 I'm very pleased to welcome you to this IIEA webinar. We're delighted to be joined today by Dr. Teo Tili Kanan, Director of the European Center of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, who's being generous enough to give her time out of her schedule to speak to us. She'll speak to us for about 20 minutes or so, and then we will go to a Q&A with our audience. You'll be able to join the discussion using the Q&A function on the Zoom, which you should see on your screen. Please feel free to ask questions in throughout the sessions as they occur to you, and we'll come to them at the end when asked, Dr. Dinh, when she's finished her presentation to them. Just a reminder that today's presentation and Q&A are both on the record, and please feel free to join the discussion on Twitter, using the handle Twitter that is at IIEA. And now formally introduced Dr. Teo Tili Kanan, who is the Director of the European Center of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Effects. Previously, she was the Director of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs from 2010 to 2019, and has been the Director of the Network of European Studies at the University of Helsinki from 2003 to 2009. And in 2018, she became and was nominated part-time professor at the European University Institutes of Transnational Governance in Florence. She served as Secretary of State at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Finland from 2007 to 2008, and she was a member of the European Convention in 2002 and 2003, and a member of the panel and eminent persons of European Security as a common project in 2015 and 2016. Dr, I'll hand over to you. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for this kind presentation, and I also would like to thank the organizers for this opportunity to address this distinguished audience. I will talk about a topic that, during the past couple of years, has surfaced European political discussion, hybrid threats. What are they? How do they affect the security of our societies? What happens to hybrid threats when there is a huge conventional threat in the form of the war against Ukraine going on? What have we seen and experienced during this, this half a year in these terms? I am representing a center of excellence, which is an international, intergovernmental center of excellence located in Helsinki, where the key task of the center and its experts is to provide information, analytical knowledge, expertise about these hybrid threats. And I will structure my presentation in the following way. I will start by paying attention to the notion of hybrid threats. Hybridity, hybridity meaning mixed form of something. So what does this refer to in the case of security threats? I try to put hybrid threats into a context asking, how come that these threats have become so very topical now during the past few years? And what do we need as democratic societies to do in order to address them and protect our societies from these threats? And last, I'm going to focus a little bit on our center, tell about its work and activities during these five years when the center was established in the spring 2017. So now I would like to use my slides and this is the topic of my presentation and we can move to the first slide, which brings light to the concept. When we refer to hybrid threats in the context of European security or broader global security, we refer to threats of a very specific type. It is malign activity caused by state actors or non-state actors, which in most cases are kind of meant to do harm to democratic states and societies. What is typical of hybrid threats is the set of instruments and tactics that are being used. So when I say here that in hybrid threats it is a question of unconventional means that are being used, I refer to means that are not typical of those means that tend to be used in the international context, political, economic or military means for power protection or promotion of one's own interests. These threats are unconventional. We talk about cyber attacks, cyber means being one of the key tools in this context. We talk about attacks and disturbances of critical infrastructures, access to energy, electricity, which of course are very topical today, critical sea lines of communication. We talk about disinformation campaigns or more broadly manipulation of the information space. We talk about instrumentalised migration, a phenomenon which we saw last year at the borders of Belarus and its three European EU neighbours Lithuania, Latvia and Poland. We talk about asymmetric forms of warfare, hybrid warfare as we call them. So many unconventional means where the target is a democratic state or society and weakening of that state is the key goal of the use of these activities. From our centre's point of view, we tend to mention that these unconventional means usually are used in concert as different tools, different instruments are being used at the same time. The activity is planned so that they are exploiting the vulnerabilities of the target country. So this is very much in the nature of what we are referring to and the use of these kinds of tools has become very common in today's international environment, just because they are so cost-effective and cost-efficient as we tend to argue. In comparison with normal military instruments, in comparison with normal political or diplomatic tools, it's much cheaper to carry out a cyber attack or produce a disinformation campaign. Still, it tends to have serious consequences for the target society. Soon when I put them into a context, I will tell that the reason why they have become so very common relates to the current international environment where there is a major rivalry going on between democratic states on the one hand, authoritarian regimes on the other. It is a rivalry about values, about models of governance, about leadership of the international order. So this is the context in which these kinds of threat instruments belong. And we can already at this stage mention that when we look at the political documents or doctrines of the key authoritarian states, Russia and China, we find these instruments there. They are a part of the so-called Russian political war. This is the Russian term and the understanding of the Russian thinking is that Russia is in a kind of broad-scale war against the West. The Russian argument being that the West is the one that attacks. And that's why Russia has to use the full scale of instruments to defend itself against the hostile hostilities of the West. And in the Chinese case, there is a similar terminology, the concept that is used by China is the indirect war where the whole Chinese society, public and private actors have to form a united front to defend China. It's political and cultural unity against Western hostilities. So the argument, the justification for the use of these tools is given in these doctrines. We can take my next slide please. So they have become a commonplace tool in this rivalry where the non-Western authoritarian states are competing about a leadership position at the international level, where we have a transition in the global balance of power ongoing, the arguments of the authoritarian regimes, Russia and China, being that it should be the end of the Western political hegemony, the international system should be more democratic, more multipolar, that their values should play a larger role in the current international order. This is the argument. There is something that we call the systemic rivalry and of course the vulnerabilities of the authoritarian systems play a role, vulnerabilities which mean that when authoritarian regimes cannot be renewed in the normal democratic way, the legitimacy of their governments, of their regimes have to be safeguarded by using other types of means. Exactly the external campaigns weakening the democracies, discrediting the democratic model, changing the international power structure to their own benefit here functions also as a tool for the domestic survival of the authoritarian regime type. We should also of course take into account that the modern technological developments creates a form, plays an important role in this context. There are much more new facilities, platforms and potential for adversarial activities and the use of these hybrid tools. And I believe the cost-efficient character of them was mentioned. So let's move to my next slide please. In the center of excellence we are looking at various cases of hybrid threats, various forms of hybrid threats, but we are also looking at trends. So what kinds of trends do we see in certain geopolitical fields, in certain functional fields of society? These are certainly no news for you, but I just wanted to pick up some trends mainly to pay attention to the diversity of hybrid threats today. So we can divide them on the basis of the time span. There are those kinds of threats that are more immediate and then there are threats that we call us or describe to be at the priming stage. So pave the way for a later operation or attack, preparing something. Well, just to mention some trends. We have seen during the past couple of years an intensifying hacking against Western governments and parliaments, their information systems. We cannot ask ourselves what is the ultimate goal with these kinds of attacks. In most cases it is not that clear if the hackers are after the kind of information that they then confidential information or personal information that they then plan to leak or publish at the later stage. Or if it's just to increase psychological pressure on societies by attacking the kind of the heart of the democratic government, parliament, the governments. This has become very frequent. If the goal is to decrease trust in the government in that country or polarise public opinion, very difficult to know. A very different trend of hybrid threat activity that we perceive takes place in the kind of at the company level within critical infrastructures where we see a kind of dependencies increasing dependencies created by in particular Chinese actors and the Chinese government. Where we're increasing foreign ownership, Chinese ownership of Western critical infrastructures cannot be described as a hybrid threat as such, but in our understanding kind of paves the way, creates a lot of dependency and potential for future hybrid threat activities, which would mean that these ownership, these critical infrastructures, these dependencies that have been created would start to be used politically against the countries and governments where they take place. And this of course has already been seen in some cases. This seems to be a systematic trend. It's linked with the Chinese Silk Road project, the Arctic Silk Road or the Central Asian Silk Road. Similar activities taking place in Africa, in Latin America, but also in the heart of Europe. As a part, I already mentioned earlier that when we talk about hybrid threats, we refer to both state actors, but also non-state actors. Non-state actors all from private companies, different political groupings, terrorist organizations, just groups of hackers are being used as proxy actors for state actors. We see more and more different types of non-state actors that promote the agenda and interests of state actors. All from the Wagner Group, private military companies, religious communities, to private smaller private companies that have been established just to kind of take care of a commercial activity for a state actor. So this really is a crucial trend among hybrid threat activities. Of course, to a little bit newer phenomena related to hybrid threats can be described first as the use of lawfare, which I will explain and the instrumentalized migration that I already mentioned. So lawfare is a term which refers to the political and strategic use of law to the benefit of a hybrid threat actor. If we think about law in its commonplace role, it is an element of stability, predictability at the international level as well as at the national level. If then law and legal frameworks are being used, not in that role, but rather in the role of promoting a state interest, law gets a very different function. This is what we see in many maritime environments where the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea is kind of artificially interpreted very much against its original spirit to promote state interests in East China, China Sea or in the Arctic or even in the Baltic Sea. This might imply the use of kind of the legal use of military exercises to block critical sea lines of communication, access to ports or harbours as an example among many others. An instrumentalized migration where migration and the commitment of Western states to international humanitarian rules and conventions is being exploited as a vulnerability and migration is used as a tool to enhance polarization in stability in target societies. We have seen in 2015 in my country Finland a Russian operation the same year against Norway and as mentioned last year by Belarus to three EU countries. Just mentioned a couple of trends to give you an impression of how diverse and different the hybrid threats activities can be. Now we go to my next slide please. And now I try to be very brief with the next two slides just addressing the phenomenon from the point of view of how we can counter these threats, how we can protect our societies, enhance our own security. Basically, we are talking about two main tools in very broad terms. We are talking about societal resilience, building broad societal resilience. And here I give you the definition of resilience, which is an ability to adapt to exceptional conditions to absorb and recover from a shock. Resilience is being built at the national, local and even international level in the framework of the European Union and NATO for instance, both by using legislative instruments, new laws, also policies. We need to pay increasingly attention to our information space for instance, against the counter this disinformation campaigns or broader manipulation of information space. But we also need to prepare our populations and societies to address this phenomenon that takes on multiple forms and that's where we are talking about psychological resilience. Of course, common situational awareness, common understanding between the private sector and public sector about the big picture that I tried to describe to you that the hybrid threats relate to and the kind of tactics, their specific tactics, by means of which they try to exploit vulnerabilities in our democracies, our values, kind of bring our values against us. Next slide mentions another tool which for a long time was a little bit distant, at least from the small states amongst us. When we now talk about an effective policy of deterrence, that deterrence does not refer to nuclear deterrence where the concept originally comes from. But in addition to resilience, we must also create, take into use more proactive tools to signal the countries that are targeting us that there will be a cost on their behavior. And this is exactly what we are doing at the EU level, at the national level by imposing sanctions, by strengthening our own narrative and the willingness, messaging the common willingness of us to protect our societies in a broad manner. I'm fast now with these slides because I want to use the remaining couple of minutes on the hybrid center of excellence, which we then can also discuss more in detail in the Q&A session that I could take my next slide and present the center of excellence to you. So we are talking about currently about the center of the size of 31 countries, on Wednesday we will in fact get our 32nd participating state, this center was established in Helsinki five years ago as I mentioned and then there were 11 members. The understanding behind that establishment was that, as these threats are so different, diverse, and as we really have to understand their logic, we have to cooperate closely as democratic states, but also strengthen cooperation between the key intergovernmental bodies, the European Union and NATO. So we have to kind of find the right instruments to counter hybrid threats and those instruments need to take place at different levels, as I said. So the center was established to kind of enhance this understanding and awareness and expertise by those 11 states and when Malta joins on Wednesday or confirms its accession that we can already place earlier, we will be 32 countries and the center covers a major part of the European Union and NATO then. And the next slide will show you how we function here. So the secretariat where we are around 40 experts, we are focusing on these different forms of hybrid threats, we are focusing on the state strategies and policies that create these threats against our societies. And so 40 experts representing 17 different nationalities as we have a lot of second-dead experts here in our secretariat, mostly with people with civilian backgrounds, some people with military backgrounds, academic experts as well as experts from the government. The center is funded by its participation fees. Finland as the host country pays half of our core budget and the rest comes from the other participating states. We do a lot of different types of analytical activities. We publish a lot on our website, public publications, but also publications with limited release. We provide a table of exercises and different types of trainings to the administrations and do capacity building in other forms. But of course we also work closely with the European Union and NATO and try to facilitate their mutual cooperation as it is a part of our mandate. We are not a part of EU or NATO, we are an independent or autonomous center of excellence. Of course we are led by, if we take the next picture, we are led by a steering board as you can see, consisting of representatives of the soon 32 participating states. And you see the flags there and you see our units with kind of green color and then the administration with its teams with blue color. Of course I have been in this position since autumn 2019 and there has always been a close cooperation with Ireland. We have had important visitors from Ireland and it has always been a pleasure to cooperate even if Ireland is not a participating state for the time being. My final slide, I have used some extra minutes now, but I wanted to just kind of show light on the kind of three dimensions of our work just to make the picture clearer for you. So we look at these threats, how do they look like, what is the peculiarity with hybrid threats, what is the kind of their specific tactics because it's a very tactical instrument when they are targeted against the vulnerabilities in our democratic society. It's freedom of speech, our commitment to human rights norms, kind of free media environment. This is what is being exploited there. We look at hybrid threats in specific geopolitical regions such as the Arctic or the MENA region last year. This year we are focusing on the Eastern partnership countries. But we also as the second section here shows we are focusing very much on the authoritarian states and their philosophies, their approaches to these hybrid threat instruments in order to be able to counter them. And we also pay attention, increasingly attention to the use of non-state actors to try to block also that route from being used. And finally the core of course is to create knowledge about our vulnerabilities. And that's where we also focus on our democratic processes. We counter election interference, counter foreign interference in our democratic processes and debates. Now I'm sorry I used a couple of extra minutes. I'm very happy to answer and address any types of questions and comments. Thank you so much Mr. Chairman.