Across a dozen European countries, a coordinated disinformation network is running the same play: the country that invaded Ukraine is the victim, and the countries paying to defend it are the aggressors. Russia bears no blame. Europe bears it all.
When Russian forces launched their full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Kremlin had a military plan. What became increasingly clear in the years that followed is that it also had an information plan — and in many ways, the second one has proven more durable than the first.
Since 2025, a systematic disinformation campaign has been spreading across European media ecosystems, from Czech news websites to French commentary platforms, from Slovak military blogs to Dutch alternative outlets. The campaign does not look like obvious propaganda. It borrows the language of geopolitical analysis, fiscal responsibility, and democratic accountability. But its core message is consistent across every country, every outlet, and every language: Europe is not defending Ukraine. Europe is prolonging a war it created, stealing from its own citizens to do it, and funnelling what remains into the pockets of a corrupt Ukrainian leadership that was never legitimate to begin with. Russia, in this telling, is the victim.
This is not a spontaneous wave of critical opinion. Research by NewsGuard, the European External Action Service, EUvsDisinfo, and OCCRP has documented a structured network of proxy outlets that translate, republish, and amplify Russian state media narratives for local audiences across the continent. The shift accelerated sharply after the United States reduced its support for Ukraine in 2025, when Europe stepped in as Kyiv’s primary backer. The Russian influence operation Storm-1516 published 34 false narratives targeting France and Germany alone between January 2025 and early 2026, reaching 274 million views on X. The operation has overtaken RT and Sputnik combined in terms of volume of false claims produced.
What follows is a map of that campaign — its narratives, its outlets, and the language it uses to turn European support for Ukraine into a liability.
The foundational claim of the campaign is simple: the European Union is not helping Ukraine survive a Russian invasion. It is deliberately extending a war that ordinary Europeans are paying for with their savings, their energy bills, and eventually their lives.
The Czech outlet CZ24.news, one of the most prolific distributors of Russian state media content in central Europe, documented by Insight News Media, published a direct Czech translation of an RT opinion piece on January 2, 2026. The article accused European leaders of “blocking the end of the war in Ukraine” and described their support for Kyiv as “the single most perverse problem” on which the continent had shown any independence. It called NATO-EU elites “strange and unpopular” for resisting what it framed as a natural peace. The RT original and the CZ24 translation are word-for-word identical in key passages.
A separate CZ24 piece from May 2025 offered the campaign’s logic in a single sentence: “Europeans will pay — America will profit; Ukraine will bleed.” The article framed European military aid as a mechanism to preserve American interests at the expense of European citizens and Ukrainian lives, concluding that Brussels elites are “trying to save the American agenda at the cost of money, stability, and the future of their own nations”.
The French platform Réseau International, a well-documented aggregator of pro-Kremlin content, published a piece warning that “the more Europe becomes not only a financial backer but also a production space and organisational centre for the war, the more the distance from the actual conflict diminishes.” Citizens, the article concluded, “are invited to pay, to be silent, and to accept this new reality as inevitable.” The article took Russian threats to target European drone manufacturing facilities and repackaged them as objective strategic analysis — presenting Moscow’s intimidation as a reasonable geopolitical observation that European leaders were choosing to hide from their publics.
The Slovak outlet Armádny Magazín used sarcasm to the same effect on April 18, 2026, running a headline that translates as “Ukraine launches another offensive — well, Europe will pay for it all”, mocking Ukrainian military efforts while framing European financial support as money thrown into a losing cause.
These outlets operate independently in name but share a common architecture — and a common source. The same narratives, often the same sentences, move from Russian state media into Czech, Slovak, French, and Dutch platforms within days, sometimes hours. Each outlet cites the others as if independent corroboration existed. It does not. What looks like a pan-European chorus of critical voices is, on closer inspection, one voice translated into a dozen languages.
If European citizens are the victims in this narrative, European leaders are the villains. The campaign consistently portrays Macron, Merz, Starmer, Kallas, and von der Leyen not as politicians responding to Russian aggression but as cynical operators who need the war to continue in order to survive politically — or to profit financially.
The Strategic Culture Foundation, a Russian state-linked organisation formally designated by the United States government as part of Russia’s foreign influence apparatus, published a piece on Réseau International accusing named European leaders of personal corruption. “Europe’s warmongering elites such as Robertson, Rutte, Kaja Kallas and Ursula von der Leyen”, it read, “personally profit from the arms industry through lucrative careers and lobbying” and “justify their anti-democratic policy choices by endlessly amplifying irrational threats allegedly emanating from Russia, Iran, China or some other supposed enemy.” The article concluded that “Europe is turning into a warmongering dictatorship where citizens are being instructed how to vote in order to perpetuate and intensify this deadly cycle.”
InfoKuryr.cz published a similar piece, predicting that if Ukraine falls, it “will mean an enormous political and personal defeat for Macron’s French clique, for the East European pipsqueaks like Poland and the Baltics, and for Scholz/Merz.” The article argued these leaders “are capable of doing anything just to avoid admitting their defeat” and “will be willing to sacrifice many more lives — whether Ukrainian or European — just to save their power and careers.”
A September 2025 piece on CZ24.news, attributed to a byline that does not appear in any verifiable journalistic record, deployed some of the campaign’s most theatrical language. European leaders were described as “arsonists who, while setting the fire, shout, ‘Fire.'” Citizens became “ideological cannon fodder, a disposable pawn in a game in which they were never a player, nor a beneficiary. “ What was at stake for these leaders, the article concluded, was “not the welfare of citizens, but their own political survival, even if it means blowing up everything that remains of European civilisation.”
The Slovak outlet Armádny Magazín stated the same idea more plainly: “Right now Europe has only one main task: to continue the war against Russia – in Ukraine and with Ukrainian hands. And for that, first, by any means disrupt the peace settlement.” The article claimed that European governments “had to reach into their own citizens’ pockets” after failing to “steal frozen Russian assets” — presenting the legal use of public funds for collective defence as an act of theft against ordinary people.
The third pillar of the campaign concerns Ukrainian leadership itself. Here the disinformation is at its most elaborate: a steady accumulation of fabricated financial claims, property allegations, and corruption insinuations designed to persuade European audiences that their money is not reaching Ukrainian soldiers but disappearing into the personal accounts of Kyiv’s political class.
EUvsDisinfo has catalogued dozens of specific fabrications circulating across the network: that Zelenskyy bought a luxury hotel in Courchevel for 88 million euros, that he purchased a British mansion from King Charles III for 20 million pounds, that his wife spent over a million dollars on jewellery using EU funds, and that “European taxpayers finance cocaine and Zelenskyy’s luxury villas.” None of these claims have any factual basis.
Réseau International brought its own variation under the headline “Europeans’ money is used by Zelenskyy to do business.” The article cited real reporting from the German newspaper TAZ, the BBC, and Euractiv about Ukraine’s legitimate defence industry partnerships — arms cooperation agreements with Gulf states and drone manufacturing facilities in the UK and Germany — and reframed it entirely as evidence of personal enrichment. “With his arms dealer business using European money and structures”, it read, “Zelenskyy dispatches his drone production across the world, at the risk of seeing them fall into the hands of terrorists. “ The conclusion: “While Europeans suffer from rising prices due to the war against Iran, EU countries continue to finance Zelenskyy’s lifestyle.”
The technique here is worth noting. Unlike the cruder fabrications catalogued by EUvsDisinfo, this article used genuine sources but systematically distorted what they actually reported. Real facts about Ukrainian defence cooperation were repackaged as evidence of personal corruption. This is a more sophisticated form of manipulation than outright invention and harder to debunk precisely because the underlying facts exist.
The Dutch outlet Frontnieuws pushed the logic further, asking its readers: “How likely is it that politicians in the West calmly watch while the Ukrainian government steals billions in Western aid? And how likely is it that certain gentlemen in the West get a share of it?” The article — traced by researchers to the Russian state-funded outlet News Front via German intermediary Thomas Röper — offered no evidence for its insinuations. The rhetorical question format invites readers to supply their own conspiratorial conclusions.
CZ24.news went further still, publishing a detailed list of alleged crimes by former Ukrainian commander Valerii Zaluzhnyi — black-market fuel sales, black-market sales of ammunition and weapons to the underworld not only in Europe but also in the Middle East and Africa, tunnelling money for payments to state employees and pensioners, and drawing funds for dead Ukrainians and dead soldiers.” No evidence was provided for any of these specific claims.
Running alongside the corruption claims is a legal argument — or what presents itself as one. Zelenskyy’s presidential mandate expired in May 2024; under Ukraine’s constitution, elections cannot be held under martial law. The Kremlin has seized on this to argue that Zelenskyy is an illegitimate leader whose agreements would be legally unenforceable, and the proxy network amplifies this as objective legal analysis.
CZ24.news ran the headline “ZELENSKYY MUST GO — Trump agrees with Putin!” A peace treaty cannot be signed by an illegitimate president!” The article integrated statements from RIA Novosti and TASS with a real Trump comment – his description of Zelenskyy as a “dictator without elections” – to create the impression of US-Russian consensus on removing Ukraine’s president. Russian representatives were quoted warning that any treaties Zelenskyy signs “may face problems and challenges to their validity in the future, perhaps not immediately, but in 10, 20 or 30 years”.
InfoKuryr.cz reproduced Putin’s own legal reasoning at length, presenting the Russian dictator’s interpretation of Ukrainian constitutional law with minimal rebuttal and no acknowledgement that prohibiting elections during wartime is a standard democratic provision, not evidence of a coup.
EUvsDisinfo has documented the strategic purpose of this narrative clearly. It is not primarily an argument about elections. It is an attempt to sever Ukraine from its international supporters by suggesting that any agreements made with Kyiv’s current leadership are legally meaningless — and therefore that continued European support is both futile and complicit in a form of democratic fraud.
Behind all of these narratives sits the master claim: that Russia did not choose this war. NATO’s eastward expansion made it inevitable. The West is the aggressor. Russia is defending itself.
RT stated this directly, quoting Valentina Matviyenko, chair of Russia’s Federation Council: “We are not fighting Ukraine. NATO is fighting us using Ukrainians.” Ukrainians would eventually realise, she added, “how cynically the West used them in an attempt to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia.”
A separate RT opinion piece from December 31, 2025, republished verbatim by CZ24.news in Czech translation the same day — argued that NATO had “furiously provoked Russia by blunt bad faith and ceaseless enlargement” and that the alliance’s “real main purpose has never been to protect Western Europe from Moscow but to keep it dependent as well as subordinated to Washington”.
InfoKuryr.cz inverted the picture entirely in September 2025, framing NATO’s defensive posture on its eastern flank as preparation for aggression against Russia and presenting a potential NATO response to a Russian airspace violation as evidence of a conspiracy to manufacture a pretext for war.
The Slovak InfoVojna reproduced Sergey Lavrov’s characterisation of EU peace policy as “revanchism, the strategic defeat of Russia”, adding his claim that the EU and Ukraine were trying to turn “Biden’s war into Trump’s war” — a line that circulated across multiple proxy outlets simultaneously.
This is where the campaign begins. Every other narrative in the network depends on it. A Europe that provoked Russia cannot, by definition, be defending Ukraine. It can only be escalating — and escalation, the logic goes, must be stopped.
The campaign is not improvised. Research by Insight News Media has traced the financial and editorial pipelines behind several key outlets. CZ24.news publishes over a hundred articles a day, approximately ten per cent of which are direct translations from sanctioned Russian state media. The company formally behind it — Slovanský svět, or “Slavic World” — shows financial flows inconsistent with a legitimate media operation of that scale. Its registered address is shared with a pro-Russian civic organisation that advocates for peace on Russian terms and with a company that advertised for social media content managers at salaries almost identical to those offered by Yevgeny Prigozhin’s troll farm operations.
Réseau International aggregates content from multiple intermediate sources — the Strategic Culture Foundation, Euro-Synergies, and Observateur Continental — none of which are as easily traceable to Moscow as RT or Sputnik, but all of which consistently reproduce the Kremlin’s framing. The use of these intermediaries is deliberate: it creates editorial distance from the original source and makes the content significantly harder to attribute and sanction.
NewsGuard’s analysis found that Storm-1516, the Russian influence operation linked by French intelligence service Viginum to GRU Unit 29155, has become more prolific than Russia’s official state media in spreading false claims about the war. As American support for Ukraine declined in 2025 and European support increased, the operation’s targeting shifted accordingly – from Washington to Paris and Berlin, following the money.
The coordination leaves traces. Both CZ24.news and Nová Republika published content in early 2026 anchored to the same specific claim — that European war financing is designed to last “until 2030”. The identical timeline appearing across unrelated outlets in different countries and languages is not a coincidence. It is a messaging anchor, distributed through the network and localised for different audiences. The phrase “state mercenarism” — used to describe Ukraine’s relationship with the West — appeared in CZ24 content and in Russian Foreign Ministry statements within days of each other, suggesting direct transmission of diplomatic language into the proxy ecosystem.
The campaign works, in part, because it is not entirely invented. European defence spending is rising. Economic pressures are real. Ukraine does have corruption problems, which its own anti-corruption bodies — NABU and SAPO — have been actively investigating. The disinformation does not fabricate a world with no connection to reality. It takes real tensions, real grievances, and real facts and arranges them into a story where Russia bears no responsibility for the war it started and Europe bears all of it.
The goal of this campaign is not to win an argument. It is to make the argument exhausting — to fill the information space with enough doubt, accusation, and conspiratorial insinuation that European publics lose the clarity needed to sustain political will. A citizen who believes their government is profiting from the war, that their money is funding a corrupt dictator, or that NATO provoked Russia into a conflict it never wanted — that citizen does not march in support of Ukraine. They disengage, or worse, they pressure their governments to stop.
Russia cannot bomb European public opinion into submission. But if it can convince enough Europeans that the real enemy is in Brussels rather than Moscow, it doesn’t need to.
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