Russia in the cybersecurity doctrines of Poland and the Baltic countries

The development of digital technologies is accompanied by significant positive effects that contribute to economic growth and innovative development. The downside of digitalization is an increase in cyber risks and threats that disrupt the normal functioning of cyberspace. In this regard, states are striving to make the boundaries of the digital space “visible” and ensure their subsequent protection through the development of specialized policies and their alignment with national interests. The higher permeability of digital borders of the state compared to physical ones and their virtual nature have led to the emergence of completely new challenges to the security of countries and their associations. Ensuring cybersecurity has become not only a civilian, but also a military task. The extreme degree of cyber conflict between countries– cyber warfare – has a hybrid form and requires the protection not only of digital data and information, but also of territorially defined critical infrastructure. As digital technologies penetrate political and public processes, governments are increasingly developing their own strategic and policy documents in the field of cybersecurity and revising them to take into account changing conditions. This study focuses on the Baltic countries and Poland, which have been actively increasing their cyber potential over the last decade, moving from exclusively defensive tasks to the development of active offensive cyber capabilities in cooperation with the EU, NATO and directly with the United States. The purpose of the article is to assess the image of Russia in the national cybersecurity strategies of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Poland. The territorial proximity of these countries to Russia and the unfriendly nature of their foreign policy towards it determined the relevance of this study, which took place in several stages. At the first stage, an assessment was made of the level of development of cyberspace in selected countries (including the dynamics of employment indicators and the contribution of the digital sector to the economy, the use of digital technologies). The second stage identifies the institutional features of the formation of national cybersecurity systems and the strategic goals of their functioning. The third stage provides an analysis of the image of Russia as a subject of international cyber processes in the key strategic documents of the Baltic countries and Poland on cybersecurity. The study shows that the main threat to the national security of the countries under study is has been defined as their vulnerability to Russian cyber attacks and the development of cyber potential is positioned as a forced and proportionate response to a potential cyber threat from Russia.