In February 2022, when Russia mounted its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Western democracies came together in a remarkable show of unity in support of Ukraine and of democratic principles. They referred to Ukraine’s fight as a fight for democracy and a global rules-based order. They imposed sanctions on the aggressor, undertook massive shifts in energy independence and military spending, welcomed large numbers of Ukrainian refugees, and collaborated to provide the beleaguered country with financial assistance, intelligence and strategic support, and military aid – all critical to its survival in its David versus Goliath struggle with its larger, and more powerful, neighbor. As of this writing, two years into the fighting, the situation looks bleaker. In late 2023, Ukraine’s then top general publicly lamented the state of fighting as reaching a “stalemate” in which no major breakthrough was immediately likely. While the two armies stand bogged down in an attritional phase of war where lines move little, Ukraine’s military now runs low on munitions. In the absence of some course correction, observers increasingly point to a long-term Russian advantage. At the same time, discussions of continued aid on both sides of the Atlantic have faced intensified political challenges.
The fight on the battlefield will be crucial to Ukraine’s future – as well as to transatlantic security and democracy, and global order. But this fight itself hinges on the continued unity and collaboration across Western democratic partners that have provided critical aid and assistance to enable Ukraine’s remarkable show of resistance until this point. This coalition is premised on trust and shared values across Ukraine and its democratic partners. It depends upon electoral outcomes, domestic politics, and multinational organization processes across Europe, the United States, and beyond. As such, it has many seams of vulnerability – even without deliberate adversarial action. It has also been targeted persistently by Russian information and influence campaigns throughout the war and before, seeking to undermine unified support for Ukraine’s war effort across Western democracies. In so doing, Moscow seeks also to undermine future confidence in one of the West’s greatest strengths – its strength in numbers of allies and partners willing to collaborate around a shared vision.
In recent years, democracies have faced fundamental challenges in addressing the threat of adversarial disinformation aimed at undermining trust in and functioning of key democratic institutions and processes. These challenges are sufficiently daunting at the national level. They have led to significant, if nascent, innovations to mitigate impacts, foster trust and resilience, and simultaneously protect core democratic values. But the challenge does not stop at national borders. Nondemocratic competitors frequently use coordinated cyber-enabled disinformation and influence campaigns strategically at a regional or international level. They aim to undermine cooperation between democracies, break alliance cohesion, and otherwise use interference in the democratic politics of individual countries to foster broader geopolitical and strategic gains. No event in the past decade better illustrates this challenge than the war in Ukraine and Russia’s multipronged efforts to influence transatlantic cooperation in support of Ukraine. But the war has also fostered new forms of strategic awareness and adaptation.
This chapter examines the role of cyber-enabled information and influence in relation to transatlantic support for Ukraine as a case study of the challenge of addressing transnational coordinated strategic disinformation campaigns. Specifically, the chapter examines Russia’s uses of multipronged disinformation and influence campaigns in attempts to influence transatlantic support for Ukraine by democratic partners and allies, scrutinizing how the Kremlin has targeted within- and cross-national vulnerabilities as part of broader strategic goals. Investigating what has been done by democratic target countries, individually and collaboratively, to mitigate the worst outcomes and potential strategic impacts, this chapter in turn examines existing mechanisms of coordination and cooperation by which democracies have sought to address this strategically motivated threat, their current adequacy to the task, as well as ongoing learning and adaptation in this area.
The remainder of the chapter is divided into three sections. The first section, “Democracies and the Transnational Disinformation Challenge,” examines the nature of today’s strategic, transnational, cyber-enabled information and influence campaigns as a challenge to democracy writ large, and as a particularly complex challenge to international unity and collaboration across democratic partners and allies. The Ukraine war has made this threat more obvious than ever before, demonstrating how such campaigns can seek to undermine critical strategic collaboration between democratic countries. The second section, “Support for Ukraine and Russian Strategic Information Campaigns,” considers the role of a broad coalition of democratic partners in support for Ukraine’s quest for self-determination and democracy, examining how Russian efforts to thwart Ukraine’s defense have extended well beyond the battlefield through extensive orchestrated information and influence campaigns across countries and audiences. These campaigns have targeted not only specific actors or countries but also relationships, institutions, and mechanisms of cooperation across democracies that enable the collaborative support effort. The final section, “Conclusion: Defensive Progress and Challenges,” considers the challenge of democratic defenses and resilience to such strategic disinformation campaigns. While democracies have indeed made some progress, the challenge of addressing complex, transnationally orchestrated campaigns remains particularly daunting. The chapter concludes with a call for more robust and strategically aligned collaboration across democracies and in defense of collaborative institutions.
Democracies and the Transnational Disinformation Challenge
Since revelations of Russian efforts to influence the 2016 United States presidential election, democratic countries have been increasingly aware of the threat posed to their domestic political systems from adversarial cyber-enabled information and influence operations and campaigns. Such operations involve the deliberate use of information and narrative to target individuals, groups, or large segments of society, influence perceptions and decision-making processes, and ultimately gain desired strategic outcomes – often utilized during peacetime or gray zone confrontation without resorting to direct military conflict, but also used to complement above-threshold clashes, both within and outside of the theater of armed conflict (Lin & Kerr, Reference Lin and Kerr2019).
By no means entirely new, this form of competition bears deep commonalities with forms of information competition and deception common during earlier historical periods, with Russian use of these techniques particularly bearing similarity to the Soviet “active measures” of the Cold War period (Rid, Reference Rid2020). But the renewed use of such aggressive information confrontation was nonetheless novel in the post–Cold War environment, and the possibilities were also transformed by the fundamentally different twenty-first-century information environment, including the rise of the global internet, online media and social media ecosystems, and ubiquitous data, digital tools, and algorithms. The new forms of operations drew not only on earlier operational techniques but also on rapidly developing cyber domain capabilities, covert manipulations of online media and social media systems, and the multi-vector spread of false, misleading, or manipulative information and narratives. The variety of techniques demonstrated a degree of flexibility, low cost, and scalability that could potentially be much more widely utilized and emulated – particularly by nondemocratic states.
Adversarial disinformation poses particularly salient challenges for democracies. Efforts to sway and polarize public opinion, spread uncertainty and confusion about factual events, influence or undermine faith in the outcomes of elections, and otherwise weaken trust in key institutions and public figures all constitute challenges to core elements of democratic systems. These states share deep commitments to freedoms of expression, association, and information. They support a free and open internet. And they base their governments’ legitimacy on the sanctity of free and fair elections. The online platforms, digital tools, and media outlets utilized in disinformation campaigns often fall under private ownership, cut across multiple jurisdictions, and have their own interests, rules of service, and technical challenges. Foreign hostile disinformation campaigns frequently interact with existing echo chambers, social cleavages, polarized media, fringe politics, divisive conspiracy theories, home-grown mis- and disinformation currents, and other domestic societal dynamics that are vulnerable to further exploitation and manipulation. The problem, therefore, has not been prone to an easy and immediate solution, despite serious efforts by democracies on both sides of the Atlantic.
While a variety of approaches have been attempted to address these challenges at governmental, whole of society, and even intergovernmental levels, the examination of the long-term strategic goals of adversarial campaigns has often been somewhat underdeveloped. Given the types of granular forensic data necessary to track and attribute disinformation operations, the focus has sometimes necessarily dwelt on specific adversarial behaviors or content forms such as the targeting of particular platforms, audiences, or events, the use of particular techniques of manipulation, or the spread of specific false, biased or misleading narratives, pictures, or other content forms. This is critical and challenging analytical work. But its focus is often necessarily at an operational or a tactical level rather than on strategic analysis. Insofar as specific campaign objectives are identified, these often have focused on local and chronologically proximate events, communities, and institutions. Adversarial uses of disinformation might be tied to efforts to generate an in-person protest event, exacerbate local animus between social groups, or undermine support for a political candidate. But the longer term follow-on effects of these coordinated actions and their impacts beyond the given country’s political system are often not the primary focus of inquiry.
The goals of uncovered operations are often broadly characterized in relation to efforts to undermine elections, sow distrust or confusion, and otherwise weaken democracy. While these broad high-level objectives are likely frequently correct, the focus on domestic politics sometimes has obfuscated attention to likely regional, transnational, or global strategic dimensions of adversarial efforts. By interpreting operations in terms of the local political context, issues, and threats to domestic democratic institutions, there has sometimes been inadequate attention to the wider orchestration of campaigns across multiple national political jurisdictions. In some cases, such campaigns might amount simply to efforts to achieve similar outcomes at scale across larger regions or sets of countries. But, in other cases, the attempt to influence dynamics between countries or regions is also critical – whether aimed at affecting foreign policies toward third parties, bi- or multilateral relations between states, the cohesion or policies of alliances or of regional or international organizations, or some other specific system-level interaction or outcome.
We can discern various examples of such higher level strategic logic at work in Russian uses of disinformation campaigns over more than a decade. While often characterized as efforts to create chaos and uncertainty, impart a sense of nihilism, and stand against something rather than for anything, there is also ample evidence that Russian information and influence campaigns have sought specific regional and international outcomes, including to secure influence across the historic region of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, undermine European Union (EU) and transatlantic unity and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance cohesion, diminish international accountability for chemical weapons use, limit uptake of Western COVID-19 vaccines, counter Western security roles in Africa and the Middle East, diminish trust in Western countries across the Global South, win broad support for positions in the United Nations (UN) Global Assembly, and bolster global pro-Russia “conservative” movements and organizational networks.
Russia’s multidimensional use of cyber-enabled information and influence campaigns in relation to efforts to undermine Ukrainian independence stands out as a particularly longstanding and egregious example of such coordinated and long-term efforts across many national jurisdictions. Russia has persistently used a mix of information operations to target Ukraine in support of its own strategic goals since at least the 2013–2014 Euromaidan demonstrations and 2014 Crimea annexation and instigation of conflicts in the Donbas and other regions of Ukraine. This has included direct operations against specific Ukrainian targets and populations such as the 2014 hacking of the Central Election Commission of Ukraine and the attempt to spread doubt and undermine legitimacy of electoral results, the use of non-demarcated military personnel to reduce certainty and speed of attribution processes, and the use of propaganda to sow ethnic tensions and stoke conflict. Efforts have frequently focused on shifting narratives concerning specific events in or pertaining to the conflict with Ukraine, such as the rapid online spread of numerous alternative explanations following the July 2014 downing of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine.
Even these efforts focused directly on the Ukraine conflict have utilized a variety of operations and techniques to pursue interrelated goals. A number of digitally enabled techniques have been used, including, for example, the use of spear phishing to gain unauthorized access, hack-and-leak operations – as well as the release of forged documents – to influence public understanding of the conflict, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks to block access to information at key moments, and the release of wiper malware and cyberattacks destroying data, damaging the economy, and shutting down parts of the power grid. These technical operations have had informational and psychological elements, aiming to affect public opinion or decision-making dynamics – within Ukraine and Russia, but also sometimes beyond. Narratives have also explicitly been weaponized to exacerbate conflict and undermine support for Kyiv, including discussion of “being ‘brother nations’ with a shared history, religion, and culture; mistreatment of Russian-speaking communities in Ukraine and fear of supposed Ukrainian Naziism, portraying the elected government in Kyiv as illegitimate and violent ‘Banderites’ [or fascists]; and nostalgia for and possibility of reclaiming the former Soviet greatness” (Kerr, Reference Kerr2023). A variety of platforms and channels have been utilized to disseminate these messages, ranging from social media to television to official public statements and involving everything from fake online personas to supposedly independent expert speakers and official state sources and outlets.
The Kremlin’s use of information and influence campaigns in its efforts to subjugate Ukraine has also long involved international components. Operations targeting US and European elections, public opinion, or political decisions have often been examined mostly as threats to domestic political systems, potentially damaging to the targeted country’s national security and democracy. But collectively, many of these efforts have also aimed to support Moscow’s broader objectives in Ukraine, clearly supporting politicians, parties, or agendas viewed as most commensurate with these goals. Even the 2016 election interference, often seen as the origin point of Western concern about democratic vulnerability to disinformation, can also be understood as related closely to Moscow’s efforts to achieve desired outcomes in Ukraine, with the former Republican campaign chief Paul Manafort having specifically served as an advisor to Ukraine’s pro-Russia former president Viktor Yanukovych, and the source of the Robert Mueller investigation and first impeachment trial of former US president Donald Trump relating to his handling of relations with Russia and military aid to Ukraine.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the global and multifaceted scope of these efforts has only increased, utilizing coordinated, multifront, often transnational and cyber-enabled disinformation and influence campaigns to achieve its desired objectives in the conflict. This has become all the more important given the complexity and criticality of coordinated Western support for Kyiv’s war effort.
Support for Ukraine and Russian Strategic Disinformation Campaigns
In the opening days of Russia’s war against Ukraine, a broad coalition of democratic countries – including the United States, members of the EU and NATO, and other partners and allies – came together to condemn the invasion and to offer military and economic aid and other forms of assistance. This support has been critical to Ukraine’s ability to defend itself and withstand further Russian conquest during two years of full-scale war. It has involved major contributions by many countries of the transatlantic region and beyond. It has also involved efforts to reinforce and expand European and transatlantic institutions, embrace nonaligned, like-minded countries, and provide pathways toward greater security and integration into the community of democratic states for Ukraine and other non-EU and non-NATO member countries vulnerable to Russian coercion and aggression. All of this has been undertaken against a backdrop of concerns about potential escalation risks, economic and energy interdependencies, and differing levels of military stockpiles, defense industry readiness, and existing policies and cultural attitudes. These efforts have been remarkable, but they also have exposed additional vulnerabilities to Russian disinformation and influence campaigns – which the Kremlin has diligently sought to exploit.
A Transformative Coalition
In the first two years of the war, over forty-one countries have contributed to the support of Ukraine – whether through the sending of arms and ammunition, support for military training, financial assistance, logistic support, acceptance and support of refugees, or other means. These efforts have involved significant financial and economic burdens, changes in policy, and overcoming a panoply of domestic, regional, intraorganizational, and transatlantic obstacles and tensions. Some countries have pledged large percentages of their national heavy weapons and ammunition stockpiles or committed to rapidly producing more as part of their support for Ukraine. Others have accepted large numbers of refugees, served as major logistics and supply hubs, or fundamentally changed aspects of their domestic economies or foreign policies. In addition to the United States and EU and NATO members, this has included G7 countries and others from across Europe and beyond – including contributions, for example, by Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and Taiwan (Bomprezzi et al., Reference Bomprezzi, Dyussimbinov, Frank, Kharitonov and Trebeschn.d.).
As of January 15, 2024, partners have committed some $278 billion in aid since the beginning of the war, including $141.06 billion in financial assistance, $19.01 billion in humanitarian assistance, and $117.99 billion in military commitments (Antezza et al., Reference Antezza, Bushnell, Dyussimbinov, Frank, Frank and Frank2024). While the United States has committed $75.4 billion ($46.33 billion of it military aid), Europe (through the EU and bilateral commitments by individual countries) has collectively committed $183.43 billion ($102.499 billion of it financial and $67.68 billion military aid) (O’Hanlon, Stelzenmüller, & Wessel, Reference O’Hanlon, Stelzenmüller and Wessel2024). According to the Kiel Institute’s “Ukraine Support Tracker” statistics, thirty European countries as well as Canada have actually committed higher percentages of gross domestic product (GDP) than the United States (0.32 percent), though these come as proportions of smaller overall economies. A total of fifteen countries have committed more than 1 percent of their total GDP to the aid effort, led by Estonia (4.09 percent), Denmark (3.06 percent), Lithuania (2.04 percent), Norway (1.72 percent), and Latvia (1.67 percent) (Bomprezzi et al., Reference Bomprezzi, Dyussimbinov, Frank, Kharitonov and Trebeschn.d.). Eastern European countries formerly dominated by Russia have made particularly large proportionate commitments. Of the top fifteen contributors by GDP percentage, seven were former communist states.Footnote 1 European countries have also provided significant support in the form of accepting and assisting Ukrainian refugees – led by Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic, but with fourteen countries accepting refugee numbers greater than 1 percent of their prewar populations.Footnote 2 These countries have also spent substantial amounts on support for the refugees they have taken in, led by Poland spending 3.35 percent of its GDP on this support, followed by the Czech Republic and Bulgaria (each 2.08 percent), Slovakia (1.68 percent), Latvia (1.51 percent), Lithuania (0.98 percent), and Estonia (0.94 percent) (Antezza et al., Reference Antezza, Bushnell, Dyussimbinov, Frank, Frank and Frank2024).
These efforts have involved particularly significant undertakings or dramatic changes in policy by a number of countries critical to the support collaboration. For example, Germany – which has committed the second-most total ($24.2 billion) and military ($19.42 billion) aid of any individual country behind the United States, and a total worth 1.06 percent of its GDP – had to dramatically alter its approach to defense and military production, as well as overturning its trade and energy dependence relations with Russia (Antezza et al., Reference Antezza, Bushnell, Dyussimbinov, Frank, Frank and Frank2024). In his February 27, 2022 speech to the Bundestag, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called the Russian attack on Ukraine a “Zeitenwende,” or “historic turning point,” and announced significant changes in German defense policy and military spending. While gaps remain between commitments and what has actually been delivered to date, this represents a generationally important change in German defense policy. France has also made some substantial changes to its foreign policy as a result of the war effort. Some observers ridiculed French President Emmanuel Macron’s prewar shuttle diplomacy charm offensive and open line to Putin during the first year of the war, seeing these efforts as potentially placating Russia or pressuring Ukraine into negotiation. But, by December 2022, Macron had declared France’s support for Ukraine “all the way to victory” and France had begun heavy arms deliveries to Ukraine. Subsequent changes suggest an increasing support for inclusive European defensive hardening, including a 40 percent increase in France’s defense budget announced in January 2023. Perhaps more significantly, there is also evidence of a changing French approach to European security – including a more positive stance toward further enlargement of the EU and NATO.Footnote 3
Former Soviet Bloc and nonaligned countries on Europe’s Eastern flank have also undertaken dramatic changes in policy and critical supportive efforts. In addition to the substantial aid contributions and refugee support relative to their GDPs and populations, Baltic and East European states have loudly pressured partners for greater supportive efforts. Poland has played a particularly essential role, serving as a hub for logistics – including the transfer of military and humanitarian aid – with its city Rzeszow providing the closest airport to the Ukrainian border. It has also taken in one of the largest total refugee populations with many more transiting through the country to further destinations. Ukraine’s closest European neighbors have also become conduits for shipment of its agricultural products, while Turkey has played an intermittent role in pressuring Russia to allow their Black Sea export.
In addition to specific efforts to provide immediate aid and support for Ukraine, another significant element of the response by democratic partners has involved efforts to consolidate and reinforce structures of cooperation and security across Europe and the transatlantic region. In the first months of the war, Sweden and Finland – which had long maintained a neutral status in relation to NATO – declared their desire to join the alliance and were formally invited at the Madrid Summit in July 2022. Despite intra-alliance tensions that held up the actual accessions, most NATO members rapidly embraced the further integration of these two partner countries, seen as capable of quickly becoming important contributors to the alliance’s defense posture. Western democracies have also come together in an effort to provide pathways forward to secure democratic futures for Ukraine and other non-NATO and non-EU member countries vulnerable to Russian aggression. At NATO’s Vilnius summit in July 2023, the alliance affirmed language that “Ukraine’s future is in NATO” and agreed that, after the war, Ukraine would not be required to go through the formal process of a “membership action plan,” or MAP.Footnote 4 On December 14, 2023, the EU’s current members voted to begin membership accession negotiations with Ukraine and Moldova, also advancing Georgia to candidate status.Footnote 5
Vulnerabilities and Targeting of Ukraine’s Support
The outpouring of support for Ukraine in the face of Russian hostility has marked an impressive, coordinated response, but it has also demonstrated new seams of vulnerability to Russian information and influence campaigns. While some relate to core democratic institutions and protections and processes across democracies, others are due to the historic, cultural, or political specificities of particular states critical to the support efforts – or capable of playing spoilers in those efforts, such as through the EU or NATO. While the individual support of key states is vital in and of itself, some vulnerabilities are explicitly inter- or transnational, related to alliance or regional institutions, bi- or multilateral dynamics, coordination, trust, and cohesion. Russia has made extensive strategic use of cyber-enabled information and influence campaigns during the first two years of the war, including targeting these vulnerabilities in Ukraine’s support coalition. Coordinated campaigns across different national and regional audiences have targeted not only specific countries key to the support effort but also the very relationships, organizations, and mechanisms that have been most critical in enabling a collective unified response.
A review of several known instances of Russian disinformation and influence operations since the start of the full-scale war with Ukraine readily demonstrates this strategic sophistication, both in target selection and often also in coordination of tactics and narratives across jurisdictions. We see this first, for example, in operations targeting countries that are leading providers of military, financial, or humanitarian support. Operations across these countries use similar but tailored tactics, aiming to bolster challenges to support for Ukraine and increase conciliatory positions toward Russia across the right and left extremes of the political spectrum, and spread narratives undermining public support for Ukraine or emphasizing associated risks and harms to national well-being. These efforts began long before the full-scale invasion, cultivating networks of relationships with extreme political parties and movements, fringe media outlets, organizations, politicians, journalists, activists, influencers, and other public figures. They also long involved cultivating digital ecosystems for the laundering and spread of interrelated but tailored disinformation across many platforms.
Since the invasion, not only has the intensity of these efforts increased but they have also focused much more explicitly on the goal of undermining support for Ukraine. Russian cyber-enabled information and influence campaigns seeking to affect the course of the war have targeted numerous audiences, including within Ukraine itself, the Russian public, the Global South, and the West. Building on the relationships, audiences, and techniques cultivated through earlier campaigns and operations, they have sought to “amplify divisive local issues and voices,” “tailor[ing] disinformation and narratives for specific audiences.” They have used a combination of official channels, “state-backed media outlets,” “Russia-linked actors,” and organizations, and “coordinated inauthentic activity on social media platforms.” They have leveraged techniques such as “hack-and-leak operations,” “falsified imagery,” fake copies of trusted websites, and automated systems for the dissemination, laundering, and amplification of fake stories across multiple media ecosystems (Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), 2023; Huntley, Reference Huntley2023; Insikt Group, 2022; Kerr, Reference Kerr2023, p. 17). Through a mix of narratives and covert influence campaigns across numerous countries, they have aimed to discredit the legitimacy or capability of the Ukrainian government and military, spread doubt and fear concerning pro-Ukraine policies, encourage conciliatory approaches to Russia, and foment grievances and division between Ukraine’s supporters (Bronk, Collins, & Wallach, Reference Bronk, Collins and Wallach2022; Kerr, Reference Kerr2023). Narratives of particular prevalence have included those seeking to stoke hostility, fear, and resentment toward Ukrainian refugees; blame Russian sanctions and aid to Ukraine for local economic and social hardships; legitimize Russian actions and blame Ukraine, NATO, or the United States for the war; raise the specter of military escalation to involve supporting countries, nuclear, or other catastrophic threats; and sow distrust in mainstream parties and media of Western democracies as “biased or untruthful” (Aleksejeva, Reference Aleksejeva2023; Kerr, Reference Kerr2023).
Studies both prior to and during the full-scale war show Russia building vast networks for the distribution of targeted disinformation and cultivation and manipulation of supportive actors and publics across Europe and the United States, often appearing to particularly emphasize those countries most critical to the Ukraine support effort. For example, the EUvsDisinfo Database – a project of the European External Action Service (EEAS) East StratCom Taskforce – found that Germany was the European country most targeted by disinformation campaigns recorded in their data for the 2015–2021 period leading up to the war, with 700 cases collected. During this same period, their data showed France as the second-most targeted, with 300 cases. Comparative studies by the EU DisinfoLab since the full-scale invasion likewise point to Germany as the most-targeted EU member state during the conflict, while major leaks of Kremlin correspondence and investigative studies have demonstrated explicitly planned efforts to target both French and German public opinion and politics to undermine support for Ukraine.
Operations in both Germany and France have sought to instrumentalize fringe political parties and movements to spread narratives undercutting support for Ukraine across receptive audiences and promote policies serving Russia’s strategic goals. In Germany, for example, leaks and traced online campaigns show Moscow attempting to utilize pro-Russian media and social media as well as networks of collaborative relationships and clandestine operatives to mobilize both left- and right-wing activists, political parties, and sympathetic segments of the population around opposition to support for Ukraine – in some cases specifically seeking to bring together both ends of the political spectrum around common narratives and grievances. Some of these operations have long roots going back well before the 2022 invasion. Prior to the full-scale war, German-language Russian state-backed media had an established presence in the German media system, including outlets such as RT Deutsch and Sputnik, which focused their coverage on polarizing issues such as immigration and EU skepticism, producing content that was often picked up by – and frequently supportive of – extreme populist political parties and campaigns (Hadeed & Sus, Reference Hadeed and Sus2023; Spahn, Reference Spahn2020). By mid-decade, Russian disinformation often targeted Angela Merkel and her policies, including her stance on migration. In the infamous 2016 “Lisa F.” case, a hoax about a thirteen-year-old Russian–German girl having allegedly been kidnapped and assaulted by men of Arab origin was amplified by Russian media leading to anti-migrant demonstrations and an attack on a refugee reception center by German neo-Nazis.
Since Germany’s blocking of RT shortly prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a number of pro-Russian German blogs and independent media sources on platforms such as Telegram have achieved wide audiences spreading Kremlin narratives (DW, 2022; Kastner & Hewson, Reference Kastner and Hewson2023). Analysis by Reuters has identified twenty-seven Telegram channels that “reshare and boost pro-Kremlin messages to a combined audience of about 1.5 million subscribers,” including flattering images of Putin and warnings about the risk of nuclear escalation (Nikolskaya et al., Reference Nikolskaya, Saito, Tsvetkova and Zverev2023). German researchers have also shown the Russian government is more often using official channels of communication such as Foreign Ministry and Embassy websites, social media, and press releases to spread disinformation (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2022). In one prominent August 2022 example of the use of these mechanisms to spread inflammatory disinformation against support for Ukraine, an out-of-context video clip of German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock portrayed her as declaring her intention to continue support for Ukraine even against the will and interests of German voters. The clip was picked up first on pro-Russian Telegram accounts and then propagated further across mainstream social media platforms, spread by accounts connected with extremists and fringe political party members, and leading to a trending hashtag on German-language Twitter (now X) calling for Baerbock’s resignation (Delcker, Reference Delcker2022).
The Kremlin has long sought to build closer relations with German fringe politicians and activists. The hard-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has been a particularly pronounced beneficiary of Moscow’s largess. Prior to and since the beginning of the full-scale war, several AfD members have been invited on trips to meet with Kremlin or Kremlin-aligned figures in Moscow, Belarus, Kyiv, and Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine. At the same time, Kremlin efforts also have aimed to stoke support for left-wing activism such as peace and anti-NATO movements. Investigations have traced Kremlin efforts to encourage alliance between the AfD and the far-left party, Die Linke, specifically appearing to target Die Linke parliamentarian Sahra Wagenknecht, who has led protests opposed to supplying arms to Ukraine.Footnote 6 Reuters investigations have also indicated that the Russian agency Rossotrudnichestvo is also directly coordinating a “network of agents” – some under false German identities – involved in promoting Kremlin narratives in protests and civil society events within Germany (Nikolskaya et al., Reference Nikolskaya, Saito, Tsvetkova and Zverev2023). After the beginning of the war, the AfD’s popularity has soared nationally, doubling between fall 2022 and 2023 an average of 22 percent, with much higher numbers in some Eastern regions.Footnote 7 Berlin’s Center for Monitoring, Analysis, and Strategy (CeMAS) research also showed a significant increase in “approval of pro-Russian propaganda narratives” between spring and fall of 2022 (Kastner & Hewson, Reference Kastner and Hewson2023). The exact impact of Russian information and influence campaigns on such shifts in polling and public opinion is difficult to establish, as these efforts often target already vulnerable populations and seek to exacerbate preexisting grievances and dynamics. But these trends could prove concerning in relation to long-term support for Ukraine.
In France, Russian disinformation and influence operations have also sought to leverage fringe parties, organizations, and public opinion to influence policy. Campaigns targeting France since the start of the full-scale war, similarly to those in Germany, have built on longstanding efforts. Russia has, for example, long cultivated a relationship with Marie Le Pen’s far-right party, the National Rally (formerly National Front), with past loan interactions suggesting financial support from Russia, Le Pen’s rhetoric emphasizing negative impacts of sanctions on the French economy, and the party voting against or abstaining from support for Ukraine and advocating better relations with Russia. National Rally member and European parliamentarian, Thierry Mariani, also leads the Association for Franco-Russian Dialogue, an organization which promotes pro-Russian positions in Paris. Mariani has made frequent trips to Russia, served as an election observer in the Donbas in 2018, and led National Rally delegations to Crimea. He pushes against Western support for Ukraine and sanctions of Russia, promoting negative views of the Ukrainian government and the United States. Jean-Luc Schaffhauser, a former member of the European Parliament for Le Pen’s party, has sought to “[launch] a foundation with Moscow’s backing that would advocate for a cease-fire in Ukraine, with the Kremlin maintaining its grip on the country’s eastern regions” (Belton, Reference Belton2023). Schaffhauser, who arranged the loans to support Le Pen’s prior presidential bid, also plans to back a slate of far-right candidates to the 2024 EU Parliament who seek closer relations with Russia.Footnote 8
Russian efforts in France appear to have been tailored to emphasize particular narratives thought to be most resonant and play off of existing divisions and vulnerabilities in French society. In 2023, a French parliamentary inquiry issued a report noting Russia’s “long-term disinformation campaign” and efforts to “defend and promote Russian interests” and “polarize [France’s] democratic society” (Belton, Reference Belton2023). A December 2023 The Washington Post investigative report examined how leaked Kremlin documents demonstrate explicit plans in this regard led by First Deputy Chief of Staff to the Putin Administration, Sergei Kiriyenko. The documents show an effort to utilize social media, politicians, activists, and other public figures to heighten domestic political tension, challenge NATO cohesion, and weaken support for Ukraine. Leaked 2022 Kremlin presentations give a window into the strategic thinking, expressing a belief that France would be “vulnerable to political turmoil.” They cited polling numbers showing the French public – at 30 percent – had the second-highest positive view of RussiaFootnote 9 of any country in Western Europe (behind Italy), with “[40 percent] inclined not to believe reporting on Ukraine by France’s own mass media.” Kiriyenko’s team encouraged promoting narratives about the negative impacts of the sanctions on Russia leading to “social and economic crisis,” the inappropriateness of “paying for another country’s war,” suggesting nefarious US use of the war “as an instrument to weaken Russia’s position in Europe,” the risk of European embroilment in a “World War III,” and the need for “dialogue with Russia” to develop a “common European security architecture” (Belton, Reference Belton2023). Other investigations suggest ongoing Russian efforts to exacerbate tensions around immigrants and ethno-religious difference in French society.Footnote 10
Use of digital platforms and tools has been critical in Russia’s efforts to spread disinformation and influence in France, as it has been in Germany and elsewhere. The leaked Kremlin documents showed direct instructions for the use of troll farms and false French personas in targeting French society (Belton, Reference Belton2023). In June 2023, French authorities announced the discovery of a broad Russian disinformation campaign, dubbed “Doppelgänger,” involving the production of fake duplicates of official government and media websites – including those of the French Foreign Ministry and the newspaper Le Monde – then using these impersonations to disseminate false content supportive of Russia and critical of Ukraine and its support. The French Foreign Ministry attributed the operation to Russia, pointing to “numerous elements revealing the involvement of Russian or Russian-speaking individuals and many Russian companies … [and] many state [or state-affiliated] entities.” The Russian companies Struktura and Social Design Agency were identified as “running [the] operation,” while an anonymous news agency, Recent Reliable News (RRN), provided a repository of propaganda content for its use (EU Disinfo Lab, n.d.). The operation similarly targeted Germany, Italy, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom (Reynaud & Leloup, Reference Reynaud and Leloup2023).
In early February 2024, in another major revelation concerning Russia’s at-scale use of digital tools to spread disinformation, the French government revealed a vast network of Russian sites that were “structured and coordinated” to spread Kremlin propaganda across multiple countries supporting Ukraine, including France, Germany, Poland, and the United States.Footnote 11 The network, dubbed “Portal Kombat” had been discovered by Viginum, the French government organization tasked with confronting foreign disinformation. The network included 193 sites set up to disseminate materials in multiple languages and jurisdictions. A sub-portion of the network had spread over 150,000 articles during a three-month period of June–September 2023, tracked by researchers. The materials disseminated primarily focused on justifying Russia’s war against Ukraine and spreading false or misleading information and narratives to do so (Le Temps, 2024; Willsher & O’Carroll, Reference Willsher and O’Carroll2024).
Russian campaigns to undermine support for Ukraine have also targeted Poland, one of Ukraine’s most invaluable supporters and closest neighbors. As with other cases, the prehistory of the recent disinformation and influence efforts stretches back well before the full-scale invasion. While a significant wariness of Russia and potential Kremlin interference or aggression has long been a hallmark of Polish domestic politics – including on the far-rightFootnote 12 –evidence suggests that Russia has attempted a similar cultivation of fringe political party connections and exploitation of local grievances as it has in the other countries it has targeted. Leaked emails have shown Russian cultivation of relationships with some fringe Polish politicians at least as far back as 2015, utilizing connections with the Zmiana (“Change”) party, for example, to prompt demonstrations of support for Russia’s annexation of Crimea (Agence France-Presse in Warsaw, 2016; Foy, Reference Foy2015; Glos Koszalinski, 2023; Morozova & Szczygieł, Reference Morozova and Szczygieł2023; Pacula, Reference Pacula2015). In 2019, only three months after its formation, Konfederacja (“Confederation”) – “an openly pro-Russia party” – won 4.6 percent of the vote for Polish representation in the European Parliament. While this meant it did not reach the 5 percent threshold to win seats, it finished as the fourth strongest party and its fortunes have continued to grow.Footnote 13
Pre-2022 Russian information and influence campaigns in Poland leveraged both overt state-backed sources and covert networks – often involving social media.Footnote 14 They also used illicit cyber campaigns involving phishing and hack-and-leak operations.Footnote 15 Particularly prominent themes, which have had continuing relevance during the war, included Polish loss of sovereignty to the EU, US, or other foreign actors; Polish “‘Russophobia’ and anti-Russian actions”; “Polish aggressiveness and imperialist intentions,” including desires to turn Belarus and Ukraine into “vassals”; “economic difficulties” resulting from this subservience, hatred, and aggression; and amplifying historical grievances and false or misleading “history-related claims,” including about Polish responsibility for World War II, and inadequate Polish gratitude for the Soviet liberation of Poland (Nemečkayová, Reference Nemečkayová2023). Other prominent narratives of Russian pre-2022 disinformation in Poland included those about the COVID-19 pandemicFootnote 16 and migration and refugees.Footnote 17
Since February 2022, Russian information and influence operations in Poland have built on these earlier efforts. In a rapid shift following the start of the full-scale war, many of the social media accounts and group pages that had been most active in promoting COVID-19 disinformation (or other themes such as conspiracies around 5G) rapidly switched to align against Ukraine and the war support effort. Hundreds of new anonymous accounts also appeared suddenly and began to comment on content related to Russia and Ukraine.Footnote 18 Disinformation about the war has focused with particular intensity on undermining Polish relations with Ukraine and attitudes toward Ukrainian immigrants, but also justifying Russian actions, questioning economic and social consequences of support for Ukraine, promoting pacifism and anti-war sentiment, and amplifying tensions between East and West European allies. Narratives about Ukrainian refugees have suggested that the refugees are usurping privileges of Polish citizens such as access to jobs, housing, hospitals or schools, stirring resentment. They also have sought to induce fear and anger by falsely suggesting that the refugees are mostly young men rather than women and children, and that they are dangerous, engaging in criminal activities.Footnote 19 Some propaganda narratives play up historical grievances and ethnic tensions (Insikt Group, 2022, p. 5) – such as recalling unresolved animosities around the World War II Volhynian massacre, or even suggesting Polish imperialist ambitions in Ukraine.Footnote 20 Other content seeks to amplify broader anti-Ukrainian sentiments – whether through suggesting that Ukrainians are all “Banderites,” Nazis, fascists, nationalists, or extremists, seeking to discredit the Ukrainian government, or blaming Ukraine and NATO for inciting the conflict (Tymińska, Korpal, & Sek, Reference Nabozhniak, Tsekhanovska, Castagna, Khutkyy and Melenchuk2023; Zadroga, Reference Zadroga2023). Research on Ukrainian social media since the start of the war shows some of the anti-Ukrainian rhetoric to be taking off – including the popularization of the hashtag #StopUkrainizacjiPolski (“#StopUkrainizationPoland”), driven in part by the at-scale deployment of inauthentic, automated, Russian disinformation-spreading accounts.Footnote 21
Recent shifts in public opinion polling, political rhetoric, and protest dynamics within Poland suggest that – though support for Ukraine is still relatively strong – the audience for some of these Kremlin messages may be growing. Public opinion studies conducted in the fall of 2022 and early 2023 already found Poles – particularly in poorer regions of the country – growing more critical of the economic effects of support for Ukrainian refugees, with approximately a third of the population believing that “the war in Ukraine was the result of [the same] global liberal conspiracy […] that caused the COVID-19 pandemic,” and that “Ukrainians residing in Poland were not refugees but economic migrants.” Approximately two-thirds of respondents thought that Poland “‘cannot afford’ the presence of war exiles” (Mazzini, Reference Mazzini2024). In 2022–2023, polling showed the right-wing party Confederation’s popularity rising rapidly, polling third with 10 percent support by April 2023, and reaching 16.9 percent by July, prompting much speculation that they would prove “kingmakers” in Poland’s October 15, 2023, parliamentary elections, potentially helping then-ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) form a coalition government. While this did not occur,Footnote 22 the campaign saw the Confederation and PiS candidates competing to be the loudest “defenders of Polish sovereignty,” with slogans of “no more welfare for Ukrainians” and that “the needs of Polish citizens need to come first.” The year 2023 also saw the emergence of the Polski Ruch Antywojenny (Polish Anti-War Movement) or PRA, which led a march in Warsaw in May 2023 and popularized the hashtag/slogan “#niemojawojna” (Not My War).Footnote 23 Poland has also seen several waves of mass protests by farmers, angered by the competition created by the import of inexpensive Ukrainian grain. The apparent role of the Confederation party in orchestrating these protests as well as some pro-Russia displays suggest potential growing alignment between the galvanized farming communities and Russian narratives.Footnote 24
Equally important to the targeting of key countries to Ukraine’s support, Russia’s campaigns appear to also target key relationships between countries, cohesion of and trust in multinational organizations, and mechanisms of cooperation playing critical roles in the support processes. These have included efforts, for example, to sow discord in bi- and multilateral relations between parts within Europe, to diminish trust and cooperation in the transatlantic relationship between Europe and the United States, to weaken the cohesion and amplify distrust in the EU and NATO, and to reduce the confidence of supporters in Ukrainian leadership and capability. Such campaigns often make use of multiple coordinated operations across different countries, stressing parallel themes of discord, leveraging transnational networks, and laundering disinformation through fringe media and social media ecosystems across different languages.
We see this, for example, in the Kremlin’s efforts to amplify rifts between Eastern-Central and Western Europe. Already by July 2022, Recorded Futures had tracked RT stories “repeatedly stressing extreme political divisions between Poland and Germany or insoluble disagreements between Poland and the Baltics versus Germany, France, and Turkey, suggesting radically different stakes or positions in relation to the war.”Footnote 25 Also noteworthy are attempts to undermine European trust for the United States and its motives in rallying transatlantic support for Ukraine. An incident in September 2022 involving efforts to publicize a fake RAND Corporation report shows the lengths that Russian operations have gone to in order to launder disinformation and help it to gain traction in relevant echo chambers across countries and language barriers. The inauthentic report was a document supposedly prepared at the behest of the US government and laid out a plan for using the pretext of a US-provoked war between Russia and Ukraine as a mechanism to weaken Germany and the EU, while strengthening the United States. The report and stories about it were publicized by fringe outlets in Germany and then Sweden, discussed in connected YouTube videos, and then written about by RT and promoted by social media of the Russian Embassy in Sweden.Footnote 26
Equally complex Russian disinformation and influence campaigns have sought to disrupt NATO and EU processes and cohesion. Sweden’s and Finland’s 2022 decisions to apply for NATO membership and the subsequent accession processes became targets of opportunity for such campaigns. Russian disinformation narratives tracked in Finland have, for example, “argue[d] that Finland has been pressured by the United States to apply to the alliance and that the majority of Finns oppose the NATO membership.”Footnote 27 The campaigns to slow or undermine Sweden’s NATO bid appear to have been particularly complex, spanning several languages and countries, and plausibly involving covert encouragement of Koran burnings and other protest actions in Sweden as well as online campaigns. In July 2023, the Swedish government announced that Sweden had been targeted by “Russia-backed actors […] amplifying incorrect statements such as that the Swedish state is behind the desecration of holy scriptures.”Footnote 28 Sweden’s Psychological Defence Agency drew attention to the fact that RT and Sputnik had published numerous articles in Arabic about the Koran burnings, and that their agency had tracked millions of social media posts in Arabic and other languages, apparently part of a campaign to portray Sweden as an “Islamophobic” country that supports Koran burning, to create tensions with domestic minorities and backlash in Muslim-majority countries (protesters stormed and vandalized the Swedish Embassy in Baghdad). Most significantly, these campaigns amplified a pretext for continued Turkish (and to a lesser extent Hungarian) resistance to Sweden’s NATO accession bid.Footnote 29
Conclusion: Defensive Progress and Challenges
In February 2024, when the French government issued an announcement about its discovery of a vast network of sites disseminating disinformation about the war in Ukraine in multiple languages across Europe, it did not do so alone. Instead, the “Portal Kombat” discovery was revealed in a joint press conference of the French, Polish, and German foreign ministers. In this collaborative “Weimar Triangle” format, the three countries – each key actors in support for Ukraine – also announced the launch of a joint alert mechanism to enable intelligence sharing and coordination around “unacceptable interference,” such as Russian disinformation campaigns. The countries also agreed to each do more to “pressure online platforms to counter these influence operations.” “We are in a period of vulnerability with the European elections,” noted the French Foreign Minister Stephane Sejourne, drawing attention to the June vote for the European Parliament (Irish, Reference Irish2024; Le Temps, 2024). While this recent move is certainly not the first effort by Western democracies to find common cause in fighting transnational flows of foreign disinformation, much more such coordination will be necessary to succeed in mitigating the threat.
Western threat perceptions around cyber-enabled disinformation have developed gradually since at least 2016, prompting various forms of experimentation to address the problem. Following initial surprise, states were relatively quick to recognize the strategic nature of the threat with its potential to undermine democratic elections and decision processes. But much of the initial focus fell on developing the necessary capabilities and collaborative relationships to enable tracking and, where possible, disrupting particular operations on single or multiple platforms. This included developing research centers focused on identification and tracking, building mechanisms for multistakeholder and whole-of-society engagement, ironing out relevant areas of law many of which differ across jurisdictions, and, in some cases, creating government entities tasked with oversight on the issue.
While a full review of these developments is beyond the scope of this chapter, we see examples of the significant headway that has been made in addressing the disinformation challenge in the various governmental and nongovernmental institutions, private sector reports, open-source intelligence trackers, and other data sources cited. We are no longer operating in the dark with regard to many of the ongoing operations and campaigns. The number of trustworthy organizations engaged in researching and publicizing information concerning cyber-enabled disinformation operations has skyrocketed in Europe and the United States over the past eight years. This includes programs dedicated to tracking, exposing, and counteracting foreign disinformation campaigns, from think tank and university centers to investigative media outlets and civil society organizations, and from private sector entities to government bodies. Several countries have dedicated government bodies focused on addressing the issue at home or abroad.
But we also see here some of the gaps that have developed in Western efforts to address the problem. At first by necessity, much of this work has happened at a highly granular and forensic level – concerned with tracking particular identified operations. Also, because of the early focus on known operations targeting either domestic elections or destabilizing areas of domestic politics, the lion’s share of attention has examined these national-level dynamics as end-goal targets of the cyber-enabled influence campaigns tracked. This has been challenging enough, furthermore, with national government responses often hamstrung to some degree by the phenomenon’s intersection with thorny areas of domestic politics and the entanglement of foreign disinformation campaigns with domestic actors and their freedoms of expression and organizing. In other words, identifying and attempting to mitigate national and subnational operational and tactical dimensions of disinformation campaigns have posed sufficient challenges. So, the strategic orchestration of campaigns across multiple national jurisdictions – including to impact long-term interactive outcomes beyond the particular countries targeted – was, at first at least, an underappreciated dimension of the threat.
Democratic countries have thus made substantial progress in building innovative institutions and mechanisms to address the problem of foreign disinformation – including innovative defensive measures by governments, the private sector, and civil society. But these efforts still face many significant difficulties even at the national level. At the same time, evident transnational dimensions of disinformation campaigns around the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine have drawn growing attention to the criticality of coordination on this issue across democracies in order to protect common interests, relationships, and capacity to successfully collaborate to achieve shared strategic goals.
It is not too late to better protect these objectives vis-à-vis Ukraine, but the timing is urgent. Finding adequate collaborative solutions to protect Ukraine’s support coalition from adversarial disinformation will also prove broadly applicable and critical in the next phases of global strategic competition that will shape the future success of the international rule-based order and democracy.
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