Executive Summary

The war in Ukraine turned disinformation into a core pillar of modern warfare, and Russia has folded information operations directly into its military strategy, using social media and, increasingly, artificial intelligence to shape public opinion and weaken international support for Kyiv. The approach is built on high volume and repetition: contradictory narratives pushed rapidly across platforms are designed to confuse audiences rather than persuade them, a model long reliant on state media, troll farms, and cyber-enabled influence operations run by the Russian military intelligence service and proxy groups such as the now-defunct Internet Research Agency.

Generative AI has become the accelerant on top of that existing infrastructure. It allows the same troll farms and media networks to produce convincing text, deepfake video, and synthetic personas at a cost and scale the older toolkit could not reach, while a newer tactic known as LLM grooming aims to seed the training data of AI systems themselves so that chatbots reproduce Kremlin narratives as if they were neutral fact. Networks such as Pravda and operations such as Matryoshka show how this has become an industrialized, self-reinforcing system rather than a one-off tactic.

Romania and Moldova offer the clearest real-world test of what this can do. In Romania, a coordinated, AI-enabled interference campaign contributed to the first annulment of an EU presidential election over foreign interference. In Moldova, a comparably resourced campaign failed to change the outcome but still strained the country's institutions. Together the two cases mark the boundaries of what this kind of operation can and cannot achieve against a functioning democracy.

The implications reach past electoral politics. Businesses face degraded open-source intelligence, reputational exposure by mere association with contested narratives, and growing risk from AI tools that may be quietly citing polluted sources. Public institutions face eroding trust, direct threats to electoral integrity, and counter-disinformation capacity that keeps getting dismantled by the same political cycles it is meant to survive. Absent sustained institutional coordination and regulatory adaptation, the trajectory through 2026 and into 2027 points toward more volume, more sophistication, and a harder line between authentic and fabricated content.

This is the condensed intelligence brief. The full SpecialREPORT includes the complete evolution of Russia's disinformation toolkit and its adaptation to Western sanctions, the Doppelgänger and Tenet Media cases, full country-by-country breakdowns of the Romania and Moldova operations, a complete business and public-sector risk assessment, a full stability factors matrix, and function-specific operational recommendations for corporate security directors, NGO safety officers, extractive industry executives, and humanitarian operations managers.

[Download the full report at the end of this report]