May 9 is Europe Day, marked to commemorate the beginning of the European integration and celebrate peace and unity in the Old Continent. In the recent years, European security and defence capacity has been actively enhanced through the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO), Lithuania is engaged in seven project of the format, one of which it coordinates. “We are honing a unified EU response to large-scale cyber security incidents and crises,” Vice Minister of National Defence Margiris Abukevičius says and expands about the importance and meaning of the Lithuanian-led PESCO project.
Today the European Union is a unique economic and political family of 27 European countries that develops policies across different areas, including security and defence, with an emphasis on the point that the European countries can do more together than separately.
It was laid out in the Treaty of Lisbon that came into force in 2009 that the EU members with military capabilities matching higher criteria should deepen security and defence cooperation. After a review of new security challenges and threats, the EU activated the possibility and developed the PESCO instrument in December 2017.
The aim of PESCO is to develop critical military capabilities together and to deploy them to EU operations. The projects encompass various areas and are developed through cooperation of separate countries that have better expertise or more experience in those areas. Lithuania has taken up to coordinate cooperation in the area of cyber security.
“The EU cooperation on cyber security to date has mainly concerned information exchange, however, there was a real need for a EU-level capability suitable for responding to a large cybersecurity crisis. Lithuania took the initiative to create an operational multilateral force – it has been developed very quickly and has been on standby successfully for two years already,” tells M. Abukevičius.
The PESCO project on Cyber Rapid Response Teams and Mutual Assistance in Cyber Security that Lithuania coordinates is currently one of the most progressed and successful PESCO projects. It has been listed among those to reach Full Operation Capacity (FOC) by 2025.
The international CRRT on standby is formed by experts from all the contributing countries: Lithuania, Poland, Netherlands, Romania, Croatia, and Estonia. Two joint cybersecurity exercises have been planned for this year.
“The CRRT has been tested in exercises and real-life situations. One of the recent situations in which it proved very useful was the latest elections to the Seimas of the Republic of Lithuania. The team was on the ground here and helped testing cyber resilience in the election digital systems,” says M. Abukevičius.
Intense cooperation is maintained with the EU Military Staff (EUMS) and legal and procedural aspects are refined in order to ensure effective deployment of PESCO CRRTs in support of EU authorities, agencies and institutions.
“The project led by Lithuania has given rise to a legal and procedural basis. That was not given, in fact, deployment of a multinational team to another country is a challenge. However, we have found solutions to legal issues and agreed on clear-cut procedures, such as, decision-making deadlines, redeployment deadlines, etc., working together in the team framework,” Vice Minister pointed out the successes of the project.
Photo credits: G. Maksimovicz-Alkema/MoD.
