Croatian Parliament Speaker Gordan Jandrokovic took part in a meeting with his counterparts from Central Europe and Italy in Salzburg on Thursday, where they discussed hybrid threats. He warned that Croatia's neighbourhood is currently "both the target and the source of numerous hybrid threats".

In addition to the host of the informal meeting in the Austerlitz+ format, Austrian National Council President Wolfgang Sobotka, the discussion was also attended by heads of state and government and representatives of the parliaments of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia and Italy, the Parliament said in a press release.

Josef Schröfl, Deputy Director of the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats in Helsinki, gave the keynote speech. The most important topics were hybrid threats, the dangers they pose to democracies, the current situation in the Western Balkans and EU enlargement.

Hybrid threats are on the rise worldwide and Croatia’s immediate neighbourhood, the Western Balkans, is “currently both a target and a source of numerous hybrid threats,” Jandrokovic said.

“The aim of such undesirable activities is usually to divert the Western Balkan states towards actors pursuing a completely different agenda than the Euro-Atlantic one, which the states of the region have politically opted for and which is in the interests of the European Union and NATO. All this requires extraordinary caution from the member states of these alliances if we want to avoid undoing some political processes and if we want to prevent possible new crisis situations in the future,” he added.

He called for increased cooperation between countries to combat hybrid threats and emphasised that “malicious actors, both external and internal, are trying every day to undermine our democracies and electoral processes, as well as the rules-based world order and our way of life.”

“If we want to successfully deal with current and future hybrid challenges and preserve our democratic values, a strong leadership role of state institutions in coordination with civil society and with intensive international cooperation is necessary,” said Jandrokovic.