European Commissioner Andrius KUBILIUS in Sweden
6 November 2026
Contents updated on 6 Nov 2026
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European Commission
Follow its sittings00:00 - 00:52
Speaker 3
Now, with that said, I will right away jump into the first panel, and I'm extremely honored and happy to have with us here Commissioner Andrius Kubilius, Commissioner responsible for Space and Defence, and Minister for Defence from Sweden, Pål Jonson. So, please join me here, and welcome to you both. Very welcome here to Stockholm, and nice to have you here. And we thought rather than having keynote speeches and introductions, we will have this as a common discussion, and we will also open for questions from you, which I think certainly you will have. So, let's start thinking about where we are in terms of security in Europe.
What's the diagnosis? How would you describe where we find ourselves today? Can I start with you, Minister Jonson?
00:52 - 02:40
Speaker 4
Sure. We're at a very dire point for European security due to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and what we are, of course, observing is that Russia might not be as strong as some people have assumed, but it doesn't make it less dangerous because it has a propensity to take great political and military risks. It shows a great deal of brutality not at least inside Ukraine, and right now it has some tactical adventures currently when it comes to the production of ballistic missiles, when it comes to jet-driven Shahed drones or Geran-2, and also when it comes to glide bombs, which makes our Ukrainian friends being very much military challenged right now on the long-range strike capabilities, in conjunction, of course, that Russia has high ambitions to reconstitute their armed forces and come back bigger, so to speak, by going up, possibly to 1.5 million soldiers, and of course go wherever they have brigades right now, they're going to go up to divisions, where they have divisions, they're going to go up to army corps and so forth. So, this is there's going to be a lot of military expansions most likely from the Russia, and that's why it's so important that us Europeans are able to transform economic clout into combat power in this challenging times, and do it quickly on base on the basis of the agreement at The Hague. Last point then, of course, what we are seeing also is a propensity of Russia to take greater risk when it comes to this hybrid operations.
And I'm thinking about everything from disinformation to cyber element, both CNA and CNE, and we're also seeing acts of sabotage, such as in Leipzig, in Germany, in Poland, and Estonia to mention a few.
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