Context

From Texas to Alberta to Catalonia, the Kremlin amplifies separatist causes abroad while jailing those who voice similar ideas inside Russia.

Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) has evolved into a dense and interconnected ecosystem of actors, infrastructures and narratives operating across digital platforms and geopolitical contexts.

Tanks or missiles are no longer the main weapon in the attacks on democratic societies. Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) has become one of the defining security and foreign policy challenges of the 2020s along with other hybrid threats.

Ukraine has emerged from its harshest wartime winter with its energy system battered by relentless Russian strikes designed to freeze civilians into submission.

FIMI outlets exploited the war in Iran to advance anti-Western and anti-Ukraine disinformation messages. Narratives concentrated on energy crisis, using it as an opportunity to push for the removal of sanctions on Russian oil and gas.

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 week, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service rehashed old claims that European countries were planning to give Ukraine a nuclear weapon.

Have you ever paused at a glossy video promising that somewhere out there, families flourish effortlessly, women glow with confidence, and there are simply no gender issues to speak of?

Over the past week, pro-Kremlin FIMI outlets smeared Ukrainian athletes at the Olympics, declared France on the road to authoritarianism, and tried to deflect attention from a report on Navalny’s poisoning by pointing to the Epstein files.

If history is the assembled repository of records from the past, culture is the process that brings it to life.