From intelligence scandals to Russia’s shadow war:  Ex-Estonian defense chief Hanno Pevkur discusses Europe’s security challenges

But it's really hard for the public, right, to understand that Russia is behind it when you've got a government that's sort of really, really careful before doing such an attribution for reasons that can be explained.

But people are saying now we need to give it a different name.

We should stop calling it a hybrid war because that just doesn't somehow translate to people's minds.

Some people are suggesting the term shadow war.

What do you think?

Well, I've said that already for a long time, that, you know, let's forget the phrase hybrid war, because when you take all this action, what Russia is doing, this is just... everything they can do before we can call it a war.

And then when you go back in history, we've seen assassination attempts, we've seen poisoning attempts also before.

And as we just now see that this is expanding to so many different fields like undersea cables, airports, cyber attacks, then we try to put it together as a hybrid war, as one phrase or one definition.

But for me, it's not the question of the hybrid.

It's just Russian activities against our freedoms, our people and our societies.