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Mariam Megrelishvili is a Senior Expert at the Center for Strategic Communications (CSC) of the Strategic Security Initiative (SSI). She specializes in political analysis and international relations. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in International Relations, as well as a master’s degree in European Interdisciplinary Studies from the College of Europe. Throughout her 14-year career, Mariam has held various key positions in both the government and private sectors. Her areas of expertise include hybrid warfare, strategic communications, and energy security.
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
Humans in the Loop, Accountability in Limbo
This October, the Future Forces exhibition and summit came to my own city, Prague, running from 21 to 23 October 2026. Czech President Petr Pavel opened the event, setting the tone for three days in which defense was treated as a meeting point for technology, policy and the people who use both. The organizers counted more than 12,500 participants from over 80 countries, including governments, armed forces, industry, research institutions and international organizations. More
5 days ago
Switzerland Names Russia: What Bern’s New Security Strategy Says About Hybrid Attacks and Polarisation
On 18 September 2026, the Swiss government's English-language X account posted two sentences and a link. In response to the deteriorating security situation, it said, Switzerland had set three objectives, and the Federal Council had adopted its Security Policy Strategy 2026. The post drew 29.6 million views on an account where posts usually reach a few thousand people. Its post on the 1 August national day speech reached about 5,700 views. Online audience and commenters took
Oct 27
Bridging the Tumen River: Symbolism and the Strategic Importance of the Yakov Novichenko Bridge
With Putin’s foreign policy agenda predominantly focused on the campaign for Ukraine, anti-Western rhetoric, and resistance against international economic and trade sanctions, the Yakov Novichenko bridge puts a spotlight on his interests in the Far East. As China’s President Xi entertains continuous talks with the Trump administration, Russian interest in outcompeting China for influence in North Korea, paired with the toll of the wartime manufacturing demands, makes the brid
Oct 22
The Propaganda Shutdown That Never Happened: When Infrastructure Damage Becomes an Information Operation
On 8 October 2026, a Ukrainian drone strike damaged a data centre operated by Russian technology company Yandex in Sasovo, in Russia’s Ryazan region. Further strikes affected facilities in Kaluga and Vladimir on 9 and 11 October, disrupting services across Yandex’s digital ecosystem. Within days, another claim began circulating: Russian propaganda bots had gone silent. The claim was compelling, but the evidence did not support it. Viral charts showed a sharp decline in automa
Oct 20
Weaponising the Unrest: How Russia Exploits Europe’s Political Divisions
On Sunday, 18 October, France woke up to what the press described as a hungover from a day of unrest. The cost-of-living protests from the previous day, had drawn more than 550,000 people, according to the Interior Ministry, and 800,000 according to the organisers. By the end of the day, 1,200 people were arrested and 150 police officers were injured. In Limoges, fire destroyed much of the 19th-century town, while AFP reporters described scenes more intense than those witnes
Oct 19
United We Stand? The Future of Transatlantic Security After Warsaw
The 2026 Warsaw Security Forum, which brought political leaders, military commanders and security experts to the Polish capital on October 12-13, sharpened a question that has hung over European security since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine: can the transatlantic Alliance adapt to a more demanding strategic environment without weakening the political and military cohesion that has protected the continent for more than seven decades? Over two days of debate on NATO’s
Oct 14
Climate Security in the Arctic: A Geostrategic Outlook within the Transatlantic Cohesion Prism
Through the prism of transatlantic cohesion, the Arctic is best understood not as a single theatre but as a refracting lens: developments that appear primarily environmental, economic or institutional on their own terms consistently resolve, once passed through this prism, into questions of Allied unity. Climate change is reshaping the High North's physical and operational environment, altering sea-ice extent, maritime accessibility, infrastructure resilience and the conditio
Oct 13
Russia's Slow-Motion Interference: What the 2026 Election Cycle Reveals About European Resilience
2026 and 2027 will decide as much about Europe's political future as 2020-2022 did. Most major EU states will go to the polls during that period, and the stakes are structural. European polarisation driven by geopolitical strain and economic pressure is making European foreign policy weaker, because unanimity-based instruments (sanctions renewal, common defence commitments, a shared reading of the "common European home") all depend on a political centre that polarisation erod
Oct 7
The Kaliningrad Dilemma: When Deterrence Creates the Risk It Is Meant to Prevent
For most of the confrontation between Russia and NATO since 2022, both sides have operated within an uncomfortable but relatively recognizable boundary. NATO has strengthened its eastern flank, expanded military readiness and continued supporting Ukraine while avoiding direct participation in the war. Russia, meanwhile, has responded with military deployments, nuclear signaling and increasingly confrontational rhetoric, but has stopped short of deliberately attacking NATO ter
Oct 2
When War Comes Home: The Kremlin’s Challenge of Narrative Control
For much of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, the Kremlin has benefited from a certain distance between the battlefield and everyday life. The war could be presented as a distant military operation, while its costs and consequences remained unevenly distributed across Russian society. That distance is becoming harder to maintain. On 20 September, as Russians went to the polls on the final day of parliamentary elections, Moscow and the surrounding region came under what
Sep 29
The Politics of Not Blinking First: Washington and Beijing After the Summit
Three days (23-25 September), one confirmed deliverable up front, and a wider deal that only fully surfaced afterward. Treasury Secretary Bessent opened the visit by extending the Busan trade truce (due to expire on 10 November) to 10 January. By the time President Xi departed, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs published an official report of eight-point consensus reached during the talks: a reciprocal tariff-reduction package, a new trade council, and the launch of an
Sep 28
When Hybrid Attacks Stay Below Article 5: Europe’s Strategic Communications Problem
Finally, Europe is not debating whether hybrid attacks are a real security threat. The question now is how to respond when the hostile activity is serious enough to threaten national security and actually falls below the threshold of a conventional hard power projection and armed attack. The past few weeks have brought the problem into sharper focus. Germany formally attributed the August drone incident at Leipzig/Halle Airport to Russia (DW, 2026). Days later, a NATO fight
Sep 25
Splitting the Atoms, Not the Alliance: Turkey, Russia, and Akkuyu Power Plant
This September, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) conference in Bishkek marks the latest development in the decade-long cooperation on the Akkuyu nuclear power plant (NPP) deal between Russia and Turkey. The heads of state used the sidelines of the summit to emphasize their commitment to strengthening the cooperation. This partnership signals that Akkuyu NPP is not a one-time project, but arguably, rather a long-term foundation of Russian energy and industrial prese
Sep 22
Seeing the Threat, Understanding It Too Narrowly: What 9/11 Still Has to Teach NATO
Twenty-five years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the temptation is to mark the anniversary by retelling the day itself, the burning towers, the grounded flights, the images that an entire generation absorbed before it fully understood what it was watching. That story has already been told many times over, in documentaries, congressional hearings, and the exhaustive record of the 9/11 Commission. The more useful anniversary exercise is harder: asking not what happene
Sep 10
Resilience as Power: Strategic Communication and Security in Small States
In recent years the nature of security transformed. Contemporary threats increasingly extend beyond conventional military confrontation, targeting institutions, societies, and democratic processes through disinformation, cyberattacks, political interference, and other forms of hybrid activity. Rather than seeking immediate territorial gains, such threats frequently aim to undermine public trust, weaken institutional legitimacy, and exploit societal vulnerabilities. n this con
Aug 3
A Regional Blind Spot: Closing the Cybersecurity Gap in the V4 Regional Cooperation
Péter Magyar's landslide victory over Viktor Orbán in Hungary's April 2026 parliamentary election did more than end sixteen years of Fidesz rule. It reopened a regional format, the Visegrad Four, that had been effectively dormant since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. On June 23, Magyar hosted the prime ministers of Poland, Czechia, and Slovakia at the Grassalkovich Palace in Gödöllő for the first V4 summit in two years, declaring simply, "V4 is back." The four leade
Jul 18
Palantir's European Exits and the Unresolved Question of Strategic Autonomy
France's Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu did not lead with cost overruns or technical failure when he announced in June 2026 that the DGSI would end its relationship with Palantir in favour of French firm ChapsVision. He led with a question of control. France, he said, could not depend on partners capable of cutting access to critical technology at will, on their own terms, for their own reasons. The concern was not hypothetical. It had just been demonstrated. Weeks earlier,
Jul 18
Scroll, Rage, Vote: TikTok as a Hybrid Threat and How the AfD and Die Linke Are Rewiring German Youth Politics
In Germany, a quiet yet rapidly developing hybrid threat is emerging: the smartphone screen. Unlike conventional warfare with tanks and troops, this could be fought with algorithms, anger, and a generation of young voters being drawn towards political extremes. TikTok, a platform owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance and used by more than 20 millions of the German population, has become the most influential space for political persuasion and manipulation in the country, par
Jul 18
Missile Defense Becomes Collective: Europe's Next Security Architecture
For years, Europe treated missile defense as a supporting capability. That assumption has changed in favor of strategic priorities. The decision by Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine and the United Kingdom to establish a defensive Anti-Ballistic Missile Coalition is more than another multinational defense initiative. It reflects a broader shift in European security thinking, one that recognizes long range missile threats as a defi
Jul 14
Beyond Sanctions: How UK-EU Coordination Is Shaping Cyber Deterrence
On July 13, the United Kingdom and the European Union unveiled their first coordinated cyber sanctions package against Russia, targeting senior intelligence officials, cybercriminals, front companies, malware operators, and disinformation actors involved in Russia's hybrid operations. Alongside the sanctions, the EU and the UK jointly attributed a cyberattack against Poland's energy infrastructure to Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), while France and Germany summoned R
Jul 14
Cognitive Strikes as part of Russian Active Measures
Recently leaked internal files attributed to Russia’s Social Design Agency (SDA) have exposed a set of coordinated influence operations targeting European societies. The SDA, a Russian firm already sanctioned by the US, UK and EU for spreading “deceptive Kremlin propaganda,” operates as a contractor of the Russian Presidential Administration. The leaked documents, obtained by investigative journalists, include internal reports, planning documents and private communications be
Jul 6
When Deterrence Becomes Disruption: Nuclear Signaling as a Hybrid Threat
Nuclear influence has moved beyond its launch button and nuclear weapons no longer need to be deployed to reshape global security. A range of non-kinetic measures can now alter political calculations, generate strategic anxiety, and erode international legal frameworks without triggering the threshold of an armed conflict. Deterrence postures of Nuclear weapons states (NWSs) are also visibly changing with nuclear spending on the rise, as geopolitical competition persists, and
Jul 6
Occupied Without Annexation: Belarus Inside Russia's War Machine
On June 19, Volodymyr Zelensky issued an ultimatum, giving Alexander Lukashenko one week. Four relay stations were identified on the territory of Belarus, in the regions of Gomel and Brest, installed on communications towers, which are normally used to guide Russian Shahed and Geran drones through their final approach vectors towards Volyn, Rivne and Zhytomyr. These stations have been operating since the second half of 2025, and it was in March 2026 when intelligence communit
Jun 28
Évian G7 in Review: Russian Escalation, the U.S-Iran Memorandum, and the Road to Ankara
The 52nd G7 Summit concluded in Évian-les-Bains on 17 June 2026, but the gathering that emerged looked different from the one France had planned. Paris had hoped to focus on economic resilience, critical minerals, and artificial intelligence governance. Instead, leaders spent much of the summit responding to a rapidly changing security environment shaped by developments around Iran and Ukraine. More than any formal agenda item, these events defined the tone and outcomes of th
Jun 19
Reframing the “Post-Soviet” as a Postcolonial Condition: Rethinking Empire, Influence, and Power in Eurasia
Photo: OpenAI By Louis Sandro Zarandia When analysts struggle to explain why Georgia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Moldova or Armenia keep finding themselves at the centre of geopolitical crises, they tend to reach for familiar explanations: democratic deficiency, corruption, institutional weakness, a region caught between Russia and the West. What these explanations share, beyond their condescension, is a common blind spot. They treat the symptoms while refusing to name the disease.
Jun 18
From the Third Rome to the Burning Lavra: Religion as a Tool of Russian Power Projection
Photo: OpenAI By Megi Benia The Russian strike that damaged the Dormition Cathedral of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra is more than an attack on a UNESCO World Heritage Site or one of the holiest places in Eastern Orthodoxy. It exposes a deeper contradiction that has long characterized Russia's relationship with religion, history, and power. For centuries, Russia has sought to portray itself as the heir to the Orthodox Christian world through the policy of the "Third Rome." Following
Jun 15
A New Hybrid Figure: CEO Diplomacy and the Changing Architecture of Great-Power Competition
Source: OpenAI By Tamar Shengelia When a semiconductor CEO travels with the president, he is no longer just a businessman. And when a rival power targets his company while he sits at the negotiating table, he is no longer just a businessman either. The Beijing summit of May 2026 revealed the emergence of a new geopolitical figure: the CEO-diplomat. The Beijing summit offered a revealing glimpse into the evolving role of the technology CEO in contemporary geopolitics, with the
Jun 14
The Shift No Longer Symbolic: Marco Rubio’s Armenia Visit and Power Dynamics in the South Caucasus
Photo: OpenAI By Megi Benia Contributors: Tinatin Gachechiladze, Mariam Gamdlishvili, Mariam Orjonikidze Wägmark On May 26, 2026, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visit days before the Parliamentary election in Armenia became one of the most strategically consequential moments in recent Western engagement in the South Caucasus. Unlike previous high-level visits focused primarily on democratic reform or economic cooperation, Rubio’s visit was overwhelmingly security-orien
May 27
Ambiguity as Strategy: What the Beijing Visits Revealed About Strategic Communication and Power
Photo: OpenAI By Mariam Gamdlishvili and Ketevan Jakeli Within less than a week in May 2026, Beijing hosted both: Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. The sequence itself became part of the message. In practical terms, the visits focused on trade, security, sanctions, and geopolitical competition. Symbolically, however, they communicated something broader: China increasingly sees itself - and wants to be seen - not just as a participant in global affairs, but as the diplomatic
May 27
International Law O'Clock: Is the Prohibition on the Use of Force Meaningless?
Photo: OpenAI By Konstantina Zivla The question is no longer whether the prohibition on the use of force (Article 2(4) of the UN Charter) is technically in force - it is. The question is whether it remains meaningful in a world where three permanent members of the Security Council appear willing to abandon it, and where the Council itself is paralysed by the veto system. The short answer is: No, it is not meaningless. But it is no longer the rigid, inviolable wall it was des
May 20
The Parade That Couldn’t Perform: The Limits of Russian Symbolic Power
Photo: OpenAI By Irina Mamulashvili and Sydney Sheinfeld This year's Victory Day parade in Russia was, for the first time in nearly twenty years, devoid of tanks, armoured vehicles, and ballistic missiles. There was no internet access in Moscow. A three-day ceasefire had been negotiated via Washington in order to prevent an attack by Ukraine during the celebration of the holiday. These are not the conditions under which a state projects strength. They are the conditions under
May 14
Beyond Messaging: Strategic Communication as Statecraft
Photo: OpenAI By Mariam Gamdlishvili Strategic communication is still widely misunderstood. It is treated as messaging - something that follows policy, explains it, or, in the worst case, tries to repair it. This is not just inaccurate; it is strategically dangerous. Communication actually does not sit or set downstream of policy. It is inseparable from how policy is experienced, interpreted, and ultimately judged. Neville Bolt offers a rigorous definition of StratComms: th
Apr 28
Strategic Autonomy or Strategic Illusion: Europe's Defense Dilemma
Photo: Open AI By Tinatin Gachechiladze For the last thirty years, the concept of European strategic autonomy has been cycling between aspiration and institutional reality. The defense dilemma Europe deals with is not new, but it has never been more profound. The continent possesses solid economic weight, an industrial base, and political institutions to strengthen its own security. Regardless, it has not done so. On paper, Europe's means look formidable: European NATO allies
Apr 22
National Resilience as the First Line of Defense
Photo: AI Gemini By Megi Benia For much of the modern era, national defense was understood primarily in military terms. Security was measured through force posture, troop readiness, weapons systems, territorial control, and the capacity to defeat an external aggressor. Those elements remain indispensable. No serious state can ignore conventional defence. Yet the strategic environment has changed. Many of today’s most consequential threats do not begin with armored formations
Apr 16
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