In Trieste, at the headquarters of the Central European Initiative (CEI), Ukraine’s ambassador to Italy, Ihor Brusylo, delivered a warning that was far more personal and urgent than the usual diplomatic communiqué. The CEI is not a body that normally makes headlines; it is one of those quiet organizations that work behind the scenes, trying to stitch Europe back together after a century of wars and empires. Founded in 1989, just as the Cold War was ending, it brought together countries from the Baltic and the Balkans, from Italy and Poland to Ukraine and Moldova, in the hope that shared technical cooperation would make old political wounds heal. Its headquarters are in Trieste, a city that has been at the crossroads of Latin, German and Slavic worlds, a city that has belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to Italy, and at one point to the Allied administration. Trieste knows better than most places what it means to be a weak link in a chain of rival powers. So when Brusylo met with CEI officials and then faced the press, his choice of words felt deliberate and heavy. Russia, he said, views the European Union as a weak link. It views Ukraine as a battlefield, but not the only battlefield. The full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in his view, was never only about Ukraine. Another goal was to make Europe explode, to tear it apart from within. That sentence is the kind of phrase that stays in the mind, not because it is dramatic, but because it is a precise description of what so many Europeans do not want to believe: that the war outside their borders is also a war being fought inside their own institutions, parties, and online spaces.
Brusylo’s warning is not the product of paranoia. It is a conclusion reached by someone who has spent years watching Russia’s hybrid war against his country, first in the occupied eastern regions, then in the misnamed “special operation” that has killed tens of thousands of people. The Kremlin, he was saying, is not trying to defeat Ukraine alone. It is trying to demonstrate that Europe as a project is unsustainable. In the Russian strategist’s mind, the European Union is not a force of progressive peace; it is a comfortable but fragile construct, an assembly of nations that have allowed themselves to become decadent, divided and weak. If Russia can make Ukraine bleed endlessly, it can create an energy crisis in the West. It can send refugees across borders and watch as countries quarrel over how many to take. It can flood social media with hostile messages and make every election look like a struggle between traitors and patriots. It can support political parties on both the far left and the far right, and thereby make the center stop holding. The word “explosion” that Brusylo used is not about a nuclear blast. It is about civic trust exploding. It is about parliaments becoming paralyzed, governments falling, neighbors turning against each other, and the entire edifice of European consensus falling into rubble. The war in Ukraine is thus both an end in itself and a battering ram aimed at the European idea. This is why Brusylo said Europe is the weak link: because no single army can conquer Europe from the outside, but a determined enemy can help Europe conquer itself from within.
The ambassador was not speaking in a vacuum. He was looking at the electoral calendar and seeing a target-rich environment. With elections approaching in Italy, Poland, Spain and France, he warned that disinformation will spread even more. It is not difficult to understand why those countries were singled out. Italy has a long tradition of political instability and, in recent years, has seen significant sympathy for anti-European and pro-Russian narratives. Poland is a frontline state, hosting millions of Ukrainian refugees and serving as the military gateway for Western aid, but it is also a country where the political scene is deeply polarized. Spain and France are major European powers whose elections can reset the balance of the entire continent. If all four are subjected to coordinated campaigns of lies, the result may be a Europe that is too divided to support Ukraine, too distrustful to act autonomously, and too confused to recognize the source of its own dysfunction. Brusylo did not just say that disinformation will increase. He said it will be carried out with a full arsenal: hybrid threats, subversive activities, and every tool available to hostile state actors. He called on European governments to provide a more concrete response. The word “concrete” is important. It suggests that many existing responses have been too abstract, too slow, too bureaucratic. He is asking for systems that can detect and neutralize influence operations in real time, before they change the outcome of a vote. He is asking for cooperation that transcends national boundaries, exactly the kind of cooperation that the CEI was designed to foster.
To understand what hybrid threats and subversive activities really mean, it helps to put them in the context of modern Europe. Hybrid threats are not a single weapon but a combination of many. A hybrid attack might begin with a cyber assault on a political party’s internal communications, leaking stolen documents that are selectively edited to look like scandals. It might involve the creation of dozens of fake news websites that appear to be local media but are actually controlled from Moscow. It might use Artificial Intelligence to produce a video of a politician saying something that was never said. It might flood a country’s fact-checkers with so many false stories that they cannot keep up. It might use real divisions in society—migrations, regional differences, class resentment—and amplify them until they break open. Subversive activities go even further. They involve the recruitment of people inside a country who are willing, perhaps without knowing the full picture, to serve the interests of a foreign power. A business leader might accept a lucrative contract that turns out to be a way of buying influence. A politician might accept a donation from a company that is owned by a Russian oligarch. A journalist might become a paid agent of influence, spreading messages that sound reasonable but which align exactly with Kremlin wishes. These are not science-fiction stories; they are the documented tactics of Russian intelligence and its proxies across Europe. Brusylo spoke about these threats in Trieste because Trieste has always been a city of spies, exiles and empire games, but also because the CEI, with its membership of central European and Balkan states, is one of the platforms where such threats can be discussed across old dividing lines. His message was that the era of quiet diplomacy is over; the era of active defense has begun.
The most striking moment of the press encounter came when a journalist asked directly whether Russia would intervene by funding specific political parties. Brusylo answered without hesitation: “I believe so.” He went further, saying that Russia will keep doing it. But the crucial part of his answer was his explanation of how, in practice, such influence is exercised. “They never act directly; instead, they use connections between various political parties, including this one.” The phrase “including this one” is deliberately open-ended. It could be translated as “including this party” or “including parties of this kind,” but the effect was the same. No political party should feel safe. No party can look at its funding and be absolutely sure that no part of it is tainted by foreign influence. The reason Russia never acts directly is simple: direct interference is too easy to detect and too hard to defend. Instead, the Kremlin works through intermediaries. Money moves through shell companies, third-country foundations, business consultancies, trade agreements, and ideological fellow travelers. A party might think it is receiving a legitimate donation from a private citizen, not realizing that the private citizen is a front for someone with close ties to Russia. There may be no illegal contract, no smoking-gun conversation, no signed document. There is just a relationship, built over years, that slowly convinces certain parties that their interests are aligned with those of Moscow. This is the deep danger that Brusylo was pointing to: not necessarily corruption in the criminal sense, but the slow erosion of political independence. He said it is a serious threat, and that Europeans should be more aware of it. His tone suggested that he has watched his own country be subjected to this for decades, and he knows how difficult it is to fight against an enemy that does not wear a uniform.
In the end, the ambassador’s message was not only about geopolitics. It was about the human condition of living in a democracy under attack. It is easy for a short news item about a diplomatic meeting to disappear in the flow of information, especially in a time of crisis. But the warning from Trieste speaks to every European who is about to vote, to every citizen who watches videos online, to every party activist who wonders why politics has become so toxic, and to every journalist who tries to tell the truth. Brusylo was asking Europeans to connect the dots: the war in Ukraine, the energy crisis, the influx of disinformation, the fractures in political systems, the strange alliances formed around causes that do not seem to make sense. All of this is not random. It is being orchestrated, at least in part, by a power that wants Europe to tear itself apart from within. The ambassador’s final words are perhaps the hardest to hear: “It’s a serious threat—one that you, too, should be more aware of.” The “too” is an invitation to empathy. Ukrainians have learned these lessons at the cost of many thousands of lives. Europeans can still learn them before the explosion reaches their own streets. But that requires a change of attitude: from passive consumption of information to active skepticism, from comfort to vigilance, from the belief that foreign wars are distant to the understanding that the front line can run through every capital, every parliament, and every mind. The meeting at the CEI General Secretariat headquarters produced no big announcement, but it produced a moment of clarity. Whether Europe will use that clarity is a question that can only be answered by the people who are about to vote.