Moscow's interest in this autumn's Czech and Moldova elections

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. 

Alternatively, countries might partner with local civil society organisations, as Lithuania and other smaller states have done. 

In either case, governments would do well to increase funding to the many civil society organisations across Europe with relevant expertise which are now in funding crisis (in part because of the United States’s general withdrawal from supporting civil society abroad). 

Each country should also seek to reduce its vulnerabilities that facilitate Russian influence operations by tightening its regulatory and judicial framework. 

One obvious first step is strict prohibitions on foreign funding to political parties (Norway offers a good model).  A related approach had tightened disclosure or registration requirements; the UK, for instance, recently mandated that anyone acting on Russia’s behest register with the authorities. 

Each will also need to consider its position on limiting Russian propaganda access: while the EU blocked many (though not all) of Russia’s major propaganda outlets in Europe; some individual countries, like Latvia and Lithuania, have gone further and banned additional websites or broadcasters, while non-EU members Switzerland and Norway opted to allow broadcasts to continue. 

The major social media platforms should not escape attention; at minimum, governments should push for maximally strict EU enforcement of the Digital Services Act to raise the stakes on the social media platforms that serve as a primary conduit for foreign malign influence activity — even when this causes tension with Washington, which argues, with spurious evidence, that the DSA represents a form of censorship.

Finally, European governments should look for opportunities to push back, and perhaps even go on the offensive against Russia. 

Sanctions are one measure; the EU has levied them against individuals and entities involved in Russia’s operations, while some individual member states, like the Czech Republic, have unilaterally sanctioned additional implicated actors. 

Governments should also increase funding provided to enable independent Russian-language media outlets (as well as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the longstanding US government-funded network now in jeopardy), and deepen support for Russian civil society actors who aspire to a different future for their country.

Governments with the stomach for it might also consider more direct operations to target Russia’s hybrid capabilities, along the lines of as the reported American operation to take Russia’s Internet Research Agency offline on the eve of the 2018 mid-term elections. 

None of these measures will stop Russian interference operations or mitigate them entirely.  But by hardening defensive measures, building resilience in society, and going on offence, when warranted, Europe can make itself a harder target, and perhaps eventually begin to move off its backfoot.  That would put it in a markedly better position for the long battle that still lies ahead.

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