Marija Golubeva
How do we build the resilience and deterrence needed to defend the European project from hybrid attacks? How do we meet the threat from Russia and other authoritarian actors who target not just individual member states, but our shared infrastructure, energy independence, and the narratives that hold us together?
Marija Golubeva's Richard von Weizsäcker Fellowship
Europe Under Attack: Building Resilience and Deterrence for the Euro pean Project
The European project – not just individual member states – has become the primary target of hybrid attacks by Russia and other authoritarian actors. That is Marija Golubeva's central hypothesis, and her Richard von Weizsäcker Fellowship sets out to test and substantiate it. Across three domains – shared infrastructure, energy independence, and political identity – she argues that the attacks of the past four years form a coordinated strategy aimed at the foundations of the EU itself.
Three domains of attack
In her research, she analyzes patterns of hybrid attacks between 2022 and 2026. The first domain covers physical attacks on the infrastructure that underpins EU interconnectedness. The second covers attacks on European energy independence. The third covers information campaigns designed to undermine the EU's political identity and narrative – particularly around European defense and enlargement.
Her argument is that these are not separate incidents but a systematic effort to erode the idea of Europe as a coherent political project.
From diagnosis to action
During her fellowship, Marija Golubeva intends to combine research with practice. She plans to convene a roundtable bringing together security and defense experts alongside EU and rule-of-law specialists, bridging two communities whose discourses rarely meet. She will also design and run a scenario-based simulation of a hybrid attack on Germany and other EU member states. In doing so, she plans to address a core weakness of current security architecture: it is still built around member-state attribution rather than EU-level response.
Her aim is to produce concrete recommendations for policymakers and civil society. Her conviction, drawn from years of running crisis simulations, is that resilience without deterrence is not enough: Europe must show that it has teeth.