It is evident that Montenegro is on the top of the list of countries subject to the hybrid war, but NATO and the European Union, EU, are working together to eliminate these threats. NATO support is extremely important, and the Alliance itself is well aware of it.
“At the 2018 NATO Summit in Brussels, allied heads of states and governments agreed to form counter-hybrid support teams to assist allies in the preparation and responding to hybrid threats. At the request of the Montenegrin Government, NATO’s first hybrid team for support was sent in Nov. 2019. Its aim was to help Montenegrin authorities bolster their national defense against a series of hybrid threats,” a NATO official told CdM.
According to a political analyst from Zagreb, Mr Davor Đenero, NATO represents an excellent insurance policy for deterring conventional threats, including Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which guarantees the solidarity of member states in the event of one of them being threatened, which all member states will see as an attack on themselves.
“If Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty is the most important instrument for deterring conventional threats, the hybrid ones in NATO are resolved by coordinating work of the security and intelligence services and sharing information, as well as by devising a common defense. It’s difficult for a country to defend itself from global threats, and in the world of complex relations it’s also hard to collect all the relevant security information on its own. Hybrid threats affecting MNE are pretty much similar to those in the Baltic countries or Poland and cannot be neglected by NATO,“ Mr Đenero told CdM.
According to him, hybrid threats in a contemporary world are more serious than the conventional ones.
“We have a situation that the president of Serbia openly states that he cannot send troops to Montenegro under current circumstances (although it is not clear why he should do so), but he is talking about it as if it was a possible scenario in some previous times.”
