By Valentyna Shapovalova and Yuliia Dukach, for EUvsDisinfo
According to Danish state authorities, there were no major foreign influence campaigns to speak of in the lead-up to Denmark’s March 2026 parliamentary election. Local fact-checkers and journalists tracked pro-Russian narratives and fringe propaganda channels, but nothing resembling a broad, coordinated campaign with significant reach emerged. Monitoring and analysis by Defense Innovation Highway and OpenMinds of part of the Danish online information environment during the campaign reached similar conclusions.
Given the widespread reports of Russian election interference worldwide, it may seem surprising that Denmark, a NATO member and strong supporter of Ukraine, was largely untargeted. Examining the Danish election case, we found not only national aspects that make Denmark an extraordinarily resilient example, but also broader insights into how Russian influence operations differ across geographical, political, and temporal contexts.
Looking for bots and finding none
To explore the election period more systematically and empirically, we monitored and analysed a part of the Danish digital information space, focusing on TikTok. TikTok was selected due to its growing reach and its recommendation algorithm’s tendency to amplify content from newly created accounts with no established follower base, thereby lowering the barrier to coordinated inauthentic behaviour. The strong presence of major political parties, politicians, and media outlets on the platform further makes it an attractive target for comment-section manipulation aimed at shaping public opinion, a vulnerability documented in other national contexts.
Our analysis covered content and comment activity across more than 40 Danish political and media channels, which were manually selected based on national political prominence and popularity on the platform. We applied a quantitative methodology previously tested in other countries, including Ukraine, Moldova and Armenia, ahead of the vote, to identify Russian AI-amplified bot accounts and coordinated inauthentic behaviour.
The pattern we observed was straightforward: posting intensified, and the platform reflected the ordinary acceleration of content that comes with an election period. Yet the comment sections showed no sudden influx of the kind one might expect, given the abruptness of the election call in late February. Even applying the detection algorithm used in analogous contexts, we found no indicators of a coordinated inauthentic operation with systematic bot activity.
This does not mean that Russia ignored the Danish election altogether, as fringe pro-Russian Telegram channels spreading disinformation about Danish politicians and election-related issues were detected. Moreover, during the election period, pro-Russian hackers claimed DDoS attacks against the websites of different political parties in Denmark. However, taken together, these incidents point to a more limited pattern of hostile activity at the margins, not a broad election-focused influence campaign designed to penetrate the mainstream information environment. Several factors contributed to this development. We divided these factors into two broad categories: internal and external.
The internal factors, or why Denmark may have appeared like a low-return investment
Russian influence operations do not unfold in a vacuum. They exploit existing divisions, emotional triggers, institutional weaknesses, and distrust. They are more likely to gain traction where politics are highly polarised, confidence in institutions is low, and fringe narratives have a fair chance of moving into the mainstream. They are much less effective when those conditions are weaker.
The first noteworthy internal factor in the Danish case is trust. Denmark remains a comparatively high-trust society, making disinformation narratives that undermine the legitimacy of democratic processes and the government a harder sell to Danes. Trust in government sits above the OECD average, while trust in news media has remained high and stable over the past decade. Naturally, this high trust measure does not fully eliminate societal vulnerability, but it does change the baseline conditions under which manipulation has to operate.
Another factor is media literacy and the strength of the national media system. In a country where legacy media is still regarded as a political watchdog and public service media take a strong stance, false claims encounter more resistance than in a less liberal media system. Moreover, Denmark is among the countries with the highest press freedom index globally, which reinforces both the credibility and reach of professional journalism.
The Danish political landscape also currently offers fewer exploitable divisions than many other European cases. There were disagreements during the campaign period, as in any healthy democracy, but on several key issues, such as support for Ukraine, defence policy, and resistance to external pressure over Greenland, a broad political and public consensus remained. That matters because information operations tend to work best when they can attach themselves to already polarised political issues and intensify them further.
Timing is another factor. Some election periods are ripe for manipulation because they coincide with emotionally charged trigger events. For instance, the Swedish Psychological Defence Agency noted that information influence remained a persistent threat in 2025, but that the overall scope was lower than in earlier years, likely because trigger events such as Quran burnings and the NATO accession process were no longer dominating the national agenda. The Danish election period also did not have a major catalytic event of that kind. Without a clear emotional trigger rooted in local events, hostile campaign engineers had less material to work with.
Preparedness itself may also have mattered. Danish intelligence issued a public statement ahead of the election, warning that foreign actors were likely to attempt interference. These warnings have a deterrent function; they let hostile actors know that the authorities are alert, that journalists are watching, and the environment is less conducive to interference than it might have been.
External factors and the limits of Russian resources
The Kremlin does not have unlimited resources for informational warfare, meaning it does not target every country with the same intensity, on every platform, at every politically sensitive moment. Operational capacity is weighed, prioritising some targets over others.
It is therefore often not enough to look at only one country in isolation during an election period. To understand a relative absence of a major campaign, it helps to ask where else Russian attention may have been directed, what other political contests or geopolitical priorities may have seemed more valuable, and which targets offered more obvious returns.
Hungary offers a useful counterpoint. As a politically pivotal EU member with a more autocratic media system and a government that at times has taken positions aligned with Russian strategic interests, it presents a very different set of opportunities. Recent reporting indicates a far more active involvement by the Russian side around the Hungarian elections, including coordinated disinformation campaigns and the reuse of known Russian propaganda infrastructure.
A similar pattern appears beyond Europe, namely in Armenia, which has in recent months been preparing for the national elections scheduled for June 2026. Analyses by, among others, EUvsDisinfo have demonstrated a heavy Russian focus on different parts of the Armenian informational landscape, targeting the elections directly, and pushing narratives that mirror the Kremlin’s influence campaigns seen during the elections in Moldova in 2025.
From a cost-benefit perspective, the same resources deployed in Denmark are unlikely to yield comparable effects. In Hungary, as in Armenia, influence operations do not need to manufacture divisions almost from scratch or struggle for visibility. This makes the same type of informational intervention more scalable and, from the Kremlin’s perspective, seemingly more worthwhile.
Making interference inefficient
Current discussions of counter-disinformation often focus on reactive detection, identifying campaigns once underway, or on pre-bunking as a way of shielding local populations from harmful adversary narratives. Both approaches matter, but the Danish case points to something broader. Defence in the information war against Russia does not only take place at the content level; it also operates at the structural level. When trust remains relatively high, media systems function effectively, key institutions signal awareness, and platforms are less easily exploited, the overall environment becomes harder for adversaries to penetrate.
This shifts the focus from reacting to attacks to shaping the conditions in which they occur. Denmark may simply have appeared as a low-return investment compared with more polarised or strategically pivotal states that held elections in the same period, such as Hungary. This acknowledgement does not eliminate the threat, nor does it suggest that resilience is fixed. What it does is highlight an often-overlooked dimension of democratic defence: raising the cost of interference at multiple levels to the point where attempting it at scale becomes strategically inefficient.
Seen in this light, the absence of a major disinformation campaign or significant bot activity from the Russian side during the elections in a NATO state is not analytically empty, as it serves as a reminder that interference is selective, not universal. Russian influence operations are deployed where conditions are favourable and where the expected return justifies the investment. In less favourable contexts, activity may persist at the margins, but large-scale efforts may simply not materialise, as illustrated by the Danish case.
Valentyna Shapovalova is an analyst and program lead at the Danish-Ukrainian initiative Defense Innovation Highway (DIH), where she develops and coordinates initiatives on cognitive warfare and defence between Ukraine and the Nordic region. In her previous role, Valentyna was a PhD fellow at the University of Copenhagen, specialising in the intersection of Russian information warfare and gender, including pro-Kremlin disinformation strategies and narratives, and state-media control in Russia. She has published peer-reviewed research, given university lectures, and provided expert-level commentary on these topics to Danish media.
Yuliia Dukach, PhD, is the Head of Disinformation Investigations at OpenMinds and a lecturer at the Kyiv School of Economics. She is a researcher and data journalist with over seven years of experience studying disinformation, computational propaganda, and online influence operations. Her work combines investigative methods, data analysis, and machine learning to uncover how propaganda networks function and affect societies. Previously, she led a disinformation research project at the independent Ukrainian media outlet Texty.org.ua, where two collaborative projects on machine-assisted detection of manipulations, to which she contributed, received Sigma Awards.
By Valentyna Shapovalova and Yuliia Dukach, for EUvsDisinfo
