Introduction
The July 2026 NATO summit in Ankara will convene after a year in which the Alliance’s eastern and southern peripheries have been repeatedly tested by incidents that are coercive, dangerous, and often ambiguous rather than clearly war-triggering. This is why the Alliance’s central challenge is not only to deter a major conventional attack, but to govern a continuous zone of coercion below that threshold. NATO itself describes hybrid threats as activity that combines military and non-military, covert and overt means, deliberately blurring the line between war and peace. In practice, that blurring is now most evident in the borderlands of the Alliance: the eastern flank from the Baltic to the Black Sea and the southern maritime arc from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and Straits of Hormuz. The July summit will therefore confront a single strategic problem expressed in two theaters: how to maintain credible deterrence while managing ambiguous escalation, distributed maritime risk, and alliance political friction.
The Baltic Sea remained a focal point of hybrid-security concerns in 2026, with particular attention directed toward the vulnerability of critical undersea infrastructure. In June, Finnish authorities announced that four individuals were suspected in connection with damage to telecommunications cables between Finland and Estonia linked to the cargo vessel Fitburg,1 an incident that forms part of a broader pattern of disruptions affecting power cables, telecommunications links, and energy infrastructure across the region since 2022. NATO has responded during the last few years by increasing its military presence and surveillance activities in the Baltic, including the deployment of frigates, maritime patrol aircraft, naval drones, and the continuation of Operation Baltic Sentry, which was established to protect critical undersea infrastructure.2 At the same time, the 2026 BALTOPS exercise placed renewed emphasis on securing maritime supply routes and safeguarding critical infrastructure amid heightened tensions with Russia.3
