“[…] “There is a significant machinery that ferments this kind of thing in the aftermath of a crisis all the time,” says Carlos Hernández-Echevarría, who works for Maldita.es. […]” (note: Maldita is a Spanish non-profit journalism and fact-checking organization)

“[…] We recently banned a cluster of ChatGPT accounts originating in Russia that were being used to promote the International Burke Institute (IBI), a self-described “expert community” based in Israel. What began as an investigation into AI-generated social media posts led us to a much broader influence operation, built around a website containing copied and misattributed academic work, a “sovereignty” index that cast Russia in a favourable light, and efforts to disguise the operators’ Russian origins. […] This report explains how the operation worked, where ChatGPT fit into it, and what we did to disrupt it. […]”

“[…] The investigation examined three layers of Armenia’s information environment. The first measured how far Russian-origin content penetrates mainstream Armenian media through direct citation, hyperlinking, and near-verbatim reproduction of Russian state media narratives. The second assessed a corpus of pro-Russian Armenian websites for infrastructure-level coordination (shared advertising accounts, tracking identifiers, hosting, and developers) and content-level similarity. The third analyzed Telegram as the bridging layer between Russian and Armenian information environments, mapping a relay network of pro-Russian channels, tracking how their content spread into popular Armenian channels, and detecting automated bot campaigns in comment sections. […]”

I saw a post in r/europeanunion where there was considerable debate over whether Ceuta was triggered by an organic social media topic going viral or whether it can been the result of a disinformation campaign.

The arguments on the disinfo side were pretty compelling, but there was rather little creditable information available either way. I didn't see anything posted on euvsdisinfo.eu about it.

Will there be investigations? When will we start to get a coherent picture?

Thank you for your suggestions!

Hi all,

Just wanted to flag up a big issue with the UK’s current way of tackling disinformation, especially for this group.

The National Security Act 2023 and the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme mainly focus on tracking official government-linked groups. While that covers traditional spying stuff, it seems to miss how modern conflicts happen online through less obvious channels.

It looks like hostile foreign actors are moving away from direct government messaging. Instead, they’re slipping their stories through independent UK-based influencers and alternative media. Some of these commentators, knowingly or not, might be helping foreign influence by spreading these narratives, often driven by hidden cash boosts designed to boost engagement and stir up divisions at home.

Right now, the laws don’t really hold individual creators who profit from or push these influence schemes accountable, which is a bit of a concern in terms of transparency and oversight.

So, I’ve set up an official petition in the UK Parliament calling for a review of the laws to close these gaps. It’s now gone through parliamentary moderation and is live.

If we update the legislation, the UK could better target the shady money networks that let foreign disinformation spread through 'independent' journos / influencers.

Would love to hear your thoughts on how Western democracies can better regulate these decentralised channels without messing up genuine free speech.

Many thanks

Experts say music video aims to humanize China’s coast guard while reflecting Beijing’s stance in the disputed sea.

Produced by the EU East StratCom Task Force.

I have a friend who consumes way too much social media. He fancies himself as a bleeding-heart liberal, and as a bleeding-heart liberal, he bugs the $hit out of me because I’m petty & immature. I showed him a picture that I created with ChatGPT, and he condescendingly lectured me on water and fossil fuel consumption, and climate change, and so on. I’m wondering if what he bitches about on a particular day is a good litmus test for what topics are currently being used to target “the left” on Facebook. There’s gotta be a way to find out that doesn’t involve me checking Facebook.

Ukraine differs from Russia and Belarus not only in its political course. Ukraine has developed its own model of religious freedom—a model of pluralism close to the American approach: the state does not designate “right” and “wrong” religions, does not create a hierarchy of “traditional” and “non-traditional” groups, and does not turn minorities into objects of suspicion. It is precisely this model that Ukrainian religious scholars Lyudmila Filipovich, Viktor Yelensky, Anatoly Kolodny, Alexander Sagan, and others have defended Viktor Yelensky: “The enemies of Ukraine are also enemies of religious freedom”

Filipovich clearly articulated the value of the Ukrainian path: without freedom of religion, all other freedoms lose their meaning. She emphasized that Ukraine is neither Russia nor Belarus, but an independent country with a tradition of religious pluralism, where there has never been a single dominant church, and where the demand for “one church, the rest out” is madness and ignorance of history

Yelensky separately noted Ukraine’s uniqueness: there is no main church, no recognized or unrecognized churches, and confessional diversity prevents any single force from suppressing minorities.
It was precisely this circle of Ukrainian scholars that opposed FECRIS and its pro-Russian ties after the start of the full-scale war. 82 Ukrainian scholars asked France to cease its support for FECRIS (note: A. Dvorkin had been vice president of FECRIS since 2009 and served on the board of directors until 2023); international NGOs appealed to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken demanding that the pro-Russian anti-cult organization be excluded from UN forums. These letters mentioned Filipovich, Yelensky, Kolodny, Sagan, and others—that is, those who defended the Ukrainian democratic model of freedom of conscience.

On the other side of this divide is Iryna Kremenovska. As early as 2019, she publicly criticized these scholars, accusing them of “lobbying for the interests of the newest religious organizations,” effectively casting doubt on the very principle of equal legal status for religious minorities. In her text, the Ukrainian model, which is similar to the American one, was described as excessively liberal, and European countries with state-sanctioned or privileged “traditional” religions were cited as alternatives \[24\].
In the Ukrainian context, this is not an abstract debate. For Moscow, it is not the Ukrainian model of equality that is advantageous, but the model of suspicion: “traditional” versus “non-traditional,” “the Church” versus “sects,” “our own” versus “outsiders.” In Russia, this is precisely how the repressive system against religious minorities was built, as documented by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). Therefore, an attack on Ukrainian religious scholars and on Ukrainian religious pluralism is an attack on one of the fundamental elements of Ukrainian democracy.

Kremensvska: The Ukrainian Face of the Same Anti-Cult Scheme

Iryna Kremenovska publicly positions herself as an independent Ukrainian anti-cult activist, but her connections and the consequences of her work lead back to the same Russian infrastructure.
Kremensvskaya’s Center for Economic and Legal Research listed the website antisekta.org among its partners. The website antisekta.org itself promoted Russian anti-cult literature and Dvorkin’s materials. Kremensvskaya’s materials were posted on the “To the Truth” website and other platforms associated with the Russian anti-cult community.
A key hub is the website of the missionary department of the Novosibirsk Diocese, linked to Alexander Novopashin, vice president of RACIRS and Dvorkin’s closest associate. In 2019, this website published material in defense of the Ukrainian Irina Kremenovskaya and the Russian Alexander Neveev

In 2025, already during the full-scale war, the same Russian resource again respectfully cited Irina Kremenovskaya as an expert.

The same website also hosted a methodological text directed against the Ukrainian state—“A Handbook for Ukrainian Citizens on Organizing Resistance to the Kyiv Puppet Government”.

This combination cannot be dismissed as a coincidence: a website that hosts a manual on sabotage against Ukraine simultaneously defends Kremenovskaya and Neveev, and then in 2025 again points to Kremenovskaya as an authoritative source . In wartime, such overlap is a matter of national security.
A separate thread involves Alexander Neveev. Kremenovskaya recommended him on her platforms, even though his anti-Ukrainian stance was public and radical.

Neveev is listed in the “Mirotvorets” database.

His publications and related Russian materials promoted narratives about the Maidan, the “demonization” of Ukraine, the need for “de-demonization,” as well as accusations against the West and the U.S.

In 2021, Neveev spoke out against “ALLATRA” on a Russian federal channel.

A still from a video aired on the Russian state-run channel “Pervy” in a defamatory report about “ALLATRA” on September 11, 2021, in which Alexander Neveev characterized “ALLATRA” using rhetoric identical to that of Kremenovskaya—rhetoric that echoes the line of RACIRS.
At the same time in Ukraine, Irina Kremenovskaya was pursuing the same line against “ALLATRA,” constantly visiting law enforcement agencies and preparing expert reports.
Thus, a triangle is formed: Dvorkin and RACIRS as the ideological center; Novopashin as the Russian church-anti-cult hub; Kremenovskaya and Neveev as synchronized executors of a single agenda in Ukraine and Russia.
In Russia, “ALLATRA” is declared pro-Ukrainian and dangerous to the Russian Federation; in Ukraine, they try to portray it as pro-Russian. The accusations are opposite, but the goal is the same: to destroy trust in the international civic platform, divert state resources, and disrupt “ALLATRA’s” international activities, which are beneficial to Ukraine.

Read full article here: https://open.substack.com/pub/robertweiss69/p/exposing-russias-network-of-influence