Securing Democracy Dispatch

Foreign authoritarian regimes “know they’re not going to change 250 million minds” directly with information operations. Instead, they flood the zone to seed narratives to be picked up later or to shape search-engine and chatbot responses to reflect their preferred narratives, Senior Fellow Bret Schafer said during an online discussion with the Los Angeles World Affairs Council.

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

• NATO Defense Spending: Russian officials and state media downplayed NATO’s decision to increase defense spending to 5% of GDP and highlighted US-EU divisions. Russian President Vladimir Putin emphasized that, while Russia spent money on the development of its defense industry, European countries spent funds “on the development of American weapons”. Putin also boasted that Russia’s defense spending is 6.3% of its GDP and assured that the Kremlin intends to reduce defense spending after completing “the special operation with the necessary result”. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov labeled NATO’s decision “a threat to taxpayers in the EU and Britain” because their money would be spent on “a senseless war in Ukraine”. Sputnik Brasil claimed that Europe feared “becoming a hostage” to the United States and declared that NATO’s increased defense spending could lead to the “dismantling of the European project”.
• Nazi Allegations Against New MI6 Chief: Russian propaganda outlets amplified claims that the grandfather of the United Kingdom’s newly appointed Secret Intelligence Service chief, Blaise Metreweli, was “a Ukrainian Nazi”. RT Deutsch repeated allegations published in the Daily Mail that Metreweli’s paternal grandfather, Konstantin Dobrowolski, was the son of a German-Polish Ukrainian “who worked for Nazis and was involved in the mass murder of Jews”. RT en Español noted that neither UK authorities nor Metriweli have uttered “a single word of condemnation” of Dobrowolski and his role in “Nazi-occupied Soviet Ukraine”. Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova theorized that someone “deliberately and consciously” appoints the descendants of Nazis to leadership positions in the “collective West”. Sputnik elaborated on this claim by suggesting a Nazi connection to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, former German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, former Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, and Canadian Minister of Transport and Internal Trade Chrystia Freeland.

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

• “Ten Talks” Criticism: PRC state media officials sharply criticized Taiwanese leader Lai Ching-te’s “Ten Talks on Unity”, a series of speeches that PRC state media have framed as pushing a “secessionist narrative”. CGTN called Ching-te’s latest speech “a rant of nonsense and delirious soliloquy”, Xinhua accused him of “recycling debunked narratives”, and CCTV claimed that the speeches reveal Ching-te’s “hidden dictatorial ambitions”. The most scathing assessment came from the Global Times, which labelled the talks a “desperate political show”, Ching-te a “saboteur of peace”, and Taiwan a “so-called country”. In a video posted to Instagram, CCTV’s Chinese-language outlet said that Ching-te has started to “imitate [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy” to “attract [US President Donald] Trump’s attention”, but that “Trump doesn’t take Ching-te seriously at all”.
• NATO Defense Spending: In the aftermath of last NATO week’s summit, PRC commentators continued to bash the alliance’s pledge to increase member countries’ defense spending to 5% of GDP. A PRC defense ministry spokesperson called the alliance a “true war machine” that has “overstepped its own geographic limits”, while China Daily labeled the pledge a “political gambit to placate the US administration”. Dozens of posts covered friction between Spain and the United States over the former’s refusal to commit to the 5% target, with several highlighting comments from a Spanish expert who called the US demand “crazy”. PRC media also amplified the Kremlin’s perspectives, including by quoting Putin, who reiterated his claim that Russia was “betrayed” by NATO’s eastward expansion.

Iranian diplomats and state media focused on one main narrative this week:

• IAEA: After the United States and Israel targeted Iran’s nuclear program last week, Iran focused its ire on the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Director General Rafael Grossi. PressTV accused Grossi, who claimed that Iran is hiding enriched uranium in Isfahan, of advocating for the bombing of historical sites and “setting [the] stage for Trump’s aggression on Iran’s heritage”. PressTV’s French-language service alleged that Grossi “participated in the murder of innocents with his unfounded report”. Former UN weapons inspector and frequent contributor to Russian and Iranian state media Scott Ritter said that Grossi has “blood on his hand[s]” and “should be removed immediately”. Iranian government officials rejected Grossi’s calls for the IAEA to visit nuclear sites, calling the idea “incomprehensible” and “meaningless and possibly malign in intent”. Iran’s ambassador in Brussels added that Grossi has “deep biases regarding Iran and a strong loyalty to the United States”. 

Billboards promoting RT documentaries erected in three Italian cities: At least 22 billboards were recently erected across Rome, Milan, and Bologna to promote RT-published documentaries about Ukraine that have been screened to Italian audiences. The billboards violate the EU’s 2022 regulation that banned the dissemination of RT and Sputnik content within the bloc. Program Coordinator Louis Savoia tells the Dispatch, “These billboards represent an escalation in the Kremlin’s effort to win over Italy’s hearts and minds through documentaries, an overt information strategy in recent years to increase Italians’ skepticism toward the Ukrainian war effort and European leaders’ support for it. It is no coincidence that the largest share of these advertisements went up in Rome, as Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni faces growing signs of weariness about European rearmament among rival politicians and the public—and increasing vitriol from Russian state media toward her. The billboards also charge that authorities ‘ban the truth’. Indeed, Russian officials have routinely alleged censorship of their narratives about Ukraine and weaponized protests and other backlash to these documentaries to justify this assertion. Any official response from Rome or Brussels will need to be cautious, lest they validate the Kremlin’s portrayal among the Italian public.”

Inauthentic pro-Scottish independence accounts go dark during Iran blackout: Dozens of social-media accounts that advocated for Scottish independence from the United Kingdom and published hundreds of posts per week have been linked to Iran; they went inactive on June 13 as 95% Iran fell under an internet blackout amid Israeli air strikes, according to the UK Defence Journal. Senior Investigative Research Officer Peter Benzoni writes, “This information operation was uncovered due to a natural experiment—a large-scale, but localized, internet outage. These natural experiments are understudied. Researchers should look into information campaigns like the Pravda network over time and look for gaps in their normal behavior, correlating those with internet-service provider and other outages, maintenance windows, and software releases, or times when the technical infrastructure backing these operations tends to break. This reveals both their architecture and potential points of intervention.”

In Case You Missed It

• The Russia-linked information campaign Operation Overload has published 587 unique pieces of content in the last eight months that attracted millions of views worldwide, a massive increase largely aided by the use of commercially available artificial intelligence (AI) tools, according to research from CheckFirst.
• X will use AI agents to write community-notes entries, but human users will still need to approve these additions before they are published.
• The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency dismissed an Iran-linked hacking group’s threat to release emails stolen from the accounts of individuals and government officials close to Trump as a “smear campaign”.
• NATO member countries agreed to increase defense spending to 5% of gross domestic product by 2035, with 1.5% dedicated to cybersecurity and other non-military expenses.
• US senators removed a controversial proposal in Republicans’ budget bill that would have banned states from enacting new regulations on AI for ten years.

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