As US and Israeli strikes on Iran dominated global headlines, a network of pro-Kremlin proxy outlets across Europe launched a coordinated information campaign — not to report the conflict, but to use it as ammunition against Western unity.
The targets were not Iranian. They were American credibility, the transatlantic alliance, and Ukraine’s relationship with Washington. Across Czech, Slovak, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Polish and Slovenian outlets, the same narratives appeared within days of each other — the US as a rogue aggressor, Europe as a vassal state, NATO as a collapsing fiction and Ukraine as a liability Washington is ready to discard. The messaging was too consistent, too coordinated, and too strategically convenient for Moscow to be a coincidence.
The first and most sustained line of attack was delegitimising US military action entirely. Czech outlet CZ24.news, which regularly translates and publishes content from Russian state-affiliated sources, was among the most explicit. In a piece examining US alliances in the region, the outlet declared: “The only country the United States will continue to defend at all costs is Israel. It has long been the de facto master of the American elite, and thanks to compromising materials from the Epstein affair, it literally holds Washington by the throat.” The same piece described NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte’s supportive statements about Trump as “a statement of a slave to a vassal”.
Dutch outlet Frontnieuws.com framed the strikes as an illegal war of choice built on manufactured pretexts: “Trump has started an unnecessary war, a war of choice, for reasons he never fully clarified, based on facts that don’t add up about weapons of mass destruction — where have we heard that before?” The Iraq War parallel was not accidental. The same outlet ran a separate piece describing “the end of the American-Zionist empire”, with “Pax Americana trembling on the operating table” and “Israel reduced to smoking rubble while Washington flaps its useless wings.”
Italian outlet Controinformazione.info went further still, framing the strikes as not just illegal but an attack on the international order itself: “The United States and Israel have launched an unprovoked war against Iran in flagrant violation of Article 2(4) of the Charter, without Security Council authorisation and without any legitimate claim of self-defence.” The piece added, invoking Kissinger: “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be its friend is fatal” — and concluded that hosting US military bases “means transforming one’s country into a vassal state”.
Spanish outlet Geoestrategia.eu described the Mar-a-Lago meeting between Trump and Netanyahu as “the public ratification of a long-standing strategy: the systematic destabilisation of the Islamic Republic of Iran”, adding that “Washington has traditionally outsourced military pressure to Israel, using its ally as a high-risk proxy.” A later piece on the conflict’s progression declared simply, “Trump is trapped, but he doesn’t know it” and “Trump lives in a fantasy world. Yes, I think he has lost touch with reality.”
The second major thrust of the campaign was driving a wedge between Europe and the United States — portraying European countries not as allies but as victims of American unilateralism, dragged toward a war they did not choose and cannot afford.
CZ24.news framed the situation in stark terms: “With Trump’s arrival, the bloc lost the last remnants of its independence.” The same piece warned that the war in the Middle East was “a warning to Russia” about how the US treats its allies — meaning the outlet was explicitly using the Iran conflict to reassure Moscow that NATO solidarity is hollow.
The same outlet also published a lengthy analysis by Elena Pustovoytova arguing that Europe has no realistic path to energy independence from American LNG and that the only rational solution is to return to Russian gas: “The most reasonable solution would be a return to purchasing Russian energy resources. This is inevitable.” The piece framed the US bombardment of Iran as “simply a means of subordinating energy supply chains in the world’s richest region to Washington’s control” — positioning the war as an American energy grab at Europe’s expense. The analysis carried a direct attribution line at the bottom: “ZDROJ: Elena Pustovoytova, Fond Strategičeskoj kultury” — the Foundation for Strategic Culture, a Russian outlet with documented links to the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service. CZ24 was not hiding where its analysis came from. It was simply translating Kremlin talking points into Czech and presenting them as independent commentary.
French outlet Réseau International contributed its own angle: “The EU directly rejected the idea of participating in securing the Strait of Hormuz” – framed not as a reasonable European position but as evidence of a rupturing transatlantic relationship.
Polish outlet Myśl Polska ran a piece predicting that 2026 would become “the year of local wars that could lead to the Great War or World War III”, arguing that US actions in Iran effectively signal that “for the USA, the NATO project has become a thing of the past.”
The third strand of the campaign targeted the US-Ukraine relationship directly — using the Iran conflict as a pretext to argue that Washington has moved on from Kyiv and that Ukraine’s window for support has closed.
Slovak outlet Hlavný Denník ran a piece built around Trump’s own statements, stripped of all context and framed to maximise damage: “Kyiv could have been captured by Russian forces in a single day,” and “finding common ground with Zelenskyy is harder than with Vladimir Putin, which delays the settlement process.” The piece sourced its material from Russian aggregator Bloknot — transparently laundering Kremlin framing through a Slovak byline.
Slovak outlet Infovojna.com published a piece centred on the resignation of the head of the US National Counterterrorism Centre, using his resignation letter to validate the claim that Israel – not Iran – was the real threat and that the war was “fabricated by Israel”. The outlet also ran a post by Kremlin envoy Kirill Dmitriev verbatim and without critical commentary, in which he proposed that the US “impose sanctions on the United Kingdom and the EU for lack of reciprocity and for destroying Western civilisation through immigration – and lift sanctions against Russia to support global energy markets.”
Réseau International went further on Ukraine, arguing that “Ukraine in general and Zelenskyy in particular are no longer necessary” to the United States and that Washington had already extracted everything it needed from the war — military experience, drone technology, and battlefield data — and had no further use for Kyiv. The framing was precise: not that the US abandoned Ukraine, but that Ukraine had been used up.
Taken individually, each of these outlets might be dismissed as fringe commentary. Taken together, they form something more deliberate. The same narratives — the US as aggressor, Israel controlling Washington, Europe as vassal, and Ukraine as exhausted proxy — appeared across eight countries and at least ten outlets within the same news cycle. The language overlaps. The sourcing overlaps. In several cases, the origin is not even hidden: CZ24 names the Foundation for Strategic Culture; Hlavný Denník cites Bloknot; Infovojna republishes Kremlin officials without attribution labels.
This is not a collection of sceptical voices reaching similar conclusions. It is an information operation using real events — a real war, real economic disruption, real political tensions — as raw material for narratives designed in Moscow and distributed across Europe in the languages that reach European audiences most effectively.
The Iran conflict gave the Kremlin’s proxy network exactly what it needed: a genuine crisis with enough chaos, enough legitimate grievance, and enough Western disagreement to make the amplification invisible.
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