Securing Democracy Dispatch

ASD at GMF has joined Bluesky! Follow us @securedemocracy.bsky.social.

The Trump administration’s attempts to shut down Voice of America and other US-funded outlets offer “greater opportunity for Washington’s adversaries to shape public perceptions worldwide”, GMF Digital Communications Specialist Nana Gongadze and Senior Fellow Bret Schafer write.

Russian diplomats and state media focused on two main narratives this week:

• European Troublemakers: TASS cited Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service statement that accused European special services of undermining Ukraine peace negotiations and claimed that British and French special services had been “searching for informational dirt” about US President Donald Trump’s ties with Russia to further undermine talks. Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) elaborated that the United Kingdom and France showed particular interest in information about business projects between American citizens and Russian energy companies, such as Gazprom, Rosneft, Rostec, and Rosatom. RT also amplified Russian presidential aide Nikolai Patrushev’s claim that NATO military exercises near Russia’s border practiced the seizure of Kaliningrad, Russia, and preemptive strikes on Russia’s nuclear weapons. Sputnik Lithuania speculated that Lithuania, Poland, and Germany want to take over the Kaliningrad region.
• EU Power Outages: Many Russian state news outlets covered power outages in Portugal, Spain, and parts of southern France neutrally, but some introduced conspiracy theories about possible causes. An RT en Español contributor claimed that “several Catalan mayors” were warned of the blackout a day before it occurred. Sputnik Serbia consulted Bojan Dimitrijević, a professor at the Belgrade Business and Arts Academy of Applied Studies, who warned that the outage could be a “dress rehearsal” for a new totalitarian state in the EU that he compared to “Orwellian war communism”. Similarly, RT en Español journalist Helena Villar implied that Brussels orchestrated the outage to “get people to buy the kit with the candles and the battery-powered transistor”, alluding to an earlier EU appeal to citizens to hold 72 hours of emergency supplies.

The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) diplomats and state media focused on two main narratives this week: 

• Tariff Negotiations, or Lack Thereof?: Last week, the PRC continued to cover developments tied to US tariffs. The PRC’s MFA, as well as PRC embassies in countries like Canada, Fiji, Japan, Kenya, Kuwait, Liberia, Mexico, Slovakia, the United Kingdom, and the United States called on the world to “Never Kneel Down!” Similarly, the PRC ambassador to India shared his recent op-ed that encouraged India to “stand up to Washington’s bullying”. PRC diplomats and state media accounts denied that there was any dialogue taking place over the tariffs, with pro-PRC commentators mocking Trump’s lack of clarity when describing the negotiations and implying that Beijing’s rebuttals were a “a slap in the face for” Washington.
• Technological Prowess: PRC state media and diplomats widely relayed the launch of a crewed Chinese spaceship. Some accounts focused on the launch, others on the crew’s exchanges in space, others still on Chinese people’s enthusiasm around the event. CGTN-affiliate Frontline highlighted PRC-Brazil space collaboration and a pro-PRC commentator amplified news of international cooperation between ten countries, including Russia and Iran, to work on a lunar probe mission by 2029. Along similar lines, the PRC ambassador to Egypt promoted his country’s successes in artificial intelligence (AI) patents, the spokesperson for the PRC embassy in India praised her country’s lead in chip “design and fabrication research”, and the Consul General in Osaka, Japan highlighted a specific breakthrough in chip manufacturing. Other videos advertised militarized robots or flying cars.

PRC repression campaign targets Canadian election candidate: Canadian officials identified a PRC-sponsored transnational repression operation against Joe Tay, a Conservative party candidate and outspoken critic of Beijing, that entailed placing a bounty on Tay—subsequently amplified online in an “inauthentic and coordinated” manner—and censoring his name on Chinese platforms. Tay conceded defeat on Tuesday after finishing in second place and running a low-key campaign out of concern for his safety. Managing Director David Salvo tells the Dispatch, “The details of the PRC’s horrific campaign against Tay fit a pattern of PRC interference in democratic elections that ASD has tracked. PRC state-sponsored actors target specific candidates in specific races, threaten and intimidate said candidates and their relatives still located in China, and conduct information operations in Chinese languages to influence how diaspora voters perceive candidates and issues of importance to the PRC. This has happened in the last few Canadian election cycles, but it’s also happening on a smaller scale in the United States.”

Russian information campaign amplifies false claim about Danish lawmaker and Greenland: A Russian influence operation fabricated and amplified a story on social media that falsely claimed Danish lawmaker Karsten Hønge sought Russia’s help to prevent Greenland from joining the United States. The operation’s content included a doctored image of a Facebook post published by Hønge, according to Danish defense intelligence services. Open-Source Intelligence Analyst Larissa Doroshenko says, “One of Russia’s information-warfare objectives is to promote division and sow discord. In this case, a Danish politician’s alleged request for Russian help put it in confrontation with several European NATO members who increasingly see Russia as a threat to their national security. This fabricated request could have also stirred up domestic political debates and polarization within Denmark, potentially exacerbating rivalry between Hønge’s Socialist People’s Party and the Social Democrats or divisions between progressive-left and far-right parties.”

France attributes years of high-profile cyberattacks to Russian military intelligence: French authorities formally accused APT28, a notorious hacking group linked to Russian military intelligence, of directing several cyberattacks against the country’s public and private sectors since 2021, as well as the hacking and leaking of thousands of documents belonging to then-candidate Emmanuel Macron’s presidential campaign in 2017. Senior Fellow Bret Schafer says, “Nothing in the report is particularly surprising, as it was well known that the Kremlin uses hacking groups and influence agents to target entities and individuals in the West. Still, the public acknowledgment of this activity—and more importantly, providing specific details of the campaigns and methods used—is an important part of resilience building.”

In Case You Missed It

• The PRC lifted sanctions on five members of the European Parliament that were previously imposed in retaliation for EU scrutiny of Beijing’s treatment of Uyghurs.
• About nine-in-ten American adults are concerned about AI conveying inaccurate information and news, a Pew Research Center poll finds.
• Revival, a Bulgarian nationalist party with pro-Kremlin views, signed a cooperation agreement with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party, inviting exchanges of “experience, ideas, and political practices”.
• X has lost 11 million EU users—a 10.5% drop in its total European users—since August 2024, with the largest losses in France, Poland, and Germany, according to the platform.

The views expressed in GMF publications and commentary are the views of the author alone.