by David Salvo & Nathaniel Myers , Washington via https://euobserver.com/eu-and-the-world/ar5ca4cf82
In the coming weeks, both Moldova and the Czech Republic will hold elections. In Moldova, authorities estimate the Kremlin will spend €100m — €31 per registered voter — to influence the outcome.
In the Czech Republic, Kremlin-linked outlets are pumping out more content each day than the country’s major news outlets combined.
This is no longer unusual: Moscow interfered in elections earlier this year in Poland, Germany, France, and Romania.
Indeed, it would be more newsworthy if there was a vote Moscow didn’t attempt to manipulate.
And its influence operations have inflicted damage far beyond the ballot box, fueling civic unrest, harming national economic interests, damaging public health, undercutting core foreign policy priorities, and straining European unity (around Ukraine, above all).
It is continually testing new tactics and increasingly leverages offline actions like paid protests, vandalism, bomb threats against polling stations, and even vote buying.
Given Moscow’s ever-more brazen attempts to foster instability in Europe; it’s no wonder that its leaders increasingly see themselves, as German chancellor Friedrich Merz said at the end of August, “already in conflict with Russia”.
Europe needs to act now on this growing sense of alarm about the urgency of the threat Russia’s interference poses to European security and democracy.
While there are models of good practice for pushing back on Russia’s destabilising operations, far from every European nation has a strategy to address these threats.
Four fightback measures
Each country will need to develop a national information defence strategy, tailored to its own specific circumstances and constraints, but focused on the same four goals: build public resilience; detect and expose; close policy loopholes and vulnerabilities that facilitate Russian operations; and push back.
In each area, they will benefit by learning from one another’s experience.
To build resilience, European nations might look first to the Baltic and Scandinavian states, which have long integrated media literacy, critical thinking, and other relevant skills into their public education programs.
Estonia, for example, has a longstanding kindergarten-through-high-school curriculum which tailors its modules to the age of students; high schoolers, for instance, are required to take a 35-hour “media and influence” course.
Sweden’s Psychological Defence Agency is mandated with working not just in the school system but in broader society to educate citizens.
The Dutch Media Literacy Network offers another approach, leaning on more than a thousand organizations to advance media literacy among priority groups across society.
Detecting and exposing interference operations is essential for raising awareness among the public, as well as to minimise the impact of a particular operation.
Analytical and investigative capabilities should be developed inside a government, as France did when it established Viginum: a government agency which tracks, identifies, and exposes foreign nation-states’ malign influence operations targeting France and its interests.
