This week, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service rehashed old claims that European countries were planning to give Ukraine a nuclear weapon. FIMI narratives accused Ukraine and the United Kingdom of planning pipeline sabotages. And lastly, unfounded claims were spread about the Gulf states asking Russia to become the guarantor of peace in the Middle East, as no other country could do it.
Russia’s dependence on American technology shatters the Kremlin’s invincibility narrative, leading to a slowdown in advance on the front.
Life under Russian occupation is not only a military reality – it is an information siege. An estimated 5–6 million Ukrainians in temporarily occupied territories are being cut off from Ukrainian media, flooded with Kremlin propaganda, subjected to internet shutdowns and messenger bans, and pushed into silence by fear. This is not incidental. It is a deliberate strategy to isolate communities, erase identity, suppress dissent, and conceal the truth from the outside world. How does this system of digital control actually work – and what does it do to people forced to live inside it?
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. And that was just the beginning.
Language is the source code of identity, running the commands of thought and expression. The attack on Ukrainian language is aimed to erase the source code itself. Ukrainian, however, persists, booting again and again, refusing the simulation imposed from outside, carrying the full trace of the history and culture that preceded it.
If history is the assembled repository of records from the past, culture is the process that brings it to life. The repository can be curated, files omitted, branches deleted — reshaping what appears authoritative. In Ukraine’s case, altered archives and displaced artefacts sought to impose a different version of the past. Yet culture does not depend on a single authorised build; it restores suppressed branches and continues to generate meaning even when the record is forcibly rewritten.
Cases in the EUvsDisinfo database focus on messages in the international information space that are identified as providing a partial, distorted, or false depiction of reality and spread key pro-Kremlin messages. This does not necessarily imply, however, that a given outlet is linked to the Kremlin or editorially pro-Kremlin, or that it has intentionally sought to disinform. EUvsDisinfo publications do not represent an official EU position, as the information and opinions expressed are based on media reporting and analysis of the East Stratcom Task Force.
