The European Commission says Russia is behind a coordinated disinformation campaign targeting EU agricultural policy. A look at what Russian state media and their European proxies have been publishing suggests the claim is not without foundation.
The protests were real. Thousands of farmers across France, Germany, Poland, Belgium and Spain took to the streets over the past two years, furious over EU trade policy, the Common Agricultural Policy reforms, and the EU-Mercosur free trade agreement signed in January 2026. Their grievances — uncompetitive regulations, cheap imports, shrinking margins — are genuine. But as European Conservative reports, citing Commission sources via Spanish outlet El Debate, Brussels has now formally identified a Kremlin-backed disinformation operation designed to exploit and amplify that discontent. The Commission has established a dedicated unit to tackle the campaign, pointing directly to Vladimir Putin as a central actor.
The question worth asking is not whether farmers have legitimate grievances — they clearly do. It is whether Russia has been systematically working to turn those grievances into something more damaging: a sustained narrative that the EU is not just flawed but fundamentally hostile to its own citizens.
Moscow’s Playbook: Grievance as Ammunition
The paper trail from Russian state outlets is extensive. RT, Sputnik and Lenta.ru have covered the farmer protests and Mercosur deal with remarkable consistency — not by fabricating events, but by selecting what to show and how to frame it, then pushing that frame as hard as possible.
RT ran an op-ed headlined “Von der Leyen celebrates ‘a great day for Europe’ as farmers trash Brussels”, portraying EU leadership as “so disconnected from reality that it may as well have been held on a whole other planet.” The same piece described how “pencil pushers use EU Copernicus satellite images to spy and crack down on farmers whose paperwork doesn’t match” – bureaucratic surveillance as the face of Brussels. And then came the line that lays bare the strategic intent: “Russian President Vladimir Putin was effectively a bigger defender of EU farmers’ interests than Brussels was.”
- https://www.rt.com/news/591720-leyen-brussels-ukraine-farmers-protest/
When the Mercosur deal was signed despite mass protests, RT framed it as von der Leyen bypassing democratic procedures and pushing through an unpopular deal against the will of European farmers.
- https://www.rt.com/news/631098-eu-mercosur-trade-farmer-outrage/
Sputnik was equally blunt. In a piece titled “‘We Shot Ourselves in the Head’: Mass European Farmer Protests Blowback for Ukraine Support”, the outlet framed the protests as the direct consequence of Europe following US policy against Russia. “The farmers today are waking up to the consequences of the Ukrainian conflict,” one commentator argued, adding that Europe had “shot ourselves in the head” by supporting Kyiv — positioning solidarity with Ukraine as the root cause of European agricultural collapse.
- https://sputnikglobe.com/20240201/europe-farmer-protests-are-a-consequence-of-ukraine-support-we-shot-ourselves-in-the-head-1116525496.html
Lenta.ru took a more granular approach, running multiple pieces focused on Poland and France. One longread framed the Green Deal as an “ideological attack on the food security of European Union farmers” — and quoted a St Petersburg State University academic at length on why Ukrainian grain imports were destroying Polish agriculture.
- https://lenta.ru/articles/2024/03/13/polsha-fermery/
Another piece amplified Viktor Orbán’s framing of the situation as “a quiet battle between traders and producers”, with the Hungarian prime minister calling on European farmers to unite against Brussels.
- https://lenta.ru/news/2026/01/26/evropeyskih-fermerov-prizvali-vystupit-protiv-zerna-iz-ukrainy/
Orbán’s words, laundered through Lenta, reach audiences far beyond Hungary.
Kremlin Talking Points, European Bylines
What turns this into a campaign rather than just opinionated coverage is the next layer — how the same narratives, often in near-identical language, surface across European-language proxy outlets shortly after appearing in Russian state media.
The clearest example of how directly proxy outlets draw from their sources comes from Czech outlet CZ24.news, which described the Green Deal as “managed destruction” of European agriculture and self-sufficiency — language lifted almost verbatim from RT and Sputnik. But CZ24 went further than its sources, publishing a piece suggesting EU policy was a conspiracy to bankrupt farmers so multinationals could buy their land and grow GMO crops — and warning readers that “the red colour in many yoghurts and cottage cheeses is from insects”.
- https://cz24.news/vykoupi-pole-a-co-tam-budou-nadnarodni-firmy-pestovat/
Fear of Mercosur imports as “chemistry” and contaminated food became a protest slogan in Poland — “Stop chemistry from Mercosur” appeared on banners at Warsaw demonstrations covered by Wolne Media.
- https://wolnemedia.net/umowe-z-mersocurem-mozna-jeszcze-zablokowac/
Slovak outlet Oral.sk published content that reads as a near-direct translation of Kremlin messaging: “The EU increasingly demonstrates that at a critical moment, it is ready to sacrifice ‘its own’ — farmers, industrialists and workers — for abstract geo-economic goals.” The piece deployed the “globalist model” framing standard across Russian state media and drew an explicit double standard: “When activists with the ‘right’ agenda take to the streets, it’s called civic engagement. When farmers are involved, they call it ‘unrest.'”
- https://oral.sk/kratko-o-protestoch-farmarov-v-eu/
French outlet Réseau International framed Mercosur as a “violent betrayal” of European farmers pushed through by von der Leyen against French opposition.
- https://reseauinternational.net/la-confederation-paysanne-annonce-des-tracteurs-sur-le-peripherique-parisien/
French outlet NewsNet went further, connecting Dutch farmer protests to the “Great Reset” — framing local agricultural disputes as a front in a global conspiracy, with the headline “When the Great Reset puts Holland in a pre-revolutionary situation”.
- http://newsnet.fr/art/pourquoi-les-agriculteurs-manifestent-ils-aux-pays-bas
Polish outlet Myśl Polska echoed RT’s characterisation of EU officials as “completely detached, disconnected from any reality”, with a farmer protest organiser asking, “None of us understands why our people, whom we elected to the European Parliament, act against their own citizens.”
- https://myslpolska.info/2024/02/21/rolnicy-nie-jestesmy-sami/
The same phrases — “managed destruction”, “Brussels elites disconnected from reality”, “globalist model”, “threat to food sovereignty”, and “chemistry from Mercosur” — appear in Czech, Slovak, Polish, French and Spanish outlets shortly after their emergence in RT and Sputnik. Across six languages and at least ten outlets, the messaging is not just similar. It is the same.
Brussels Responds — But the Battle Is Far From Over
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has urged Agriculture Commissioner Christophe Hansen to actively counter misleading narratives and communicate the benefits of EU policy more clearly — an acknowledgement that Brussels has not been winning the information battle. The Commission insists that Mercosur imports will meet strict EU standards, with safeguards triggered if volumes rise sharply or prices undercut domestic markets. Many farmers remain unconvinced, citing past cases — such as tomato imports from Morocco — where protections were seen to fall short.
Those concerns deserve serious policy responses. What they do not deserve is to be weaponised by a foreign power with a strategic interest in fracturing European unity. The Kremlin did not create Europe’s farm policy problems. But the evidence shows it has invested considerable effort in ensuring they hurt as much as possible — and that the anger they generate flows in the direction Moscow finds most useful.
