Kremlin Propaganda Campaign
Foreign Policy, April 12, 2024
Belgium launched an investigation late Thursday into alleged Russian interference in the European Parliament’s upcoming continentwide elections, slated for June 6 through 9. On Friday, Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said Brussels’s intelligence service confirmed the existence of a pro-Russian network trying to influence Europe’s vote and undermine its backing for Kyiv. “Weakened European support for Ukraine serves Russia on the battlefield, and that is the real aim of what has been uncovered in the last weeks,” De Croo said.
Among the allegations, Brussels accused Moscow of offering money to European Parliament members to promote Kremlin propaganda. Czech intelligence suggested that the Prague-based Voice of Europe news site had been funded by Russia to pay parliamentarians from Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Poland to make pro-Russian statements.
A Politico investigation found that 16 European Union lawmakers appeared on Voice of Europe, all of them far-right politicians. “If it is a war of civilization, well, I hope the civilization in Ukraine will lose,” Dutch far-right politician Marcel de Graaff said last October during a Voice of Europe-organized debate. Czech authorities sanctioned two of the agency’s executives last month, including Russian oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk, a longtime friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s.
“The objectives of Moscow are very clear,” De Croo said. “The objective is to help elect more pro-Russian candidates to the European Parliament and to reinforce a certain pro-Russian narrative in that institution.” The Kremlin has not publicly commented on the allegations.
Russia has long been at the center of alleged interference campaigns across the West. Last month, Latvia’s security service began criminal proceedings against EU lawmaker Tatjana Zdanoka after Russian, Nordic, and Baltic news outlets accused her in January of being a Russian agent since at least 2004. And in the United States, Russian-backed operatives hacked and released Democratic emails as part of a Putin-ordered campaign to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election in favor of then-candidate Donald Trump. U.S. intelligence suggests that Putin also authorized influence operations in 2020 to undermine confidence in the U.S. voting system, exacerbate social divisions, and disparage then-candidate Joe Biden in favor of Trump.
“This is a global phenomenon,” said a U.S. intelligence assessmenton Russian influence efforts that was released to more than 100 countries last October. Putin has since dismissed these findings.
