Russia will try mostly to widen European divisions

Subject

Russian attempts to influence European politics and elections.

Significance

Russia sees liberal democratic values as vulnerabilities that can be exploited to drive wedges into societies and undermine governability. A hybrid approach using both online and mainstream media is a minimum-cost, high-efficiency strategy that can in the long term amplify illiberal policies, and nationalist and far-right attitudes in Central-Eastern Europe (CEE).

Impacts

• Russia’s immediate goal of splitting the EU in order to lift sanctions while retaining Crimea is unlikely to succeed in the short run.
• There is a higher risk of interference in EU national elections than in the EP vote.
• Exploitation of platforms such as Facebook, Google and Amazon to curate fake news and accounts will become more important.