By EUvsDisinfo
Keir Giles is a British writer, an expert on the Russian military and Russian disinformation. He has written and commented on the geopolitical conflict between the West and Russia such as NATO’s Handbook of Russian Information Warfare published through NATO Defense College. In his last book: Who Will Defend Europe? An Awakened Russia and a Sleeping Continent, Giles lays out the stark choices facing leaders and societies as they confront the return of war in Europe.
Do you think that over the last few years, since your Handbook of Russian Information Warfare was published, a lot has changed in our perception of Russian FIMI?
It’s tempting to think that we are living in a fundamentally different moment, but in reality we are dealing with yet another wave of new technology that allows Russia to exercise techniques it has always used. We have seen this before: first with the arrival of the internet, then with the rise of social media, and now with AI. What changes is the speed and scale at which Russia can do what it would be doing anyway. At the same time, there are long-standing techniques against which Western societies still seem not to have properly protected themselves. Russia understands very well how to exploit Western media behaviour and continues to do so because Western media largely behave as they always have. We have seen this again over the past couple of weeks with the so-called “Trump peace plan”, which was presented through Western media as such, despite being not Trump’s, not about peace, and not really a plan at all.
The fact that Russia can still press the right buttons to generate the desired outcome across a wide swathe of Western media – and in doing so, as we saw with the 28-point surrender terms, create a new perceived reality from which audiences then have to recover – is a clear indication that some of the most basic safeguards against Russian information manipulation are still missing, despite the significant effort invested over the past decade.
How can we lessen these vulnerabilities while keeping our societies open and our democracies intact?
I’m in Brussels today to discuss this issue with international organisations. At its core, this is largely a question of implementing existing rules. That means addressing local media spaces in line with the regulatory frameworks, legislative environments, and societal norms that define what is acceptable, and recognising that the free and open exchange of information is under threat — and responding accordingly.
The recent successes we have seen in identifying, exposing, and discrediting purveyors of disinformation have all depended, first and foremost, on political decisions: decisions to allocate resources, to treat this as a genuine problem, to devote counterintelligence capacity, to examine why individuals have chosen to act as agents of influence for a hostile power, and ultimately to prosecute them.
The problem is that we still lack a shared, uniform understanding of the nature of the threat, let alone a consistent approach to implementing the necessary responses.
Similarly, when it comes to media education, it’s probably been at least a decade since everyone has been pointing to countries like Finland — it’s always Finland — as proof that this is possible and that it can be done. There are concrete ways to help inoculate societies against disinformation.
The usual objection is that educating a generation takes an awfully long time. But we’ve been talking about this for ten years already, which means that the children who were being educated in this way when the conversation first began are now fully fledged information consumers. So the best time to do this was a decade ago. The next best time is now.
If you were to define what the threat is, how would you formulate it?
It’s difficult to distil this into a single sentence, especially after having written several rather lengthy books on the subject. But at its simplest, the threat can be described as the creation of an alternative reality that suits our adversaries and disadvantages us. This involves twisting not only the individual facts that people rely on for day-to-day decisions, but the entire decision-making framework itself.
The most harmful disinformation is often not about specific data points. It is about constructing the logical framework within which those data points acquire meaning and influence. Some describe this as the Russian concept of reflexive control; others refer to it as image transfer. In practice, it means establishing in the minds of the target — whether a member of the public or a decision-maker in a Western society — a set of assumptions and reference points that nudge them towards decisions that benefit Russia, or another hostile actor, and disadvantage themselves.
Can you give an example of techniques Russians deploy?
We have a very recent example of this in the way Russia managed to convince much of the Western media that the so-called 28-point plan for Ukraine’s surrender was a US-authored initiative and somehow connected to peace. That is a case study which is still unfolding.
There are also clear historical examples where Russia has achieved significant success through long-running, multi-layered, multi-faceted, and multi-domain campaigns. The classic case is Russia’s use of nuclear intimidation. This goes far beyond the crude nuclear threats we saw after February 2022 and includes the extensive groundwork that was laid to ensure those threats would be effective.
Over time, Russia succeeded in convincing far too many people across Europe and the United States — people who should have known better — that it is impossible to engage in any form of escalation with Russia without inevitably triggering nuclear use. This belief directly shaped policy. It was a key reason why the United States initially constrained its support to Ukraine after the full-scale invasion, justifying those limits on the grounds that enabling a Russian defeat would inevitably lead to nuclear escalation.
That outcome represented a major success for a series of interconnected Russian campaigns conducted over the previous decade. These included persistent propaganda messaging, repeatedly asserting that any miscalculation or confrontation would spiral uncontrollably into nuclear war. Through sheer repetition, this narrative became part of the background assumptions informing much Western media commentary.
At the same time, Russia reinforced this narrative through actions in the physical domain, such as sustained brinkmanship by Russian warships and aircraft, designed to convince Western decision-makers that an inadvertent clash was not just possible but imminent – and that such a clash would inevitably set off a path toward nuclear use. The frequently repeated claim that “Putin never de-escalates”, presented across large sections of Western media as established fact despite having no basis in reality, was itself the product of a persistent and coordinated Russian information campaign that supported these other elements.
The result is a mutually reinforcing, interlocking set of activities, composed of multiple campaign elements that can appear innocuous or disconnected if audiences are not alert. Taken together, they form a classic example of how Russia combines information, perception, and physical actions to achieve strategic success.
Russia’s FIMI often aims to spread mistrust and undermine democratic institutions, but it’s also aimed at presenting a positive image of Russia. Historically, such attempts were often successful, but we live in a different reality after the invasion of Ukraine. One recent example is ‘visas for shared values.’ What is the real purpose of this initiative? Do its architects believe it could genuinely appeal to Europeans? Or is it primarily a short-term tactic – perhaps even a recruitment tool –masked as a values-based outreach effort?
There are a number of different elements to this. It is true that fewer people around the world, not just in Europe, are now willing to justify Russian actions. In fact, one of the greatest aids to my work has been Vladimir Putin himself and the behaviour of the Russian state, because I no longer have to work nearly as hard to persuade people that Russia is a problem. I no longer need to convince audiences that Russia wants to redraw the borders of eastern Europe: if you look at Russian maps, you can see that this has already been done in Ukraine and Georgia.
In that sense, the Russians increasingly make the argument for me. This is particularly evident now that Russia no longer even pretends that NATO’s acceptance of new member states in eastern Europe provoked its attacks on neighbouring countries – a narrative from which Russia itself has largely stepped away.
However, we are still dealing with the long tail of decades of Russian narrative-building and disinformation campaigns. Many people were so thoroughly immersed in Russian propaganda in earlier decades and generations that they find it difficult to step away from it now, even as Russia itself abandons those arguments. As a result, they continue to claim that NATO enlargement drove Russia to attack its neighbours, despite the fact that Russia is no longer making this case.
These deep-seated attitudes, having been so thoroughly and organically embedded over a long period of time, will take much longer to challenge. They form part of the mental framework that Russia has deliberately worked to construct – a framework through which people interpret and make sense of the world.
In other respects, the question remains: why does Russia mount campaigns of this kind? The answer is simple – because they work. They succeed in persuading certain segments of the population that Russia is a defender of “traditional values”, particularly in an information environment in Europe and North America where many people feel that those values are under threat. Russia recognises this opportunity and exploits it, positioning itself as a bulwark against what these audiences perceive as threats to their beliefs or livelihoods.
So, your assessment is that those campaigns of building a positive image of Russia still work in Europe?
Absolutely – and for different audiences, for different reasons. Russia now enjoys the significant advantage of no longer being constrained by a coherent ideology. It can appeal to as many different motivations for favouring Russian interests as it chooses, and it is not limited by the need to advance a single, internally consistent narrative in order to remain plausible. As a result, the mutual contradictions within Russian disinformation are no longer a weakness, but an asset.
When discussing Russia’s nuclear threats, how do we respond to those who either see engagement as too dangerous, or argue that even a small chance of nuclear escalation is enough to deter action? How can we adopt a balanced, sober approach that acknowledges the risks without allowing them to paralyse our response?
I don’t think anyone is seriously arguing that there is a zero chance that Russia might one day use the nuclear weapons it has invested so heavily in developing, except, of course, in the sense that they have already been used as information weapons. However, one of the most helpful approaches I have found when engaging in these discussions is to look at the geography of who discounts Russian nuclear threats.
The people who regard those threats as least credible are those closest to Russia: the states and societies that devote the greatest resources to understanding Russia and that have direct experience of Russian occupation. Paradoxically, these are precisely the actors who would be most at risk, yet they place the least credence in the likelihood of Russian nuclear use.
It might appear to be the greatest gamble, but in fact it reflects the greatest confidence in their understanding of how Russia operates and the game it is playing. If there is any possibility of Russian nuclear use, it should not be the dominant factor shaping assessments of how Russia seeks to manipulate and coerce foreign states.
EUvsDisinfo: Finally, how about Russia and China, and the synergies between them regarding FIMI, and possible weaknesses that are important for us to notice?
“Synergies” is a useful way of framing it. We see many commentators pointing to potential cooperation between the two sides, and there is a risk of overestimating that relationship, because correlation is not the same as causation. Simply because China has observed that Russia is particularly effective at achieving information effects through certain techniques, and has decided to experiment with similar approaches, does not necessarily mean that the two are coordinating closely or looking over each other’s shoulder. Despite a broadly shared direction of travel, and a common interest in weakening the West, their strategic objectives remain significantly divergent.
I would place this in the same category as the way other political actors around the world – including within Western democracies – have identified Russian disinformation, malign influence, and manipulation techniques and judged them to be useful for their own political purposes, sometimes even within democratic systems themselves.
That said, this is not to rule out the possibility of some exchange of best practice between Russia and China. We know there is a degree of shared thinking about the nature of information and information warfare. However, based on the evidence currently available in open sources, this is not something we should assume to be systematic or extensive.
By EUvsDisinfo
This interview is a written transcript of an audio conversation conducted in Brussels on 27 November 2025.
