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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

A number of recent global risk assessments converged on a clear message: FIMI, disinformation, and misinformation have become a systemic threat for democracies worldwide. This is no longer simply an issue of ‘fake news’ but a structural risk that undermines the conditions for economic growth, social welfare, and liberal institutions. Another clear message emerging from these reports is the importance of a robust public‑interest media ecosystem as a guardrail against informati

The pace of technological change on the Ukrainian front lines is now exceptionally fast. Could Western armies adapt as quickly? As the worst winter in many years settled across Ukraine late last year, the 600,000-strong Russian invasion force innovated to embrace the cold — and briefly gained a tactical edge all along the 700-mile front line. The Ukrainians innovated right back, ultimately blunting that edge. That dance — measure versus countermeasure — should reassure frie

In December 2024, Telegram began restricting access to channels of Russian propaganda resources sanctioned in the EU. However, a study by the Centre for Democracy and Rule of Law revealed a wide range of tools used to bypass the ban. The persistence of Russian information manipulation and interference (FIMI) in the EU stems from two key factors. First, it is the inherent adaptability of Russian threat actors post-sanctions. Second, it is Telegram’s own platform gaps that con

After losing its allies in Syria and Venezuela, a relieved Moscow will applaud the bloody suppression of the Iranian protests. Iranian protestors wave the pre-1979 Iranian flag bearing the lion and sun / photo: Social networks The preservation of the corrupt, sanctioned, repressive regime in Tehran is a critically important outcome for Moscow. It will have watched with enormous (self) interest and will be drawing conclusions from the Iranian theocracy’s at least initial, blo

Lavrov’s 2026 presser: a three-hour FIMI offensive against Europe and its leaders Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s annual press conference(opens in a new tab) on 20 January 2026 was not a diplomatic review, but a carefully orchestrated example of foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) directed at Europe, the EU, the Baltic states, Moldova, and key European leaders. Over nearly three hours, Lavrov repeated a familiar set of Kremlin narratives intend

Europe needs to get on the front foot to tackle Russia’s hybrid warfare, a Polish deputy defense minister warned as he unveiled details of a new anti-drone systems. Warmate loitering munition. (Source: Polish Ministry of National Defense) Cezary Tomczyk, secretary of state in Poland’s Ministry of Defense, has provided new details about a new €2bn (£2.3bn) anti-drone system which will be the largest of its kind on the continent, and able to detect and neutralize enemy drones

Russia’s foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) operations are diverse, entrenched, well-resourced, and coordinated. They are also linked globally to culture through ‘Cultural Heritage Exploitation’, or CHX. CHX is a multi-institutional endeavour with spatial, temporal, cognitive, and material aspects. In practice, it fuses pro-Russian historical propaganda to cultural objects, and it is one of the tools deployed to legitimise Russia’s war against Ukraine a