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This article reflects key arguments from a debate hosted by the European External Action Service (EEAS) on 16 January 2026 Ukraine is central to European history One of the most persistent distortions in discussions about Russia’s war against Ukraine is the assumption that Ukraine is historically marginal, an “edge case” recently pulled into European affairs. This assumption is not only wrong; it actively reproduces a Kremlin-centred view of history. Ukraine has been a core s

The Kremlin’s war against international law reaches beyond mere words and now includes the use of heavily armed military squads operating on foreign soil. Wagner Group mercenaries in Africa. Photo: Grey Zone / Telegram The Russian Duma is about to adopt a law permitting the extraterritorial engagement of the armed forces to free Russian citizens arrested or detained by foreign courts. The government commission on legislation has just approved the respective draft legislation.

Kremlin messaging has wasted little time pivoting toward the Middle East and Iran. A key objective has been to link Ukraine to the conflict. Disinformation narratives included attempts to tie the 2014 Maidan protests to broader regional instability and claims that Ukraine could stage a ‘provocation’ to regain international attention. The conflict involving Iran creates a challenging situation for Russia. Moscow failed to present itself as a reliable ally, offering little visi

The cyber abilities of the EU’s 27 member states are variable, but the best-prepared can benefit from helping the laggards. One year has passed since Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered US Cyber Command to halt all offensive cyber operations and planning against Russia. The decision came as elements of the defense community were calling for a more offensive posture in the cyber domain, given that Russian operations against NATO allies and other countries in the European n

Since Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the outbreak of hostilities in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, residents of Ukraine’s temporarily occupied territories (TOT) have faced a steadily tightening system of information control. This process accelerated dramatically after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. Today, an estimated 5 to 6 million people living under occupation exist in a prolonged state of information limbo. They are cut off from Ukrain

Russia is in serious trouble from a ballooning budget deficit. Rising oil prices are unlikely to change the math. Source: Oneindia War in the Middle East is pushing oil prices up, to the delight of the Kremlin — but the rise may prove too short-lived and too modest to save the Russian government from otherwise imminent spending cuts this year. Just two months into 2026, the Kremlin’s budget is already shot to pieces. On March 3, Brent climbed to $83 a barrel , its highest sin

Russia’s dependence on American technology shatters the Kremlin’s invincibility narrative, leading to a slowdown in advance on the front. Claims of Russia’s invincibility became a central element of the large-scale invasion of Ukraine as we examined in our recent article . Faith in the greatness and self-sufficiency of the Russian army has been turned into a mantra of Kremlin propaganda. However, the war against Ukraine has shown the world that this narrative, like the myth

Imagine a world where your past is not yours – where every event, every hero, every town can be deleted and replaced with someone else’s script. For Ukraine, this has not been speculative fiction but but a political practice it continues to resist. Centuries of Ukrainian history have been rewritten by Russia, which corrupts the files, reformats archives, so that they conform to its imperial design. In late 2025, Vladimir Putin signed Decree No. 858 , a technical document outl

Some young people resist Kremlin pressure to create a generation of Putin-supporting nationalists. The West must recognize and support them. Russian anti-war activist Maxim Lypkan / Source: memopzk.org “Wars are not won by generals, but by schoolteachers,” Vladimir Putin said in 2023, in a statement that has become a cornerstone of his approach to youth indoctrination. The regime is determined to reshape young Russians’ minds by replacing critical thinking with militarized pa

The mythology of Russian military invincibility is not new, but since the full‑scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 it has become one of the central pillars of the Kremlin’s information warfare. Research shows this narrative is deliberately engineered to serve geopolitical, military and psychological objectives; in particular to deter Western support for Ukraine, demoralise Ukrainian society, and project an image abroad of unstoppable Russian power . The invincibility myth depic

Russia’s poorest people face a grim choice — an existence of grinding poverty, or gambling your life and limbs on the regime’s imperial adventure. Erik Romanenko / TASS Russia’s war in Ukraine is not being fought by a united “multiethnic people,” as Vladimir Putin likes to claim. The enormous burden of the fighting and the death toll has been disproportionately borne by the peoples of the poorest and most remote parts of the country. New analysis by The Bell shows that the h

Throughout 2025, Russian officials were repeatedly shut out of the governing bodies of international organisations – a direct consequence of Kremlin’s unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine and its escalating campaign of hybrid interference worldwide. A glimpse of what’s to come? 2025 was a bad year for Russia’s international standing. As Andrii Sybiha, Ukraine’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, recently described on Facebook, Ukraine and its allies worked hard throughout

Five recurring false narratives the Kremlin uses to justify and distort its war against Ukraine. Russia has carried out online disinformation and FIMI campaigns against Europe and Ukraine for over a decade. After the illegal full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, these activities grew rapidly in scale and intensity. The Kremlin now uses information manipulation as a key tool in its confrontation with the West. Alongside the war in Ukraine, Russia is also waging a

If Europe hopes to find inspiration and security from others it is destined for disappointment, says Lithuania’s former Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis . I left this year’s Munich Security Conference in a mood which diplomats would describe as “thoughtful.” We could call this progress, since my mood in previous years was famously gloomy. The highlight was US Secretary of State Mark Rubio’s February 14 speech . Opinions differ on whether this represented an outstretche

The Kremlin blames others for not extending The New START Treaty. But Moscow played a big role in undermining the Treaty long before its demise. On 6 February 2026, The New START Treaty, the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty, expired . As that happened, the Kremlin both launched and continued FIMI campaigns that sought to minimise Moscow’s responsibility for the Treaty’s lapse, blame the expiration on outside actors, generate doomsday paranoia, and proclaim a new nuc

Europe’s reliance on US payment networks has become a strategic vulnerability that worries policymakers. After AI chips and cloud computing, Europeans have woken up to another American-dominated technology to worry about — payment systems operated by Visa and Mastercard. France’s Aurore Lalucq , one of the European Parliament’s leading voices on financial services, recently expressed fears that Washington might suddenly “cut off” Europe.” Europe must build an alternative, “a

For decades, television was considered the primary mouthpiece of propaganda. The digital age, however, has elevated a new and potentially more dangerous instrument of influence: video games. Under the guise of entertainment, they shape worldviews and political narratives, making propaganda subtle, scalable, and effective. Unlike passive media, video games offer players not only a story but an experience in which they actively participate. As a result, ideological messages emb

Russia’s use of cryptocurrency to bypass sanctions has exposed a gap in the international community’s attempts to throttle Moscow’s war machine. Photo: Agency «Moscow» / snob.ru The emergence of the A7A5 stablecoin represents a transformative shift in global financial evasion. Until now, the international community has relied on the dominance of the US dollar and the SWIFT system to enforce economic order, but the rise of ruble-backed digital assets suggests a sophisticated

Seizures of sanctions-busting oil tankers have triggered a new wave of disinformation from the Kremlin. A recent uptick in manipulative narratives about Russia’s ‘shadow fleet’ suggests that the Kremlin is getting increasingly nervous about its ability to evade European sanctions on the export of Russian oil. Just as the Kremlin uses oil tankers flying false flags to transport Russian oil overseas, it uses false claims pushed by its foreign information manipulation and interf

The Kremlin’s idea of a rapprochement is very different to Baku’s. Azerbaijani leader Ilham Aliyev (left) and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin seen here during a one-on-one meeting in Tajikistan on October 9. (Photo: kremlin.ru) Tensions between Azerbaijan and Russia persist, and this despite the tacit rapprochement that materialized as a result of the meeting between the presidents of the two countries in October in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. During the talks, held on the