Short-form insights and rapid-reaction analysis of breaking news and global events.
Russia Russian officials and state media last week framed the West as being solely responsible for increasing the chance of war in Ukraine. RT, Sputnik, and others closely followed shipments of Western military aid to the country. Foreign Ministry s [...]
Russia Russian officials and state media last week focused on three rounds of high-level diplomatic meetings between Russia and the West. Kremlin-linked accounts gave live updates of U.S.-Russia talks in Geneva on January 10. State media complained [...]
Towards the end of 2021—a year when ransomware attacks reached record highs—researchers at the Alliance for Securing Democracy investigated how local police are responding to the threat of ransomware. We sought to understand how cases are reported a [...]
The Kremlin and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as constant critics of the United States, naturally converge in the information space. The themes and narratives they disseminate about the United States and Western democracies show remarkable cons [...]
Russia Last week, Russian diplomats and state media launched a high-volume propaganda campaign around protests in Kazakhstan, which were started by anger over fuel prices and suppressed with the help of Russian troops. Kremlin-backed messengers refe [...]
Introduction States have wielded energy access as a strategic tool since at least the industrial revolution, when the adoption of coal power made energy a resource to be extracted and exported (or not), just like other strategic resources, including [...]
Russia For the past two weeks, Russian diplomats and state media continued to focus most of their attention on the conflict in Ukraine. On December 30, U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin exchanged warnings over the Ukraini [...]
Russia Last week, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs published two draft treaties—one for NATO and the other for the United States—that listed a series of demands that would limit the alliance’s presence in Eastern Europe. The recommended agreemen [...]
Earlier this month, the Congressional committee investigating the Capitol insurrection said former President Donald Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows turned over a PowerPoint titled, “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN.” [...]
The name of a website is the key indicator users, operators, and algorithms use to evaluate the authenticity of the owner of that website. So much so that there are frequent, sophisticated attempts to trick users into going to fake websites to steal [...]
Russia Russian diplomats and state media last week continued to focus much of their attention on developments around the conflict in Ukraine. On December 7, U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin held a virtual meeting to disc [...]
Last week, U.S. President Joseph R. Biden hosted a virtual Summit for Democracy with 110 countries and governments, in which he called on leaders to make commitments to bolster democracy before an in-person summit is hosted later in 2022—but did the [...]
Russia Kremlin-backed accounts last week continued to focus heavily on the tension between Russia and the West caused by Russia’s military buildup along the Ukrainian border. RT warned that “the risk of an all-out armed conflict in south-eastern Ukr [...]
On December 9 and 10, U.S. President Joseph R. Biden will bring together leaders from 110 countries and governments for a virtual Summit for Democracy based around three key themes: defending against authoritarianism; addressing and fighting corrupt [...]
Cybersecurity experts have watched closely as two trends in cyber interference have steadily grown in popularity: ransomware and hacktivism. Up to this point, they have remained relatively separate. That is, hacktivists have used technology for encr [...]
Russia Last week, Kremlin-affiliated messengers pushed combative messaging around the conflict in Ukraine. Russian officials and state media continued to blame the “'collective West’ under the leadership of the USA” for tensions along the Ukrainian [...]
Russia Last week, Russian diplomats and state-funded outlets continued their media push around the Belarusian-manufactured migrant crisis playing out on the Polish border, resulting in both “border” and “migrant” appearing among the top five most fr [...]
Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko has used state resources to traffic migrants from the Middle East and North Africa to the Polish border—manufacturing a humanitarian crisis on the European Union’s eastern edge. It’s a move designed to retali [...]
Russia Last week, Russian diplomats and state media put forward a massive amount of commentary on the migrant crisis taking place on the Belarusian-Polish border. Six of the top ten most frequently used phrases by Russian accounts tracked on Hamilto [...]
Democracy is under threat across the globe, and President Biden’s Summit for Democracy could serve as a needed wake up call, banding democrats together to brainstorm solutions by drawing upon global successes. This is arguably best accomplished by c [...]
Key Point Consolidating the international consensus that the professional enablers of corruption should be required to watch out for dirty money would require landmark reform initiatives—split roughly evenly between enacting new rules and enforcing [...]
The alignment of interests between the German right-wing party, Alternative for Deutschland (AfD), and Russia’s flagship German-language media outlet, RT Deutsch, is both well-documented and unsurprising, given the Kremlin’s penchant for supporting [...]
Gulf states engaged in cyber-espionage, hacking, and harassment must not be given carte blanche to poison the cyber-realm simply because they are U.S. security partners. The Justice Department recently announced that three former U.S. intelligence [...]
President Biden’s Summit for Democracy aims to reenergize global commitment to democracy during a dangerous period of backsliding and rising authoritarianism. It is imperative that we work together—learn from one another—to defend democracy. But rec [...]
Russia Last week, Russian diplomats and state-funded media provided updates on the Group of 20 (G20) summit in Rome. Russian President Vladimir Putin did not attend the meeting but delivered a video address that criticized unnamed G20 members for al [...]
Ransomware payments in the United States reached nearly $600 million in the first six months of 2021, exceeding the amount of ransom that U.S. institutions reportedly paid to cybercriminals during all of 2020. In 2021, the United States has fallen v [...]
Russia Last week, Russian diplomats and state-funded media disparaged NATO to justify the Kremlin’s move to suspend its permanent mission to the alliance. Moscow’s decision followed NATO’s expulsion of eight members of the Russian mission for allege [...]
September was an important month for German politics with the federal elections taking place on September 26. Our pre-election analysis demonstrated the reach of and bias in Russian coverage ahead of the elections. Both before and after the election [...]
Russia Last week, Russian officials and state-funded media continued to push back on accusations that the Kremlin abused its dominance in the European energy market to cause the continent’s gas shortage. Moscow-linked outlets amplified President Vla [...]
Russia Last week, Russian officials and state media focused on the surging gas prices in Europe, which some EU politicians have said stems from Russia manipulating the gas market to speed up the launch of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. State-backed out [...]
The AUKUS agreement between the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom represents an important step towards further integrating Australia into a concerted Pacific defense strategy, while providing U.S. allies with access to technology and [...]
YouTube’s decision last week to remove RT’s German-language channels for violating the platform’s coronavirus misinformation policy sparked an outcry from Moscow, with the foreign ministry claiming that the move was “fully in line with the logic of [...]
Russia Last week, Russian officials and state media were outraged by YouTube’s decision to take down RT’s German-language channels for violating the platform’s coronavirus misinformation policy. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs called YouTube [...]
Since the earliest days of the pandemic, Chinese state officials and media outlets have disseminated conspiracy narratives claiming that COVID-19 originated at Fort Detrick—a U.S. army research facility in Maryland that has been the target of disinf [...]
Russian disinformation campaigns have become notorious around the world for their ability to cause chaos. And while some suggest Moscow’s motives begin and end with creating havoc, the reality is that Russia has clear strategic goals in mind. The Kr [...]
Russia Last week, Russian officials and state media focused heavily on the UN General Assembly (UNGA), making it the most frequently used phrase on the Moscow-linked Twitter dashboard. Much of the coverage attempted to highlight Russia’s diplomatic [...]
Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party maintained its parliamentary majority in elections marked by apparent Kremlin-directed ballot tampering. Ahead of the elections, Russian government officials and state media used unfo [...]
Foreign actors have demonstrated an interest in Germany’s federal election this year. Of particular concern is the fact that Russian state-backed media have developed a wide reach within Germany and are actively engaging in election discourse. Since [...]
This year’s German federal election poses a challenge not only to the involved candidates and their corresponding parties, but to the entire German political landscape. Several articles and reports have highlighted the susceptibility of the election [...]
Russia Last week, Russian government officials and state-funded outlets focused heavily on Russia’s parliamentary elections, which were held from Friday to Sunday and resulted in President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party maintaining its majorit [...]