This blog explores the Russian Federation’s use of foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) throughout the decades.
Author: Marianna Prysiazhniuk, ISSP. Reviewers: Anna Pomortseva, European Organisation for Security, Dr Richa Kumar, Trilateral Research.
While the conceptualisation of information threats, propaganda, espionage, active measures and manipulation as new warfare domains under the foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) umbrella was highlighted in the first EEAS report in 2023, the Russian Federation’s use of FIMI instruments is not recent. In the Soviet Era, Russian FIMI was a strategic tool in Moscow’s arsenal for decades. FIMI allows us to understand Russian online information manipulation and psychological operations more comprehensively in its relations to international policy, networks involved abroad and strategic narratives employing and adaptation in narrower contexts. Approaches we all rely on…
Russia’s “soft” influence is better introduced as “sharp,” as the main scope of cultural expansion is to undermine trust in the given society, sow seeds of doubt, exploit internal vulnerabilities and replace the given identity with one’s own. Russian “soft”/“sharp” influence, in a broader sense, postures as a “super” identity with superiority in its essence toward others. Russia’s “sharp power”, on the other hand, historically relies on the psychological orchestration of the information operation. However, these approaches are not mutually exclusive and, in fact, are collectively exacerbated by use of online means.
The widely known Gerasimov Doctrine describes how to weaponize information to weaken the enemy by influencing him distantly. Russian fascist author Alexandr Dugin promotes psychological and information warfare as an instrument for achieving geopolitical goals. Earlier, Soviet philosopher, Grigorii Shchedrovitsky and his son, Petr Shchedrovitsky developed the reflexive control theory of Vladimir Lefevr and the activity-organization games into a new methodology, which influenced numerous politicians, including Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Sergey Kirienko promoted the concept of “Russkii mir” (introduced firstly by G. Shchedrovitsky as the political technology), which explains the necessity of the cultural expansion of Russia abroad. In addition, the KGB, the Soviet secret intelligence service, had massive experience in creating a context “on the ground”, what is called “active measures”.
Therefore, information threats and interference manifestation of autocratic regimes, particularly Russia, should be understood not only through the lens of content but also through the lens of actions – behaviour. As JohnKatzka, retired Senior Foreign Service Officer, with his two diplomatic tours to the Soviet Union, underlines in his article, “that there has been continuity in the core values of Russian culture from the Tsars to the Commissars to Putin. These core values stress the group’s needs over those of the individual, a form of “zero-sum” economics, and the promotion of national security over economic interests. These cultural factors have interacted with an authoritarian political structure common to all three eras”.
Accordingly, the way of behaviour is determined by culture; moreover, the targets Russia chose, such as identity, language, and suppression of the minority, are determined by the way culture is instrumentalised in the given society and how Russia influences it through the set of “active measures”, including information threats.
One notable example of a highly influential Soviet disinformation campaign, which we can now refer to as a manifestation of FIMI and illustrate continuity between Soviet and Russian information threatening, is Operation “Infection” (or “DENVER”). It was designed to spread the disinformation that the USA has artificially created the HIV/AIDS virus as a part of their biological warfare experiments. In the early 1980s, the Soviet Union’s Intelligence Service (KGB) planted this story to discredit USA’s international image and to undermine the credibility of the United States, sowing distrust among nations. Spreading the conspiracy theory that HIV/AIDS was a bioweapon developed by the US military at Fort Detrick, Maryland began in a small, obscure Indian newspaper called “The Patriot” in 1983.
The article claimed that AIDS was the result of American biological warfare experiments. After the initial planting, the KGB used a network of friendly journalists and media outlets to echo the story worldwide. The narrative was picked up and amplified by various sources. The campaign tapped into existing fears about biological warfare and the Cold War rivalry. It exploited anxieties about new diseases and the mistrust between the global North and South.
Modern-day Russia manipulated similar fears and emotions of people both inside and outside the country, around the biological weapons as well as the motivation for the launching of a full-scale aggression against Ukraine, stating that the USA has established a network of biological laboratories, in Ukraine that has been creating biological weapons against the “Russian gen”.
Another example of continuity and reliance on the Soviet experience and KGB heritage is the COVID-19 information campaign against Western vaccines to create favourable conditions for the Russian vaccine, which accidentally has a similar name as the primary propagandistic source does – Sputnik (Sputnik V).
These examples are derived from different historical stages of Russia and other forms of Russian state organization. However, they manifest in almost the same strategic goals of the campaign, ways to intervene, and ways to disseminate to have an impact. These parallels give extremely just grounds to expect that contemporary campaigns go far beyond the information threats intervention and should be analyzed as behaviour while considering all elements of the chain of all actions. Modern-day Russia operates on the legacy of the KGB, enriching it with the capacities of digital platforms and social media, amplifying its reach and impact, employing all the advantages of the internet.
Russian FIMI and hybrid threats have spurred the creation of several responses, for example, the Resilience and Deterrence framework, introduced by the NATO StratCom COE and the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats (Hybrid COE), the Active Defence Strategy, by the U.S. Cyber Command, which linked disinformation and cyber-attacks and proposed a broader public attribution, transparency and accountability approach, media literacy and public awareness campaigns, especially in the EU, RAND’s Strategic narrative approach and the European Endowment for Democracy reports.
A comprehensive, coordinated and agile counter-FIMI response is needed to challenge Russian “sharp power”. The FIMI conceptualization attempts to cover both the information aspects of foreign elements and the “active measures” of agents that promote the manipulative context, giving a new perspective on understanding information threats, especially employed to support conventional military actions, and, as a result, improving countermeasures.
It began much earlier than in 2022…
The 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and subsequent military intervention in eastern Ukraine served as a watershed moment, where the Kremlin demonstrated its willingness to leverage information warfare to support and legitimise military intervention to achieve its geopolitical objectives. Manipulation of information represents an offshoot of the Russian military doctrine of “maskirovka”, or camouflage, concealment and deception methods, which we later observed in 2014 after the Kremlin has already shown its propensity to use them in its military intervention in Georgia, in 2008.
In the lead-up to the 2014 Ukraine conflict and war against Georgia, Russia kept Moldova in its hybrid trap by maintaining a separatist regime that is dependent on the Russian establishment in the occupied Transnistria (“PMR”), which has been Russia’s foothold in Moldova since the early 1990s to keep the country in Russia’s orbit and prevent it from getting closer to Euro-Atlantic structures and this approach Russia repeated further in Ukraine since 2014 by creating controlled “republics” in the Ukrainian East (“DNR”, “LNR”).
In 2014, in response to the Revolution of Dignity, after the Russian president rejected to sign an agreement about the Association with the EU, Russia sharpened its political rhetoric against Kyiv. Information threats of that time were cultivated through labelling new authorities as the “Nazi regime” and portraying the occupation of Crimea as the “salvation” of the Crimean people from these “Nazis” who intended to “ukrainise” the peninsula. The 2014 phase of the overall war laid down the context for the “right” and “good” image of Russian troops, who were portrayed as “polite people”, and this instrument has been employed intensively in the further stage of escalation, for example in justifying of the shelling civil objects and the portraying Russian troops as those who release Ukraine from “nazis” and “fascist”.
Preceding the military attack, the Kremlin launched a wide-ranging disinformation campaign designed to sow discord and distort the situation. This included spreading false narratives about Ukraine planning a military assault on rebel-held areas and attempts to discredit the Ukrainian leadership and rally support for Russian intervention.
The invasion of Ukraine in 2022 represents an escalation of Russia’s longstanding foreign interference information warfare capabilities. As the conflict unfolded, Moscow continues to leverage a range of FIMI tools to shape its narrative, discredit the Ukrainian government, and rally domestic and international support for its actions. All these episodes show that Russia employs the same strategic plots, adapting them to the local context and targeting local identities, such as “nazis”, exploiting the Russian victory in WWII, “salvation”, which Russia politely bring with its troops, tradition values as absolute freedom and the Russian identity superiority and the single condition of existence of smaller nations.
For example, before the events in Ukraine started, pro-Moscow hackers defaced a website belonging to then-Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and posted images of him with Hitler in an attempt to discredit the Georgian leader. Today, we observe the parallels about denazification as the stated goal of Putin’s so-called special military operation in Ukraine, references to the neo-Nazis in the Ukrainian government, and more.
Therefore, perversion of context is the standard tool used by the Russian state both in military and non-military conditions. The aggression against countries from so-called post-Soviet space, especially such as the full-scale aggression against Ukraine, demonstrates that information threats orchestrated from Moscow has no limits and is not restricted by any international standards and law.
Network centred approach
The year 2019, the start of the COVID pandemic, was the next critical phase in the Russian FIMI development. The “anti-COVID movements” supported by Russian forces became the ground for today’s far-right activists and politicians. In addition to the disinformation campaigns, stimulated rumours and misinformation during this period, Russia was revitalizing and strengthening its networks abroad, which have become equipped and ready to step into the game, as the philosopher P. Shchedrovitsky would have said, in the launching of full-scale aggression.
The year 2022 started with massive information and cyber-attacks alongside the real bombing and shelling of the Ukrainian cities. The year of the large-scale intervention was the culmination of the Russian “sharp power” campaign and active measures, recruiting networks of collaborators in Ukraine, activating influence through religious institutions. It had a relationship with the Moscow “headquarters”, promoting the justification of invasion under the “salvation” narrative while Russian forces were committing genocide daily.
In 2023-2024, Russia started involving neighbouring countries more than it had done previously, especially the Republic of Moldova, intensifying strategic narratives on historical revanchism. It also became more active in meddling in European elections and national campaigns across the globe to strengthen Russian presence, maintain diplomatic bridges and promote Russian positions.
Since then, Russia’s information warfare machine has grown increasingly flexible and adaptable, as evidenced by its activities during the ongoing war against Ukraine. The Kremlin has employed various tactics, from disseminating disinformation and propaganda to deploying proxies to obscure its direct involvement. As noted by researchers, this non-linear approach to military strategy has blurred the lines between “wartime” and “peacetime”, with permanent warfare becoming the new normal in Russia’s relations with the West.
The year 2022 marked a significant turning point in the evolution of the Russian FIMI. As Western sanctions and pressure intensified, the Kremlin was forced to adapt its information warfare tactics. This shift in focus from overt propaganda to more subtle and decentralized forms of manipulation was a key development. Using bot networks, targeted advertising and other computational propaganda techniques to shape online narratives within Russia and abroad became more prevalent.
This turning point also marked the era of the weaponization of information and overt integration of information warfare into the Russian military doctrine, as outlined in the 2022 Russian military doctrine, which explicitly recognised information as a critical domain of modern warfare.
The conflict in Ukraine has been the main testing ground for Russian FIMI, where it has actively refined the techniques and tools of information warfare. This has inspired autocratic regimes worldwide to strengthen their foreign influence and manipulation capabilities, emulating the Russian model. However, the impact of Russian FIMI extends far beyond the Ukrainian conflict. Researchers note that hackers working for other countries, including China and Iran, are attempting to push their agendas forward, taking advantage of the information warfare landscape.
This underscores the global implications of the Russian FIMI.
The heart of Russian defeat
Ukraine is the primary prism for understanding the Russian FIMI evolution. Its scope extends beyond the current conflict that has global implications. First, the Russian obsession with Ukraine is conditioned by their geographical proximity and long-shared history, where, at its core, is the complete neglect of the existence of Ukraine. Putin constantly pushes the idea in his public speeches that Ukraine has historically been part of Russia and that its current special military operation is to de-nazify the Ukrainian government.
Second, the annexation of the Crimea peninsula in 2014 and the subsequent events in Eastern Ukraine marked a watershed moment where the Kremlin demonstrated its willingness to leverage information warfare tactics alongside the military intervention to achieve its geopolitical objectives.
Finally, Russia’s full-scale military invasion of Ukraine in 2022 became the new pinnacle of information warfare, where the information domain is weaponised an integral component of the broader military strategy.
These three core perspectives of Russia against Ukraine are factored in to influence the international community and to demonise and delegitimise Ukraine and its allies. This, in turn, enhances Russian transnational influence and hegemony, marginalises vulnerable groups such as refugees and undermines democracy worldwide.