cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/8633601

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was preceded by something less visible but equally deliberate: a sustained information offensive designed to paralyze Western decision-making, fracture allied cohesion, and make the invasion seem if not justified, then at least comprehensible to confused audiences. By the time Russian tanks crossed the border, the information war had already been running for years.

Archived version

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The aim of Russian disinformation campaigns is not to convince audiences of a single false narrative. It is to generate doubt, confusion, and informational exhaustion. After Russia shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 in July 2014, killing 298 people, Russian-linked outlets promoted multiple mutually contradictory explanations — including Ukrainian responsibility and Western fabrication — within the same news cycle.

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Moscow’s foreign information manipulation is an integral component of its military doctrine, what Western analysts call the “Gerasimov doctrine” after Valery Gerasimov, Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. It views information warfare as a critical element of kinetic operations, deployed alongside cyberattacks, attacks on infrastructure, and covert action.

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The Kremlin’s disinformation system is sustained by serious institutional investment. State-controlled television network RT alone receives over €350 million per year in state subsidies. Russia’s 2025 and 2026 federal budgets each allocated approximately €1.5 billion to state-controlled media, a nearly 30 percent increase over 2021 levels. The Internet Research Agency’s Project Lakhta, the operation behind the 2016 U.S. election interference campaign, ran on a monthly budget of $1.25 million.

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European responses to Russian disinformation address important components of the problem, but they do not yet add up to a system. France’s VIGINUM, established in 2021, provides rule-based detection of foreign digital interference. EUvsDisinfo, run by the East StratCom Task Force, has documented and attributed pro-Kremlin narratives since 2015. During COVID-19, the Re-open EU platform demonstrated that a single authoritative information reference point can function effectively under pressure. Before Russia’s 2022 invasion, the United States and United Kingdom publicly released intelligence to pre-empt Russia’s planned false-flag narratives, a prebunking operation that complicated Moscow’s information strategy and helped sustain allied cohesion.

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Additionally, the EU’s most prominent counter-disinformation initiatives — including EUvsDisinfo and the European Digital Media Observatory — operate on budgets in the €2–11 million range per initiative. Even in aggregate, identifiable EU-level spending amounts to tens of millions to low hundreds of millions of euros.

The EU’s defenses, designed mostly for peacetime communications challenges, are now being tested by a wartime adversary, and they are not up to the challenge. In the brief, we describe three structural changes that could substantially improve Europe’s position.

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