30 Dec 2025 4 min read

When “Putin’s house” becomes a headline, Europe should read it as a digital systems test

On December 29th 2025, Russian officials claimed that Ukraine tried to attack Putin’s residence with long-range drones, while Ukraine denied the accusation and framed it as a pretext for escalation. Reuters reported that the claim could not be independently verified and that Ukraine rejected responsibility.

Whether the specific incident occurred exactly as claimed is almost beside the point for European strategy. What matters is how quickly an emotionally loaded story can be injected into global media cycles, social platforms, diplomatic discourse, and domestic politics — and then used to justify decisions that reshape Europe’s security environment.

That is the core of hybrid conflict in the digital age. It is not built on one decisive lie, but on a continuous churn of claims, counterclaims, selective evidence, and narrative timing, often synchronized with military, diplomatic, and economic objectives. The European External Action Service explicitly defines this as Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference, aimed at weakening democratic processes and societal cohesion.

Digital dependence is not a tech issue; it is leverage

Europe’s dependence on US hyperscale cloud providers, platform ecosystems, ad-tech infrastructure, identity services, and increasingly closed AI stacks is not simply a market outcome. It represents latent geopolitical leverage.

Infrastructure determines who sets rules, who enforces them, and who can apply pressure when political interests diverge. Export controls, sanctions enforcement, jurisdictional reach, and contractual lock-in all become more powerful when critical systems are externally controlled. The European Commission has acknowledged this risk repeatedly in its work on strategic autonomy and digital sovereignty.

This is not so much an anti-American argument. It is a pro-European resilience argument. Allies can still have misaligned incentives, and administrations can change faster than infrastructure can be replaced.

Build digital sovereignty the boring way

Europe’s best strategy is not a single flagship platform or a symbolic “EU cloud.” It is a multi-year effort to make Europe harder to coerce, harder to disrupt, and harder to manipulate by controlling critical layers of its own digital stack.

The EU already has partial building blocks: cyber defence cooperation, hybrid threat monitoring, and initiatives focused on cloud, data, and edge infrastructure.

The missing element is coherence. Without strict interoperability requirements, open standards, and enforceable exit options, Europe risks replacing one dependency with another.

Cyberspace must be treated as a defence domain

The EU’s Strategic Compass formally recognizes cyberspace as a domain of conflict and calls for stronger collective cyber defence capabilities. Yet cyber security is still too often treated as an IT or compliance function rather than as an expression of national power. NATO’s Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence illustrates what maturity looks like: permanent exercises, doctrine development, and operational readiness across borders. For Europe, this means investing in shared threat intelligence, joint response mechanisms, and standing cyber capabilities so that attacks against one member state are immediately treated as systemic threats.

Hybrid threats are often described as a mixture of cyberattacks, disinformation, economic coercion, and political interference. What ties them together is digital infrastructure: identity systems, content distribution platforms, and trust mechanisms.

The EU’s Hybrid Fusion Cell and FIMI reporting show how coordinated information operations target elections, public debate, and institutional credibility.
Europe’s response must therefore focus on verifiable identity, transparency of amplification, and institutional trust. Without these, deepfakes, impersonation, and coordinated manipulation remain cheap and effective tools.

Open source as a security strategy

Open source is not primarily about cost. It is about control. The European Commission explicitly frames open source software as a pillar of digital sovereignty, security, and resilience. Open systems reduce single-vendor dependency, allow independent audits, enable forks in crisis situations, and support competitive ecosystems. These characteristics matter far more in geopolitics than licensing models.

European initiatives such as Sovereign Edge Europe aim to build open, federated edge and cloud infrastructure aligned with EU governance and values.

Europe does not need one centralised cloud provider. It needs portability, interoperability, and enforceable data governance.

Gaia-X, despite its challenges, represents an attempt to define rules and standards rather than impose a single platform. https://gaia-x.eu/ Similarly, the EU’s data spaces strategy focuses on sector-specific data sharing under European governance. Industrial programmes such as the IPCEI on Next Generation Cloud Infrastructure and Services aim to strengthen European capabilities in cloud and edge computing. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_23_6265

AI sovereignty is about models, compute, and governance

As AI becomes embedded in public administration, defence, and economic planning, dependency risks intensify. Closed models and proprietary APIs concentrate power and constrain policy choices. Europe’s approach must combine open models for transparency, European compute capacity for strategic workloads, and strong governance frameworks under democratic control.

Election interference is a long-term campaign

Multiple investigations and reports have documented sustained Russian efforts to influence elections in the United States and Europe. The mistake is treating each incident as an isolated scandal. Election interference is a persistent strategy designed to erode trust over time. Europe’s response must therefore be structural: hardened election infrastructure, cross-border intelligence sharing, transparency in political advertising, and continuous civic resilience.

Software is strategic infrastructure

Europe understands defence industrial policy when it comes to hardware. Software deserves the same treatment. Operating systems, cloud orchestration, secure communication tools, identity management, and monitoring systems are now critical infrastructure. The EU’s cyber defence policy increasingly acknowledges this reality. Funding maintenance, audits, and long-term support for critical open source components would deliver disproportionate strategic returns.

Resilience, not isolation

Strategic autonomy does not mean isolation. It means the ability to function under pressure. Europe succeeds when it can switch providers without paralysis, counter information operations without panic, and absorb cyber shocks without political concessions. When that happens, dramatic headlines — whether about Putin’s residence or something else — lose their destabilising power.

Europe already has many of the pieces. What remains is the political will to assemble them into a coherent, durable system before the next crisis forces the issue.