Russian Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) Operations across the EU’s Eastern Neighbourhood

I. Conceptual Framework: Defining FIMI

The term Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI), formalised by the European External Action Service (EEAS), marks a deliberate analytical departure from earlier, narrower concepts. The EEAS defines FIMI as “a mostly non-illegal pattern of behaviour that threatens or has the potential to negatively impact values, procedures and political processes.”[1] This framing is consequential: it refuses to reduce the problem to the question of whether specific claims are true or false and instead focuses on the structural intent—to manipulate, confuse, divide, and coerce.

FIMI is broader than disinformation (deliberately false content), broader than propaganda (persuasive messaging aligned with state interests), and distinct from misinformation (false content spread without hostile intent). Where disinformation is a subset of FIMI, FIMI includes the full architecture of manipulation: the creation of false or misleading content, its amplification through coordinated networks, its laundering through proxies to achieve plausible deniability, and the orchestration of these activities in concert with other instruments of coercion — diplomatic, economic, and military. The primary goal of FIMI is not to encourage belief in a specific truth, but to create confusion and disorientation. When individuals are overwhelmed with falsehoods and contradictory messages, they become uncertain in their ability to act.

Critically, FIMI is best understood as a behavioural pattern, not a content category. The EEAS framework maps it across four analytical dimensions: actors (who conduct operations), behaviour (how they conduct them), content (what messages they deploy), and effects (what outcomes they seek). Russia’s operations are characterised by the intentional, strategic, and coordinated nature of the activity — not merely by the falsity of any individual claim.

The concept of information laundering, developed by NATO StratCom, is essential to understanding FIMI mechanics. Like financial money laundering, information laundering takes content of suspect origin and passes it through a network of intermediaries — fringe blogs, local commentators, “independent” experts, religious figures, mainstream media quoting fringe sources — until its origin is hidden and it can circulate as apparently legitimate commentary. This process involves techniques to “distort and obscure the original source,” achieving a layered form of legitimisation that direct state propaganda cannot.[2]

FIMI also operates within the broader framework of hybrid conflict — the deliberate blurring of the line between peace and war through the combined use of military, paramilitary, economic, cyber, and information instruments. In this context, FIMI is not an auxiliary activity but a central pillar: it shapes the battlespace before shots are fired, creates the political conditions that make coercion possible, and sustains narratives that justify ongoing aggression after the fact.

II. Russia’s Strategic Objectives

Russian FIMI operations in the post-Soviet neighbourhood are not random. They are consistently oriented toward a recognisable set of geopolitical objectives, which remain stable across country contexts even as tactical implementations may vary considerably.

Blocking Euro-Atlantic Integration

The primary objective in all four countries examined in this paper is to prevent or reverse alignment with the European Union and NATO. As stated in the testimony of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) before Congress, Russia seeks “to rebuild the Russian empire piece by piece, undermine the Western community of democracies and those who wish to join it.”[3] In Moldova, this has taken the form of sustained operations to discredit EU membership as economically ruinous, culturally threatening, and geopolitically dangerous. In Georgia, it has meant amplifying fears that European integration will drag the country into war. In Armenia, it increasingly means portraying Western engagement as incapable of delivering security. In Ukraine, it meant years of denying the legitimacy of Ukrainian sovereign choices altogether.

Erosion of Institutional Trust

A consistent secondary objective is the degradation of public trust in democratic institutions — governments, courts, electoral bodies, media, and civil society. This is not primarily about persuading people toward Russia but about creating a generalised environment of cynicism, fatigue, and paralysis in which no institution is trusted, no result is credible, and collective political action becomes psychologically exhausting. The EEAS and academic analysts alike describe this as a goal of producing epistemic fog — conditions in which shared truth collapses.

Intensifying Polarisation

Russian FIMI systematically exploits existing social, linguistic, ethnic, religious, and economic cleavages, not to create them from nothing but to deepen, widen, and weaponise them. The goal is not to persuade majorities but to maximise the political importance of divisions — ensuring that societies are too fractured to build durable pro-Western majorities. Russia’s strategic logic, as Colonel General Vladimir Zarudnitsky formulated it, is that “it is easier to divide a state from within rather than conquer it with arms.”[4]

Narrative Preparation for Coercive Action

Perhaps most significantly, Russian FIMI serves a preparatory function: it constructs the narrative architecture that makes subsequent coercion, territorial pressure, or outright military action appear justified, provoked, or at least ambiguous. Ukraine is the clearest case, where years of delegitimising Ukrainian statehood, amplifying ethnic tensions, and manufacturing pretexts preceded and directly enabled the invasions of 2014 and 2022.

III. The FIMI Toolkit: Actors, Infrastructure, and Channels

Russia’s information architecture could be divided into four major tiers:

• Official state channels (diplomatic statements, RT, Sputnik, TASS, RIA Novosti);
• State-controlled outlets that are overt instruments of policy;
• State-linked channels that do not publicly disclose their affiliation;
• And state-aligned channels that cannot be directly linked but are operationally aligned.

The visible, overt infrastructure is, as the EEAS describes it, only “the tip of the iceberg.”[5]

State and Proxy Media Ecosystems

Russia has built a global state media infrastructure centred on RT and Sputnik, with hundreds of affiliated websites operating in dozens of languages. The Pravda/Portal Kombat network — a network of at least 193 websites linked to the Crimea-based IT company TigerWeb — creates the appearance of local news portals while systematically distributing Kremlin-aligned content. It has published over 3.7 million articles, with significant infrastructure targeting Moldova, France, Germany, Ukraine, and Serbia. It does not produce original content; instead, it automates the copying, translation, and amplification of narratives from Russian state sources.

The Doppelganger operation[6], first exposed in 2022 and attributed to Russian companies Struktura and the Social Design Agency (SDA), creates exact impersonations of trusted Western media brands — Le Monde, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Fox News — hosting fabricated content under typosquatted[7] domain names. Leaks of SDA documents in 2024 confirmed the organisation conducts information campaigns on behalf of Russian state authorities to support far-right forces in Europe, weaken Ukraine support, and manage specific regional operations.

 

The Toolkit at a Glance
State Media Networks RT, Sputnik, TASS, RIA Novosti — overt instruments broadcasting in dozens of languages globally, still accessible via mirror sites where formally banned.	Doppelganger Sites Exact impersonations of trusted media brands (Le Monde, The Guardian, Der Spiegel) under typosquatted domains, distributing fabricated content with borrowed institutional credibility.
Portal Kombat / Pravda Network Hundreds of fake local news portals across Europe, Africa, Asia. No original content — pure automated amplification of Kremlin narratives, with 3.7M+ articles published.	Bot Farms & Inauthentic Accounts Tens of thousands of coordinated fake accounts across TikTok, Facebook, X, Telegram, creating artificial consensus and overwhelming organic civic discourse.
Oligarchic Proxies Kremlin-aligned businessmen funding local media, political parties, and voter operations — providing plausible deniability for direct Russian state interference.	AI & Deepfakes AI-generated video, audio, and text used to fabricate statements by leaders, create synthetic evidence, and scale content production at minimal cost.

Covert Intensification Infrastructure

The covert layer of Russia’s FIMI infrastructure operates at an industrial scale and across a broad geographic perimeter — a scale that distinguishes contemporary Russian operations from earlier generations of state-sponsored information activity and that makes purely reactive responses structurally inadequate. EEAS monitoring verifies the scale: tens of thousands of accounts distributed across more than two dozen platforms, active in some ninety countries and directed against several hundred organisations in the course of a single year. The Moldovan case illustrates how this scale translates into election-specific operations: during the 2024 presidential cycle, the CopyCop and Evrazia bot networks conducted automated activity across TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook, with a single TikTok cluster of 1,347 inauthentic accounts generating in the order of 42 million interactions, and a smaller cluster of 155 accounts on X producing some 6 million impressions.[8] Beyond Moldova, the Matryoshka network demonstrates a further qualitative shift — the use of AI-generated video and text mimicking trusted Western outlets to deliver tailored disinformation to discrete audiences in the United States, Germany, Moldova, and Armenia. As for Georgia, the lower visibility of externally hosted bot-network activity targeting Georgia should not be read as indicating lower-intensity Russian FIMI. Russia’s Georgia campaign operates predominantly through domestic, Georgian-language amplifiers rather than through pan-European automated infrastructure — and, crucially, the governing party itself functions as a primary vehicle for Kremlin-aligned narratives on EU integration, the war in Ukraine, and alleged Western “interference.” Russia does not need to manufacture amplification capacity it already possesses through state-aligned media and a ruling-party apparatus that performs the laundering function organically. The lower visible footprint is therefore not evidence of restraint; it is evidence of efficiency.

Information Laundering Chains

The architecture that gives Russian FIMI its greatest power is the laundering chain. False or manipulative content originates in Kremlin-controlled sources, is amplified by state-aligned fringe outlets, and finally — crucially — is cited, reported on, or repeated by local actors who carry greater credibility with target audiences: local journalists, political commentators, religious figures, NGOs, or politicians. This multi-step process strips the content of its obviously Russian origin and allows it to circulate within domestic information ecosystems as organic, locally-generated commentary.

Cyber-Enabled Information Operations

FIMI increasingly intersects with cyber operations. Hack-and-leak campaigns use genuine — or doctored — stolen documents to create disinformation. In Moldova, hackers targeted the Ministry of Justice, using email and messaging apps for phishing and session hijacking. Russian-linked hacker groups, including Fancy Bear (APT28), have targeted Armenian military personnel and diplomats. In Georgia, the 2019 cyberattacks attributed to Russia’s GRU-linked Sandworm group demonstrated the integration of cyber and information operations. The attacks targeted government institutions, media outlets, and civil society organisations, while coordinated website defacements amplified political messaging and public confusion. In Ukraine’s pre-war period, cyber and information operations were systematically integrated, creating confusion in the information environment that compounded military-political pressure.

AI-Enabled and Synthetic Content

Artificial Intelligence has emerged as a force multiplier in Russian FIMI operations — not by introducing fundamentally new tactics, but by lowering the cost, increasing the speed, and expanding the scale at which familiar techniques can be deployed. The operational signature is now visible across the post-Soviet neighbourhood. In Moldova, multiple fabricated deepfake videos have been deployed against President Sandu, including content depicting her advocating pro-Russian policies, announcing her resignation, or addressing voter groups in offensive terms.[9]

In Armenia, AI-generated audio, photographs, and deepfakes have appeared in the information environment for the first time in the 2025–2026 electoral cycle, deployed with unprecedented lead times of several months before the June 2026 vote.[10]

A further development is the emergence of what U.S.-based media-rating and disinformation-monitoring organisation NewsGuard has termed as “LLM grooming” — the deliberate poisoning of data sources, principally Wikipedia, by the Pravda/Portal Kombat network, with the consequence that large language models on platforms including Meta, Perplexity, and Mistral have ingested and reproduced Kremlin-aligned falsehoods about Armenia and other targets without intent on the part of the model operators.[11]

The latter pathway shows a significant change: it turns the open design of generative AI into an automated system that lounders and processes information without needing human effort during the spreading stage.

IV. The Operational Grammar: Methods and Patterns

In all four case countries, Russian FIMI operations follow a clear operational pattern — a collection of repeatable techniques tailored for each target but based on a consistent playbook.

Narrative Seeding and Strengthening

At the initial stage, operations begin with the injection of a narrative into available channels — typically Russian state media or aligned Telegram accounts — which is then amplified by the broader ecosystem. The Pravda network demonstrates industrial-scale amplification, which includes synchronised messaging distributed across 129 affiliated websites in over 50 languages. The key is not the originality of the content but the volume and coordination of its distribution, which creates an impression of organic consensus where none exists.

Laundering Through Local Validators

Once injected and seeded, narratives are transmitted to local actors who carry credibility that Russian state sources lack. These local validators — politicians, journalists, clerics, NGO representatives, academics — amplify the message in their own voice, within their own cultural register, without necessarily knowing or acknowledging the origin of the narrative. This is the most powerful layer of the operation: it transforms foreign interference into apparently indigenous political expression.

Saturation and Information Overload

The third operational layer functions on a different logic from the first two. Where seeding introduces a narrative and laundering invests it with local credibility, saturation is not principally concerned with belief at all; its target is the audience’s capacity for judgement. When a public is exposed, simultaneously and at high volume, to contradictory claims, emotionally charged fragments, and sources whose provenance cannot be established in the time available for political decision, the practical effect is the erosion of the cognitive conditions under which evaluation is possible. The audience is not so much persuaded as worn down — and a worn-down electorate tends either to retreat into prior partisan identification or to disengage from political life altogether. Both outcomes are congenial to authoritarian actors, which is precisely why this is the layer’s strategic value. The Moldovan electoral cycle of 2024 demonstrated the technique in unusually concentrated form: independent observers concluded that the campaign was constructed to “overwhelm voters with so much misleading information that they are unable to discern truth from lies.”[12]

Contradiction as Method

Russian FIMI operations frequently deploy contradictory narratives simultaneously. The simultaneous claim that Ukraine is a Nazi state and that Ukrainian soldiers are being victimised by their own commanders; that the EU impoverishes Moldova while also making it a staging ground for Western aggression — these contradictions are not accidents. They serve to confuse and disorient, to erode the epistemic conditions for clear political judgment. This is what analysts describe as the “nothing is true” logic: if sufficiently contradictory information circulates at sufficient volume, audiences lose confidence in their ability to determine what is true at all.

Emotional Targeting

Russian FIMI consistently prioritises emotional resonance over factual accuracy. The targeted emotions differ by audience segment: Fear (of war, of NATO, of losing ethnic or national identity, and of alleged moral decay associated with anti-LGBTI narratives) for conservative rural communities; Frustration (of economic inequality, of urban elites) for economically marginalised groups; Humiliation (of military defeats, of diplomatic failures) for audiences processing security trauma. In Armenia, the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh was weaponised to generate a pervasive narrative of abandonment and betrayal — attributed not to Russia, which bears primary responsibility, but to the West. In Georgia, the trauma of territorial loss and the legacy of the 2008 war have been exploited to foster narratives of Western abandonment and ineffectiveness, diverting attention from Russia’s responsibility

Synchronisation with Other Instruments

Russian FIMI rarely operates in isolation. In Moldova and Georgia, information operations were coordinated with energy pricing manipulation, economic embargo, vote-buying networks, and cyberattacks on state infrastructure. The same methods are now used against Armenia. In Ukraine before 2022, narrative preparation was systematically synchronised with troop movements, diplomatic manoeuvres, and economic pressure. This synchronisation is what determines FIMI as a component of hybrid warfare rather than a stand-alone influence operation: it multiplies the coercive effect of each individual instrument.

V. Structural Vulnerabilities Russia Exploits

Russia’s FIMI effectiveness varies dramatically by local conditions. Understanding why requires moving from the aggressor’s toolkit to the target country’s structural landscape.

Linguistic Dependence and Media Environment

In all four countries, Russian-language media reach audiences far beyond ethnically Russian communities. Decades of Soviet cultural integration left populations accustomed to consuming information in Russian, even where national languages predominate in daily life. In Moldova, 90% of Gagauzia’s residents drew their news from Russian-language outlets. In Armenia, Russian state television and Sputnik remain accessible. In Georgia, the main source of information for ethnic minority groups is Russian. Before the war, the Russian language was dominant in the eastern and south-eastern parts of Ukraine. This linguistic channel provides an organic distribution pathway for Kremlin narratives, avoiding formal bans on Russian state media.

Weak Institutions and Low Public Trust

In societies where public trust in democratic institutions is chronically low — typically the result of corruption, selective law enforcement, and elite capture — Russian FIMI narratives find fertile ground. USIP’s analysis of Moldova could easily be generalized to all four countries: “poverty is widespread, institutions are weak, and corruption is rampant.”[13] This creates a structural openness in societies to narratives that Russia is exploiting.

Unresolved Conflicts and Security Anxieties

Each target country carries a specific security trauma that Russia systematically weaponises. Moldova has Transnistria and Gagauzia. Georgia has the occupied territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Armenia has the catastrophic losses of Nagorno-Karabakh. Ukraine had Crimea and Donbas. These unresolved conflicts serve simultaneously as demonstrations of Russian military capability and as emotional leverage points.

Church Authority and Identity Politics

The Georgian Orthodox Church and the Armenian Apostolic Church are among the most trusted institutions in their respective countries. Russian FIMI has cultivated influence through these institutions by promoting narratives — anti-LGBTQ+, anti-feminist, anti-Western “values” — that resonate with theologically conservative hierarchies and find amplification through their pulpits. The Kremlin’s strategic framing of Russia as defender of “traditional values” against Western moral decadence has genuine resonance in societies where church authority remains high.

VI. CASE STUDIES

1. Armenia

COUNTRY PROFILE Population ~3 million; formal CSTO ally of Russia until effective suspension in 2024; two successive military defeats in Nagorno-Karabakh (2020, 2023) resulting in the displacement of over 100,000 Armenians and the collapse of the enclave; Prime Minister Pashinyan pursuing active Western reorientation; significant cultural, linguistic, and economic ties to Russia persist among the population; fragmented and largely unpopular opposition; democratic institutions under sustained pressure from both domestic polarisation and Russian interference.

Armenia is the most analytically complex of the four cases — a country that has been simultaneously a long-standing Russian security partner, a victim of Russian geopolitical manipulation, and increasingly a target of intensive Russian FIMI as it attempts a Western pivot. The pattern of Russian disinformation in Armenia is highly opportunistic, contradiction-heavy, and emotionally exploitative, calibrated to a specific set of post-war traumas rather than to a stable ideological project.

Structural Dependencies: Russia’s Infrastructure Capture

Before examining the information dimension, the material foundation of Russian leverage must be stated plainly. Over three decades, Russia constructed one of the most comprehensive structural dependencies of any post-Soviet state, converting Soviet-era debt relief into permanent ownership of critical infrastructure. Gazprom acquired 100% of Armenia’s entire gas transmission and distribution network — 1,683 km of pipelines — under a deal locking in access until 2043; Armenia pays roughly $165 per 1,000 cubic metres under EAEU membership, approximately a third of market rates, making unilateral exit economically catastrophic. Russian Railways holds a 30-year management concession over Armenia’s rail network through 2038. The Metsamor nuclear plant — providing roughly 30% of Armenia’s electricity — operates entirely on Rosatom fuel and technical expertise, with its operating licence extended until 2036. Russian-Armenian billionaire Samvel Karapetyan’s Tashir Group owns the electricity distribution network and the Sevan-Razdan hydroelectric cascade. As recently as 2024, Russia accounted for approximately 46% of Armenia’s total trade, 70% of remittances, and 60% of foreign direct investment.[14] This is not residual post-Soviet entanglement: it is a deliberately constructed cage, assembled through systematic debt-for-asset swaps whose strategic rationale was articulated explicitly by Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller in 2014: “This deal guarantees us access to the Armenian market for 30 years.”[15]

Pashinyan’s Campaign Against Russian-Linked Oligarchic Networks

Russia’s standard instrument across the post-Soviet space — inserting oligarchs with Moscow ties into domestic politics — failed in Armenia. After the 2018 Velvet Revolution, Pashinyan arrested or prosecuted the key nodes of the Russian-linked oligarchic network: former President Robert Kocharyan, Armenia’s richest oligarch Gagik Tsarukyan, and most consequentially, Samvel Karapetyan, whose electricity distribution empire was placed under state management pending nationalisation in 2025.  Russia’s reaction confirmed Karapetyan’s political status: Zakharova declared Moscow’s “readiness to offer necessary assistance,” while the Russian government banned Armenian agricultural exports within weeks. The Kremlin’s reaction made the link clear, confirming the pattern that oligarchic networks with Russian financial ties function as a political infrastructure for Kremlin influence.

The Armenian Apostolic Church as a Russian Influence Channel

One of the most analytically important features distinguishing Armenia from the other three cases is Russia’s exploitation of the Armenian Apostolic Church — one of the highest-trust institutions in the country — as a vector for pro-Russian narratives. Catholicos Karekin II has received Russia’s Order of Honour from Putin personally[16] publicly described Russia as the Armenians’ second homeland and consistently opposed Pashinyan’s moves toward peace with Azerbaijan, border delimitation, and EU integration, calling for the Prime Minister’s resignation. His brother, Archbishop Ezras Nersisyan — head of the Church’s Russian diocese — publicly blessed the Arbat Battalion, a unit of ethnic Armenians fighting for Russia in Ukraine, in 2023. Armenia’s National Security Service subsequently published a document alleging Ezras had been recruited by the Soviet KGB and continues cooperating with foreign intelligence services. The confrontation escalated dramatically in 2025, with clerics arrested on charges of preparing a coup attempt, Pashinyan publicly calling Karekin II “a threat to Armenia’s national security,”[17] and a January 2026 Church reform agenda signed with ten dissident bishops demanding the Catholicos’s removal. Russia’s response replicated the pattern seen with Karapetyan: Lavrov demanded an end to “unjustified attacks” on the Church, the Russian Orthodox Church condemned what it called “political persecution,” and propagandists called for Pashinyan’s removal. The convergence of the Church-state crisis with the pre-election period is not coincidental: analysts at the Yorktown Institute describe the Church hierarchy as “Moscow’s last lever” in a country where most other instruments of Russian influence have been progressively weakened.

Exploiting the Abandonment Narrative

The catastrophic loss of Nagorno-Karabakh — the military defeat of 2020 and Azerbaijan’s seizure of the entire disputed territory in 2023, resulting in the expulsion of 100,000 ethnic Armenians — fundamentally reshaped Armenia’s information environment. Russia, which deployed peacekeepers who clearly failed to prevent the 2023 offensive, nonetheless successfully exploited the crisis to advance narratives of Western indifference and Russian indispensability. Viral falsehood allegations about the Armenian land handover to Azerbaijan, fabricated allegations against Prime Minister Pashinyan’s family, are all part of one broader campaign serving the single core message: “ჩooperation with the West is dangerous.” This is delivered through multiple specific claims — that European integration threatens Armenian sovereignty, that Western mediators are biased toward Azerbaijan, that the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process serves Western rather than Armenian interests etc.

The June 2026 Election Campaign

The June 7, 2026, parliamentary elections represent the most concentrated test of Russian hybrid pressure on Armenia to date. Five named Russian networks operated simultaneously, producing hundreds of AI-generated fake videos built around a single core fear: that Pashinyan would drag Armenia into war with Russia. Leaked Kremlin planning documents confirmed direct Presidential Administration tasking of fake media and disinformation infrastructure. Western intelligence agencies documented a $50 million scheme to transport 100,000 Russian-based Armenian voters to the polls. Simultaneously, the EAEU threatened to suspend Armenia, and Russia banned Armenian agricultural exports. The full toolkit of Russian hybrid pressure is deployed against a single election cycle.

What Makes Armenia Different

Armenia is not simply “pro-Russian,” even as it remains entangled in deep structural dependencies — Russian state television and Sputnik are accessible, and significant cultural and linguistic ties persist among the population. It is better characterised as a contested information arena where Russian FIMI competes with genuine pro-Western sentiment, a government committed to Western reorientation, and a traumatised population whose primary vulnerability is not ideological affinity with Russia but legitimate security anxiety about whether any external power can guarantee Armenian survival. The paradox of Armenia’s position is that Russian FIMI has limited organic resonance in a society that watched Russian peacekeepers fail to prevent the fall of Karabakh — yet Russia retains structural leverage that no amount of pro-European political will can quickly dissolve.

2. Georgia

COUNTRY PROFILE Population ~3.7 million; occupied territories (South Ossetia, Abkhazia) since the 2008 war also officially recognised as independent states by the Russian Federation; strong public majority (~75%) favouring EU integration; Georgian Orthodox Church among the most trusted institutions with ties to Russian orthodox church; ruling Georgian Dream party increasingly authoritarian with strong pro-Russian sentiments;  post-2022 deepening governments anti-EU rhetoric and increasing divergence between government messaging and the country’s declared EU accession trajectory.

Georgia represents a qualitatively different case from Moldova. Rather than depending primarily on direct Russian messaging or financial injection through external proxies, Russian FIMI in Georgia has achieved its greatest effect through domestically rooted validators — the Georgian Dream government itself, its media apparatus, aligned civil society organisations, and segments of the Georgian Orthodox Church — who carry genuine Georgian cultural authority and amplify Kremlin-aligned narratives in the Georgian language, within Georgian cultural codes.

The Ivanishvili Model: Russia’s Most Successful Proxy Insertion

To understand Georgia’s FIMI landscape, the political economy behind it must be stated plainly. Russia’s most consistent strategic instrument across the post-Soviet space has been the insertion of oligarchs with deep financial entanglements in Moscow into domestic political systems — Yanukovych in Ukraine, Dodon in Moldova — as long-horizon vectors for blocking Euro-Atlantic integration. In Georgia, this operation has been more durable than anywhere else. Bidzina Ivanishvili built his fortune in 1990s Russia through the same chaotic privatisation-and-extraction networks that produced the Putin system, accumulating stakes in Gazprom, Rossiysky Kredit Bank, and a portfolio of Russian industrial assets whose preservation depended on Kremlin tolerance. He entered Georgian politics in 2012, spent a decade governing from the shadows — formally resigning as Prime Minister in 2013 while remaining the unchallenged decision-maker behind successive Georgian Dream governments — and in December 2023 formalised his position as Honorary Chairman, publicly confirming what had always been true. In December 2024, the US Treasury sanctioned Ivanishvili specifically for “efforts to undermine democratic processes in Georgia in favour of the Russian Federation”;[18] a close associate, the former prosecutor general of Georgia, had already been sanctioned in 2023 as an FSB asset.

The result, after thirteen years of Georgian Dream rule, is the most thoroughgoing democratic regression of any EU candidate state. Georgia — once a frontrunner in European integration, the first South Caucasus state to sign an Association Agreement and achieve visa liberalisation — has been methodically dismantled as a liberal democracy. The judiciary is controlled by a named clan of judges (the so-called Murusidze-Chinchaladze network) whose ties to Ivanishvili were formalised in back-room pacts as early as 2015–16, and four of its members were sanctioned by the US State Department in 2023 for corruption. The public broadcaster and leading private channels have been captured or neutralised. A law modelled precisely on Russia’s 2012 foreign agents legislation — condemned by the Venice Commission, the European Commission, and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights — was enacted in June 2024 specifically to repress the civil society organisations that constitute the last institutional check on Georgian Dream’s power. Seven major opposition leaders were imprisoned by June 2025.

Depending on the methodology applied, the scale of Georgia’s democratic decline registers differently across major indices, yet the directional verdict is unmistakeable: V-Dem’s Liberal Democracy Index records a 37% drop from Georgia’s 2018 peak to 2024, placing the country below the global average[19]; Freedom House’s Freedom in the World score fell 30 per cent between 2012 and 2025;[20] and even the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index — which assigns relatively greater weight to electoral process and thus captures institutional decay more slowly — records an 11% decline from Georgia’s 2013 peak, sufficient to downgrade the country to “Hybrid Regime” in 2024. Across all three, the trajectory is one of sustained and accelerating regression.

Analysts at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute (CACI), a research institute affiliated with the Johns Hopkins University, describe current Georgian system as a quasi-dictatorship “closer to the model of Lukashenko’s Belarus.”[21] Georgia’s EU accession process was declared de facto halted by the European Council in June 2024; Georgian Dream itself announced in November 2024 that it would not resume accession talks until 2028. A country that in 2013 was legitimately competing to be the EU’s Eastern neighbourhood success story is, a decade later, closer in structural terms to a consolidated authoritarian state than to any European norm. This is the most complete execution of Russia’s oligarchic proxy model in the post-Soviet space — more durable than Yanukovych, who was removed by revolution within four years, and more structurally embedded than Dodon, who lost office in a single election cycle.

The Georgian Dream as FIMI Vector

EUvsDisinfo’s analysis concluded that “the available evidence suggests that Georgian Dream and its primary propaganda platforms are effectively serving as instruments of Russian FIMI in Georgia,” noting that Kremlin and Georgian Dream propaganda “not only promote identical narratives but also deploy similar tactics, indicating not only a strong alignment of interests but also potential coordination.”[22] The most striking illustration is the synchronisation between Russia’s SVR and Georgian Dream messaging: when the SVR released a statement in August 2024 claiming the US was orchestrating a “colour revolution” in Georgia ahead of parliamentary elections, Georgian Dream officials within days were using virtually identical language.

The “global war party” narrative, introduced by Georgian Dream after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, exemplifies how a Kremlin strategic interest — preventing Georgian NATO integration — was translated into domestically credible political messaging. By framing the choice as “peace with Georgian Dream or war brought by the West,” the ruling party weaponised the legitimate war-weariness of a population that vividly remembers 2008, presenting voters with a false dilemma that served Russian strategic interests while appearing as a sovereign Georgian political position.

Religion, Identity, and Traditional Values

One of the most consistently documented patterns in Georgia is the exploitation of religious and cultural conservatism as a FIMI amplification channel. The Georgian Orthodox Church, among the highest-trust institutions in the country, has provided platforms for anti-Western and anti-LGBTQ+ narratives that align precisely with Russian “traditional values” messaging. Chatham House documented that Russian disinformation “exploits local conservative and traditional values by targeting women and the LGBTI community,” with narratives amplified by “far-right, pro-Kremlin, and nationalist politicians, as well as religious groups.”[23]

How Georgia Differs from Moldova

Where Moldova’s FIMI ecosystem depends on direct Russian financial injection and external proxies, Georgia’s depends on institutionally embedded domestic amplifiers who require minimal direct Russian coordination — their interests align sufficiently that they independently replicate Kremlin narratives. This makes Georgia’s FIMI challenge structurally harder to address: exposing a Kremlin-linked Telegram channel is relatively straightforward, demonstrating that a governing party is functionally serving as a FIMI instrument is politically and legally far more complex.

3. Moldova

COUNTRY PROFILE Population ~3 million; bordered by Ukraine and Romania; unresolved Transnistrian conflict; autonomous Gagauzia region; path to EU accession opened 2024; chronically weak institutions; historically deep oligarchic networks; a big part of the population still retains pro-Russian sympathies.

Among the four countries examined, Moldova represents the most intensively documented case of structured, election-focused Russian FIMI with sustained financial investment and domestic proxy infrastructure. Multiple independent analyses converge on the assessment that Russia has turned Moldova into a testing ground for hybrid interference techniques, which have subsequently been refined and exported elsewhere. The tools tested in Moldova in 2024 are now actively used in Armenia to weaken the position of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in the pivotal June 2026 elections.

The 2024 Presidential Election: A Narrow Democratic Mandate

The October–November 2024 presidential election encapsulated the stakes of Russian interference in Moldova with unusual clarity. Incumbent president Maia Sandu won re-election in a second round that was, by any measure, dramatic. On the night of the first round, with domestic polling stations closed, Sandu lag behind — a result that appeared to justify Russia’s investment in vote-suppression and narrative saturation inside the country. The outcome was reversed by the diaspora vote. Moldovans living in the European Union, and particularly in Romania, turned out in extraordinary numbers: diaspora polling stations saw hours-long queues stretching across multiple city blocks in Bucharest, Paris, and other Western capitals, with many voters waiting well past midnight to cast their ballots. The diaspora’s decisive participation — delivering a margin sufficient to push Sandu above the threshold — exposed the structural asymmetry at the heart of the interference campaign: Russia’s financial and media operations had been calibrated to suppress and divide the domestic electorate, but they had no corresponding reach over the approximately 1 million Moldovans who had built their lives and formed their political expectations within the EU. The final result, and the simultaneous narrow passage of the EU accession referendum held on the same day, illustrated both the fragility of Moldova’s democratic trajectory and its resilience when the full citizen body — including the diaspora — is able to participate.

The Shor Network: Finance as FIMI

The operational spine of Russian FIMI in Moldova during the 2020–2025 period was the network built around fugitive oligarch Ilan Shor, who received Russian citizenship in 2024. The German Marshall Fund documented allegations that Shor and his affiliates channeled more than $15 million in Russian funds into the accounts of an estimated 130,000 Moldovan citizens to influence the 2024 presidential election — roughly 5% of the entire population. Russia allegedly invested approximately $55 million to influence the 2023 local elections, and an estimated 200 million EUR in the 2024 electoral cycle. By 2025, Gagauzia’s governor, Yevgenia Gutsul, was convicted of channelling illegal Russian funds into Moldovan electoral processes.

This financial infrastructure was matched by a coordinated media ecosystem: Short-linked TikTok channels, Telegram networks, and local outlets operated in synchronisation with Russian state media, formally banned but accessible in Transnistria and Gagauzia. Of the 482 sources covering Moldova’s presidential elections during voting and counting, 150 Telegram channels were assessed as compromised — meaning every third source was unreliable.

Key Narratives Deployed

• Anti-EU: emphasising concrete and immediate material costs — higher gas prices, economic disruption — against the “intangible and uncertain promise of a brighter European future”
• Anti-Sandu: deepfake videos depicting the president advocating pro-Russian policies, resigning, or making offensive remarks about voter groups
• Loss of sovereignty: framing EU membership as subordination to foreign powers stripping Moldova of cultural identity and language rights
• War fear: drawing explicit parallels between Moldova’s position and Ukraine’s before the invasion, warning that pro-Western alignment would bring Russian military action

Gagauzia as Structural Lever

The Gagauz autonomous region provides Russia with domestic political leverage inside Moldova. With 90% of residents consuming Russian-language media and long-standing tensions with Chisinau, Gagauzia serves simultaneously as a distribution hub for Russian narratives, a pool of organisational capacity for interference operations, and a leverage point for manufacturing conflict. Moscow amplified Gagauz fears that EU membership would extinguish their distinct identity while using its administration as a staging ground for funding and mobilisation.

What Makes Moldova Distinctive

Moldova’s case is distinguished by the depth of Russian financial meddling into domestic politics, the sophistication of the coordinated media-financial-electoral interference system, and the explicit use of offshore structures and sanctioned banks to launder funds. The Carnegie Endowment’s description of this as a “full-fledged influence ecosystem” rather than isolated operations captures the systemic character — a persistent infrastructure capable of activating around each electoral cycle with increasing refinement.

4. Ukraine (Before the 2022 War)

COUNTRY PROFILE Population ~44 million (pre-2022); bordered by Russia, Belarus, Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland; Crimea annexed by Russia in 2014; active armed conflict in Donbas from 2014; Euromaidan revolution 2013–14 as the immediate trigger for Russian escalation; significant Russian-speaking minority concentrated in the east and south; shared Orthodox religious heritage exploited as narrative raw material; historically deep and contested relationship with Russia; the most intensive and consequential Russian FIMI campaign in the post-Soviet space during the 2014–2022 period.

Ukraine before February 2022 represents the most advanced and consequential pre-war laboratory of Russian FIMI — the case that most clearly demonstrates the relationship between sustained information operations and military escalation, and the case that shaped many of the techniques subsequently deployed in Moldova, Armenia, and partly in Georgia.

Delegitimising Ukrainian Statehood

The foundational layer of Russian FIMI against Ukraine was not about any specific policy disagreement but about the legitimacy of Ukrainian existence as a distinct state and nation. The narrative — developed over decades but intensified sharply after Euromaidan (2013–14) — held that Ukraine is an “artificial entity,” a “constructed” state without genuine historical roots. Russia tried to delegitimize Ukraine as a state and as a nation. Putin’s February 2022 speech questioning Ukrainian statehood was not an innovation, it was the culmination of decades of narrative preparation.

The Nazi Narrative and Ethnic Persecution Claims

The Nazi narrative deployed against Ukraine differs structurally from Russian FIMI in the other three cases examined in this study. Introduced in 2014 to justify Russian military intervention in eastern Ukraine and intensified dramatically after February 2022, it served a dual domestic function that has no parallel in Moldova, Georgia, or Armenia. First, it mobilised Russian fighters and public opinion behind the war effort. Second — and more analytically significant — it resolved a fundamental ideological contradiction at the heart of Russian imperial identity: if Ukrainians and Russians are, as the Kremlin insists, one people bound by shared history, language, and Orthodox faith, the question of why Russia was fighting them demanded an answer. The Nazi narrative provided it. The enemy was not the Ukrainian people but a government that had been captured by fascists and was persecuting its own Russian-speaking population — a government from which Ukrainians themselves needed to be liberated. EUvsDisinfo describes the narrative as “predominantly targeting Russian domestic audiences,”[24] and quantitative analysis of Russian state television confirms that it surged instrumentally in the weeks before February 24, 2022, not in response to events in Ukraine but as part of a coordinated mobilisation campaign. A survey experiment conducted in Russia in 2021 found that exposure to such framing raised public support for military action against a neighbour from 8% to 48%.[25] The narrative was not a tool of foreign influence in the conventional sense: it was the ideological mechanism that made war against a brotherly nation psychologically possible for Russian society.

Narrative Preparation as Battlespace Shaping

In the months leading up to February 2022, Russian FIMI and conventional military pressure synchronised with unprecedented sophistication. False flag pretexts were manufactured through fabricated shelling incidents; claims of Ukrainian preparations to use chemical weapons in Donbas were circulated via state media; allegations of secret US-funded biological weapons programmes were developed and held in readiness; a fabricated “Plan B” claiming Ukraine planned to invade Russia was promoted to justify pre-emptive action. These operations were not improvised — they were assembled from years of accumulated narrative infrastructure. The emotional logic underlying them had been established as early as 2014, when Russian state Channel One broadcast a fabricated account of Ukrainian soldiers crucifying a three-year-old boy in the central square of Sloviansk. The story was invented — there was no Lenin Square in Sloviansk, no witnesses could be found, and independent Russian journalists debunked it within 24 hours — yet it reached an estimated 250 million viewers. As historian Timothy Snyder observed, Russian soldiers who subsequently entered Ukraine cited the story as their motivation, saying they had come “for the children.”[26] The crucified boy was not an isolated fabrication but a template: atrocity invention designed to dehumanise the enemy, resolve the ideological contradiction of fighting a brotherly nation, and make domestic mobilisation emotionally possible.

Ukraine is the clearest demonstration that Russian FIMI can function as preparatory battlespace shaping — not merely opinion influence but the systematic construction of the narrative architecture that makes territorial aggression appear justified, provoked, or at minimum ambiguous to the audiences whose political support or acquiescence the Kremlin requires.

Why Russia Ultimately Failed

The failure of Russian FIMI to achieve its intended strategic effects in Ukraine after February 2022 is analytically important. Chatham House identifies the primary reason: Ukraine “had a long time to familiarise itself with its opponent’s methods in the eight years since Russia’s seizure of Crimea.”[27] Between 2015 and 2021, Ukraine launched multiple counter-FIMI initiatives with foreign support, building institutional resilience, public awareness, and fact-checking infrastructure. When the full-scale invasion began, Ukrainian military resilience, direct evidence of Russian atrocities, and coordinated Western counter-communication shifted the information environment decisively.

VII. Cross-Case Comparative Analysis

Across the four cases, the following analytical picture emerges: the playbook is stable; the implementation is modular. Russia does not copy-paste identical operations across countries — it reassembles familiar components according to each target’s specific structural vulnerabilities, available local intermediaries, and geopolitical context.

Dimension	Armenia	Georgia	Moldova	Ukraine (pre-2022)
Primary vulnerability	Post-Karabakh security anxiety, abandonment trauma	Post-2008 war trauma, ruling party alignment	Oligarchic networks, poverty, Gagauzia/Transnistria cleavages	Ethnic/linguistic divisions, Donbas conflict, historical delegitimisation
Key local intermediaries	Pro-Russian opposition, Kremlin-linked media	Georgian Dream party, ultra-conservative and nationalist groups	Oligarchic proxies (Shor network), Gagauz leadership	Separatist proxies, Russian state actors, DPR/LPR structures
Dominant narratives	Western abandonment; cooperation with West is dangerous	Deep state and other conspiracy theories, anti-Western values, threatening with war	Anti-EU cost, war fear, anti-Sandu, sovereignty loss	Denazification, fake statehood, NATO aggression, genocide in Donbas
Financial investment	Growing (Storm-1516, Foundation to Battle Injustice)	Moderate (routed through party infrastructure)	Very high (200M+ EUR in 2024 cycle)	Extremely high (multi-decade, state-level)
Direct Russian messaging	High and growing	Medium (filtered through Georgian local actors)	High (Shor network, Pravda, RT/Sputnik)	Extremely high (state media, diplomatic channels)
Domestic laundering depth	Moderate (fringe opposition, aligned media)	Very deep (government itself as launderer)	Moderate (proxies, but identifiable)	Moderate (separatist structures, collaborating elites)
Electoral focus	High and escalating	High	Extremely high	Significant but military focus dominant
Integration with military/coercive pressure	High (Karabakh losses as backdrop)	Medium (occupied territories as background threat)	Medium (Transnistria, missile debris, energy)	Extremely high (FIMI was preparatory to military action)

 

The Modular Implementation Principle

What varies across cases is not the strategy but the implementation. In Moldova, the primary instrument is financial: Russia funds an extensive proxy infrastructure that converts money into votes, media coverage, and political organisation. In Georgia, the primary instrument is elite capture: a governing party whose interests align sufficiently with Moscow’s that it independently launders Russian narratives. In Armenia, the primary instrument is trauma exploitation: Russian FIMI works through the emotional aftermath of catastrophic security failure. In Ukraine, the primary instrument was existential delegitimisation over many years, building toward the narrative architecture that justified military aggression.

This modular character has important policy implications: generic anti-disinformation responses that address all four countries identically will systematically miss the most effective points of intervention in each specific context.

VIII. Why Russian FIMI Works — and Where It Fails

Russian FIMI’s effectiveness should not be measured primarily by whether it converts majorities to pro-Russian positions. The more significant effects are agenda-setting, erosion of trust, and political fragmentation. An operation that persuades 5% of voters but suppresses turnout among 15% of an opponent’s base, or that splits a governing coalition, or that makes a constitutional referendum pass by 1% rather than 15%, is highly effective even if it “fails” by the metric of mass persuasion. Moldova’s 2024 constitutional referendum passed — but by a margin dramatically smaller than pre-election polling predicted, apparently because of Russian manipulation of undecided voters.

The Trust Erosion Effect

The most durable effect of sustained FIMI operations is the erosion of the informational and institutional foundations of democratic self-governance. When citizens cannot trust their electoral institutions, their media, or their political leaders, and when this distrust is distributed evenly across the political spectrum, the result is the paralysis and passivity that FIMI seeks. This effect accumulates across electoral cycles and is extremely difficult to reverse once established.

Resilience Factors: Where FIMI Fails

The cases also provide evidence for effective counter-FIMI conditions. Ukraine’s pre-2022 resilience-building — eight years of experience with Russian techniques, institutional investment in counter-disinformation — significantly blunted FIMI’s intended effects once the full-scale invasion began. Moldova’s scenario-based STRATCOM approach produced measurable improvements in resilience in the 2025 parliamentary elections compared to 2024. The evidence consistently suggests that resilience requires structural rather than merely informational responses: trusted institutional frameworks, plural and financially sustainable media ecosystems, rapid pre-bunking rather than merely reactive debunking, and civic mobilisation capacities.

IX. Policy Implications and Recommendations

The primary target of counter-FIMI policy should be the distribution and laundering infrastructure, not individual false claims. Exposing and disrupting the Shor network, the Pravda/Portal Kombat ecosystem, the Doppelganger operation, and the Matryoshka bot farms addresses structural amplification capacity. Fact-checking and debunking respond to the symptoms. Dismantling the networks that produce and distribute disinformation addresses the root cause. Western policy is increasingly shifting toward deterrence and cost imposition — sanctions against specific actors, legal tools against infrastructure, and coordinated platform action against fake behaviour networks.

Identifying and Exposing Local Laundering Nodes

The most politically sensitive but analytically necessary intervention is the identification and public exposure of domestic laundering nodes — the local politicians, media outlets, NGOs, and religious figures who translate Russian narratives into domestically credible form. The evidence from Georgia demonstrates that when the governing party itself is the primary laundering node, the information ecosystem cannot be effectively defended without addressing that structural reality.

Tailored Country Responses

The comparative analysis makes clear that a generic, one-size-fits-all anti-FIMI policy will consistently miss the most important points of intervention. Moldova requires aggressive action against illicit financial flows and vote-buying networks. Georgia requires support for independent civil society and media. Armenia requires sustained strategic communication that addresses legitimate security fears through credible Western engagement — not just information campaigns, but concrete diplomatic and security deliverables. Ukraine’s experience teaches that the most effective counter-FIMI investment is in building resilience and institutional capacity before crises, not after.

Election-Period Early Warning

Election periods represent the highest-risk windows for FIMI operations, and cross-national early warning systems have proven their value precisely in this context — sharing intelligence about known operators, coordinating pre-bunking campaigns, hardening electoral infrastructure against cyberattack, and increasing transparency about foreign financial flows. Moldova’s improved 2025 electoral performance demonstrates that timely, coordinated international support can meaningfully shift outcomes even in the most heavily targeted environments. Sustained investment in these mechanisms before, not during, electoral cycles is among the highest-return interventions available to democratic governments.

Platform Accountability and AI Governance

Social media platforms — TikTok, Facebook, X, Telegram, and YouTube — have functioned as primary amplification infrastructure for FIMI operations across all four cases examined in this study. Sustained pressure on platform operators to enforce their own terms of service against coordinated inauthentic behaviour remains an underutilised lever. Well-documented attribution of FIMI networks must translate into platform action, and where voluntary compliance fails, regulatory accountability must follow. The growing use of AI to generate deepfakes and synthetic content adds a further layer of urgency — as does the documented risk that large language models ingest manipulated content, including fake Wikipedia clone sites, and reproduce it as authoritative information. Dedicated AI governance mechanisms addressing these vectors are no longer a future priority; the Armenian case demonstrates they are already operational.

Russian FIMI in the shared neighbourhood is systematic, not episodic. It is best understood as a modular instrument of geopolitical controversy — deployed with different tools and different targets across Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, and Ukraine, but serving a single strategic purpose: preventing the consolidation of sovereign, democratically governed states oriented toward the West.

[1] European External Action Service, “Information Integrity and Countering Foreign Information Manipulation & Interference (FIMI)”, EEAS, https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/information-integrity-and-countering-foreign-information-manipulation-interference-fimi_en. See also EEAS, 2nd EEAS Report on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Threats, January 2024.

[2] NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, Information Laundering in the Nordic-Baltic Region, Riga, December 2020, p. 5, https://stratcomcoe.org/cuploads/pfiles/nato_information_laundering_small_file_10-12-2020-1.pdf.

[3] Donald N. Jensen, “Russian Interference in the 2024 Moldovan Presidential Election and Constitutional Referendum”, Testimony before the U.S. Helsinki Commission, United States Institute of Peace, 12 November 2024, https://www.usip.org/publications/2024/11/russian-interference-2024-moldovan-presidential-election-and-constitutional.

[4] Colonel-General Vladimir Zarudnitsky, Chief of the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, paraphrased in Dmitry Gorenburg, “Moscow Conference on International Security 2014 (Part 2: The Panels)”, PONARS Eurasia, 2014, https://www.ponarseurasia.org/article/moscow-conference-international-security-2014-part-2-panels.

[5] European External Action Service, 3rd EEAS Report on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Threats, March 2025, https://www.eeas.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/2025/EEAS-3nd-ThreatReport-March-2025-05-Digital-HD.pdf.

[6] The term comes from a German word, “Doppelgänger”, translating as “double-goer” and refers to a large-scale, Kremlin-backed, disinformation campaign primarily targeting European nations and the United States. The operation was identified and named in late 2022 by the EU DisinfoLab and the Qurium Media Foundation due to its distinctive method of mimicking legitimate media.

[7] Typosquatting refers to the practice of creating fake websites or domains with names deliberately similar to legitimate ones in order to mislead users who make typing mistakes. (“www.bbcc.com” may imitate real www.bbc.com).

[8] EEAS, 3rd Annual Report on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Threats (Brussels: European External Action Service, 2025). Aggregate monitoring figures and the Moldovan electoral data are drawn from this report; the Moldovan figures are corroborated by independent investigations of the 2024 electoral cycle.

[9]  DFRLab, “Analysis: Why Moldova is a make-or-break moment to combat Russian interference,” 16 October 2024, https://dfrlab.org/2024/10/16/moldova-election-analysis/.

[10] EEAS, 3rd Report on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Threats (Brussels: European External Action Service, March 2025), https://www.eeas.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/2025/EEAS-3nd-ThreatReport-March-2025-05-Digital-HD.pdf;

[11] McKenzie Sadeghi and Isis Blachez, “A Well-funded Moscow-based Global ‘News’ Network Has Infected Western Artificial Intelligence Tools Worldwide with Russian Propaganda,” NewsGuard, 6 March 2025, https://www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/a-well-funded-moscow-based-globa.

[12] Institute for War and Peace Reporting, “Lessons Learned from Moldova’s Elections,” 14 November 2024, https://iwpr.net/impact/lessons-learned-moldovas-elections; see also OSCE/ODIHR International Election Observation Mission, Republic of Moldova — Presidential Election and Constitutional Referendum, 20 October 2024, Statement of Preliminary Findings and Conclusions.

[13] United States Institute of Peace, “Russia’s Hybrid War on Europe: Moldova’s Critical Next 15 Months”, 1 May 2024, https://www.usip.org/publications/2024/05/russias-hybrid-war-europe-moldovas-critical-next-15-months.

[14] Data is taken from different sources such as: Clingendael Institute, Walking the Geopolitical Tightrope, July 2025; Jamestown Foundation, “Significant Economic Reliance on Russia Stunts Armenia’s Integration With West,” January 2024; Eurasianet, “Armenia Tax Records Tell Tale of Continuing Economic Dependency on Russia,” May 2024.

[15] IWPR, “Russian Energy Giant Captures Armenian Market,” 2014, https://iwpr.net/global-voices/russian-energy-giant-captures-armenian-market.

[16] The Order of Honour of the Russian Federation was presented to the Catholicos of All Armenians,” 10 January 2023, https://www.armenianchurch.org/en/news/the-order-of-honor-of-the-russian-federation-was-presented-to-the-catholicos-of-all-armenians/10439.

[17] RFE/RL, “Pashinian vs. The Catholicos: What’s Behind The Armenian Prime Minister’s Campaign Against The Church?,” 21 December 2025, https://www.rferl.org/a/pashinian-catholicos-garegin-armenia-conflict/33629278.html.

[18] U.S. Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control, “Treasury Targets Key Figures Undermining Democracy in Georgia,” December 27, 2024. https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2771;

[19] V-Dem Project, Varieties of Democracy Dataset v14, Liberal Democracy Index, Georgia: 0.520 (2018) → 0.328 (2024). https://v-dem.net/data/

[20] Freedom House, Freedom in the World, Georgia country reports: score 73/100 (2012) → 51/100 (2025). https://freedomhouse.org/country/georgia/freedom-world/2025

[21] Svante Cornell, “Bidzina Ivanishvili: Governing from the Shadows,” CACI Analyst, Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, Johns Hopkins University SAIS, 2025. http://www.cacianalyst.org/resources/Ivanishvili.pdf;

[22] EUvsDisinfo, “Russian Scripts, Georgian Voices,” East StratCom Task Force, EEAS, 29 August 2025. https://euvsdisinfo.eu/russian-scripts-georgian-voices-how-disinformation-targets-the-countrys-western-allies-the-us-eu-and-uk-in-georgia/;

[23] Isabella Wilkinson and Tamar Dekanosidze, “Georgia Must Bolster Resilience to Information Warfare”, Chatham House, 14 March 2022, https://www.chathamhouse.org/2022/03/georgia-must-bolster-resilience-information-warfare.

[24] EUvsDisinfo, “Still at War: Russia’s Disinformation Targeting Ukraine,” 7 November 2022, https://euvsdisinfo.eu/still-at-war-russias-disinformation-targeting-ukraine/.

[25] Sergei Guriev et al., “The Effect of Propaganda on Russian Attitudes toward the War in Ukraine,” pre-registered survey experiment conducted in Russia, February 2021, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Summary available at: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f806/dc3d2f48998fe8fba507a4a494216af71593.pdf.

[26] Timothy Snyder, “The Sadness of Sloviansk,” Substack, 12 April 2022, https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-sadness-of-sloviansk;

[27] Keir Giles, Russian Cyber and Information Warfare in Practice: Lessons Observed from the War on Ukraine, Chatham House, December 2023, https://www.chathamhouse.org/2023/12/russian-cyber-and-information-warfare-practice/04-information-confrontation-human-effects.