiness to meet emergent crises, and to expose flaws in the resilience of its democratic and societal structures.
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\nIt is increasingly apparent that European nations must be prepared to meet these diverse challenges with an appropriately comprehensive and holistic response. National preparedness must be founded on a whole-of-society approach to meet, contain and deny new threats. Research highlights the multi-faceted nature of resilience, spanning cyber security, supply chain and societal cohesion<\/a>. It also examines specific case studies of good practice<\/a> across the Nordics, Ukraine as well as historical examples of wartime economies<\/a>.
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\nThe private sector has a critical role to play<\/a> in this response, which must involve industry in a broader sense, including energy providers, food retailers, transport industry and their respective supply chains. Private companies and industries possess not only physical and digital infrastructure and production facilities needed for mobilising the economy in times of crisis; they also employ a workforce whose skills can support preparedness and readiness. Governments that proactively engage with the private sector around national preparedness help businesses plan better (PDF)<\/a> for personnel, purchases and overall resilience.
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\nClose collaboration between the government, military and the private sector has been evident in Ukraine<\/a>. Since the onset of the war, both the public and private sectors in Ukraine have been engaged in repairing (PDF)<\/a> telecommunications and critical infrastructure networks. Ukrainian companies have benefited from a rapid government relocation scheme<\/a> launched in March 2022, which supported 745 enterprises in moving operations to western Ukraine.
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\nGovernments can also engage with industry representatives to identify critical sectors and professions and determine how their operations can be sustained during crisis or war. France’s recent efforts to establish an industrial reserve\u2014essentially a pool of former defence industry staff available for mobilisation in the event of national crisis\u2014is an attempt to do just that. It offers an example of how nations might maintain a standing register of key occupations essential to wartime production, minimising disruption and delay in the event of a major crisis.
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\nAlthough real increases in defence spending matter, it is the frameworks in place governing the deployment of such spending, rather than the sheer size of the budget, that will make or break a nation’s response to crisis.
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\nEuropean spending on defence continues to rise year-on-year<\/a>, but without comprehensive frameworks to address the increasingly diverse nature of threats, its overall impact will continue to be undermined. This gap is not uniform across the continent. In Central Europe, the Nordics, and the Baltics, preparedness is far more embedded in national consciousness than in Western Europe, and crisis response frameworks are correspondingly more advanced. Finland, Sweden, Norway, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Germany are not only acutely aware of the risks of hostile state interference and hybrid threats, but are actively strengthening resilience<\/a> across society, government and industry. Their frameworks for national response extend beyond purely military scenarios; cross-border coordination efforts<\/a> focus on countering and adapting to novel physical threats, and also pre-emptive resilience-building against hybrid pressures\u2014such as irregular migration\u2014which have been effectively weaponised by Russia and Belarus in the past.
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