New joint report exposes desperate Russian attempts to derail Ukraine’s journey towards EU membership
What the joint report reveals about Russian FIMI activities towards Ukraine
A joint report by the European External Action Service (EEAS) and Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD) examines FIMI activities carried out between January 2025 and May 2026.
The CCD, a working body of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, has gathered evidence in a report with the EEAS about how Russia systematically targets domestic Ukrainian audiences to erode internal support for the country’s accession towards membership of the EU. The report found that between January 2025 and April 2026, there were a total of 244,000 publications generating 1.39 billion views on Ukraine's accession.
The report also provides evidence of the systematic targeting by Russia of EU and international audiences with the aim of undermining political and public backing for EU enlargement. Around 80 investigated incidents of this kind were monitored in the same time frame.
European Union, 2026
Examples of Russian entities involved in FIMI activities in the Ukrainian and the EU’s information spaces with regards to the accession process to the EU, among other topics. The visual shows in a schematic way the similarities and differences in audience targeting across the four levels on the FIMI architecture
How Russia uses multiple tactics to manipulate information about Ukraine's accession
Together the two reports describe a coordinated, multi-layered and increasingly technological operation rather than a series of isolated incidents. Both inside Ukraine and across the wider information environment, the manipulation of information includes the following tactics:
- AI-enabled mass production of content,
- cross-platform amplification,
- information-laundering models,
- taking official statements out of context
- statements to fake an institutional consensus against Ukraine
- exploiting of elections and security incidents
European Union, 2026
The CCD mapped the Russian propaganda network called ‘ZOV’ and detected content localised for 23 regions of Ukraine and 17 major Ukrainian cities. The network consists of 68 websites, 40 Telegram channels, and 40 VKontakte pages.
What is the impact of these FIMI activities targeting Ukraine?
For people living in Ukraine, particularly among war-fatigued and economically vulnerable groups, the promotion of false or misleading narratives by Russia can lead to a gradual accumulation of doubt among these populations about EU membership. Using multi-layered distribution platforms, including short videos, state-controlled media, Telegram networks and state-aligned actors, Russia promotes and distributes inauthentic online stories to reinforce this uncertainty; false narratives spread across these channels include blaming the EU for Ukrainian war casualties, stories which fuel fears about the potential partition of Ukraine or misleading claims that Ukraine is incompatible with EU values.
For European audiences, the threat is similar to the one experienced by Ukrainian audiences, but with the difference that the stories are centred around hostile messaging towards Ukraine and Ukrainians with the intention of lowering support for the country among European and international audiences. False narratives about Ukraine and Ukrainian people include themes of corruption, crime and physical threats, as well as the manipulation of breaking news about specific events such as drone crashes and railway sabotage.
The EEAS and Ukraine CCD joint report provides detailed evidence about the many ways in which Russia uses windows of opportunity in an attempt to provoke real-life hostility towards Ukraine in general and the accession process in particular.
What can be done to counter these information manipulation activities?
The EU cooperates with partners such as the G7 and NATO to improve our shared understanding of these threats, and to make full use of a range of countermeasures, such as those in the FIMI Toolbox. These include, for example, sanctions against actors and infrastructure, digital regulation and cooperation with platforms and law enforcement.
In this way, the EU and its partners go beyond simply debunking false information to systematically detect, expose, sanction and build resilience against manipulative influence operations aimed at destabilising democratic choices such as those of Ukraine and its people.
Read here the full joint report by the European External Action Service (EEAS) and the Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD) on FIMI targeting Ukraine’s accession process to the EU.