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European Centre for Strategies and Transformation

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An independent think tank integrating analytical research, sociology, and geopolitics to deliver practical solutions for governments, businesses, and civil society.

08/10/2026

📍 ECST’s Dr. Iryna Kuehnapfel joined political consultants and campaign professionals in Frankfurt for the EAPC European Conference, marking the association’s 30th anniversary.

“Welcome to the Age of AI & Technology” was this year’s theme — a discussion Iryna knows from both sides, with more than 15 years in election campaigns and her current FIMI research at ECST.

AI is making campaign work faster and cheaper. It also makes it easier to disguise who is speaking and manufacture public support. The profession has a responsibility here: identify the funders, disclose AI use and ask who ultimately benefits from the work.

🤝 Congratulations to newly elected EAPC President Helene Masliah-Gilkarov, and warm thanks to Reza Kazemi and his team for organising the conference.

21/09/2026

🇩🇰 🇬🇱 On 21 September, clarified that the new Greenland security agreement would place Arctic defence largely under NATO, rather than exclusive US control. The deal is expected to be signed tomorrow, but its full terms remain undisclosed.
Reuters

Meanwhile, Washington says sensitive investments will be reserved for the US and its allies. American and Greenlandic businesses hope the agreement will attract new capital to the island.

🔍This creates a new dimension of the Greenland security challenge.

The agreement could simultaneously restrict Chinese and Russian access and encourage Western investment in Greenland's resources, energy and infrastructure.

But excluding hostile investors does not necessarily eliminate hostile influence.

Intermediary companies, concealed ownership and financial pressure could offer less visible routes into strategic projects. Investment restrictions could also be exploited to fuel grievances over Greenland's economic autonomy.

⚠️These are potential hybrid threats, not confirmed activities.

The key question is shifting: not simply who can invest in Greenland, but who controls the rules, the capital and the projects shaping its future.

NATO may secure the Arctic's military perimeter. Yet without transparent investment screening and credible financing alternatives, Greenland's economic development could remain vulnerable to external manipulation.

Photo by Oliver Schauf / Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain).

16/09/2026

🇪🇺 Europe may get the peace it is asking for. That is not the same as the security it needs.

in Kyiv made the split plain. Diplomacy is already treating territorial concessions as the price of quiet. Ukrainian commanders are preparing for Russia to keep attacking.

Europe does not have to wait for a settlement to face three questions.

❓Why do Western-made components still reach Russian missile manufacturers despite sanctions?

❓How are narratives about territorial concessions shaping public opinion?

❓And how do we recognise foreign information manipulation without treating legitimate political disagreement as interference?

Iryna Kühnapfel, our FIMI expert, took those questions to the 22nd Yalta European Strategy (YES) Annual Meeting. On the way back to Berlin the point made itself: a Russian drone strike near the Polish border cut the rail route used by international delegates.

More about this: https://ecst-eu.org/peace-on-paper-war-in-moscow%e2%80%99s-plans-what-we-heard-at-yes-in-kyiv/

A ceasefire can stop the shooting. It will not, on its own, stop Russia from continuing the war.

11/09/2026

🇪🇺 Russia’s information warfare in Europe has changed. It is no longer just about propaganda, fake news or state-controlled media. Today, it works as a complex digital ecosystem — adaptive, decentralised and increasingly difficult to detect.

🧩A new ECST report maps how this system operates across the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Poland, the Baltic States and Denmark.

The researchers, Iryna Kühnapfel and Prof Gerhard Sabathil, identified a six-tier architecture of influence — from strategic coordination and content production to spoofing, dissemination and amplification.

Among the networks examined:

🔹 Storm-1516
🔹 Doppelgänger / RRN
🔹 Portal Kombat / Pravda Network
🔹 Operation Overload

But perhaps the most important part of the report is what comes next.

🤖 LLM grooming
🎭 AI-generated avatars
🗳️ synthetic electoral campaigns
🌐 parallel information ecosystems

These are not distant theoretical risks. They are part of the next phase of information warfare.

The report also asks a harder question:

Does Europe actually lack the tools to respond?

Not necessarily. Europe already has many of the legal, regulatory and analytical instruments it needs.

What is still missing is the willingness to use them consistently, collectively and at scale.

📌 The report concludes with 24 practical recommendations for European institutions, national governments, tech platforms, experts, civil society and Ukraine.

👉 Read the full ECST report and see how Russia’s information influence architecture is evolving — and how Europe can respond:
https://ecst-eu.org/information-and-disinformation-network-of-the-russian-federation-as-an-instrument-of-hybrid-warfare-in-europe/

09/09/2026

📌 ECST at the ECPR General Conference 2026

Yesterday, ECST Research Team member Julia Martens presented our research on Russia’s use of religion as an instrument of hybrid influence in Europe at the .

The presentation drew on our report, “The Religious Factor as an Instrument of Russia’s Hybrid Influence in Europe: The ROC Network and the ‘Russkiy Mir’ Ideology (2022–2026)”, as well as on a survey of 25 experts from 10 countries examining Russia’s hybrid religious influence across Europe.

🔎The discussion highlighted several important directions for further research: identifying the actors behind religious influence networks, examining how religious and political networks intersect, comparing these mechanisms across European countries, and understanding how such networks adapt as traditional Russian channels of influence — including consulates and Russian Houses — are increasingly restricted.

An equally important question is how this knowledge can be translated into practical policy without reducing a complex religious and social phenomenon to a purely security-based interpretation.

We thank Laura R. Olson, Lino Klevesath, Antonius Liedhegener and Matthias Kortmann for their questions and valuable contributions to the discussion.

The conversation at ECPR gave us not a final answer, but something equally important — a clearer agenda for the next stage of our research.

➡️ Download the full report “The Religious Factor as an Instrument of Russia’s Hybrid Influence in Europe: The ROC Network and the ‘Russkiy Mir’ Ideology (2022–2026)” here: https://ecst-eu.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/ecst_report_religion_roc_en.pdf

Photo courtesy of ECPR via Bluesky.

05/09/2026

🇪🇺 Europe may be looking for the wrong signs of a Russian attack on NATO.

On 4 September, our FIMI expert Iryna Kühnapfel joined an Atlantic Council Eurasia Center discussion with Garry Kasparov, Torrey Taussig, Glenn Corn and Agnia Grigas.

The discussion brought together very different perspectives on Russia’s possible next steps. But from the FIMI perspective, one issue is particularly important: an attack does not have to look like conventional war to produce strategic effects.

🔹 A cyberattack can be treated as a technical incident.
🔹 Sabotage can remain a criminal case.
🔹 A drone incursion can be handled as an isolated security breach.
🔹 Information manipulation can be dismissed as “just propaganda”.

Seen separately, each may appear manageable. Seen together, they reveal something different: sustained pressure on NATO countries, their institutions, political cohesion and public trust.

⚠️ This fragmentation of perception is itself a vulnerability. It allows Russia to escalate pressure while keeping every individual action below the level at which European countries feel compelled to respond collectively.

Russia is already attacking NATO — just not in the form Europe has traditionally been trained to recognise as war.

Recognising the pattern is therefore not simply a matter of terminology. It is part of Europe’s security.

05/09/2026

🇷🇸 Russia does not need to “win” Serbia’s election. It needs to shape what Serbians believe the election means.

A fabricated “leak” about Kosovo. A synthetic recording linking the opposition to NATO. Attacks on election observers before they publish a single finding. An election-day “security crisis” amplified across social media. And Russian narratives moving through local actors until they no longer look Russian.

🔎 In her new ECST analysis, Iryna Kühnapfel maps the FIMI scenarios worth watching ahead of Serbia’s snap election — and explains why the greatest risk is not one spectacular fake.

🔗 It is the chain: Russian framing → domestic amplification → fabricated evidence → apparent independent validation → political repetition.

By the end of that chain, foreign interference no longer looks foreign...

https://ecst-eu.org/serbia%e2%80%99s-snap-election-what-russian-fimi-could-actually-look-like/

02/09/2026

🇮🇷 What happens when a state does not need to send its own operatives abroad?

Iran has increasingly demonstrated another model: buying capabilities from actors already operating inside Europe.

🔹 Criminal networks can provide surveillance, logistics and violence.
🔹 Cyber actors can provide access and intelligence.
🔹 Local recruits can carry out individual tasks without knowing who ultimately commissioned them.
🔹 Proxy organisations can claim and amplify attacks afterwards.

The result is more than plausible deniability. It creates attribution friction — blurring the boundaries between organised crime, foreign interference, cyber operations and state-directed violence.

Our new analysis examines how crime is becoming a proxy capability within Iran’s hybrid operations in Europe — and what European security services should be watching for.

https://ecst-eu.org/crime-as-a-proxy-iran%e2%80%99s-outsourcing-of-hybrid-operations-on-european-soil/

07/08/2026

🇷🇺🤝🇨🇳 What happens when Russian disruption meets Chinese amplification?

and do not need to build a single influence machine to create a stronger effect together. Their systems can remain separate — yet temporarily connect through media networks, intermediaries, technology, tools and mutually useful narratives.

🗳️ Elections and political crises may be particularly vulnerable.
🌐 A narrative launched in one information ecosystem can travel through another.
🤖 AI makes translation, localisation and mass content production faster and cheaper.
🔎 And the most important connections may be hidden not in the messages themselves, but in the infrastructure behind them.

Iryna Kühnapfel's analysis explores what a “federated” Russian-Chinese FIMI ecosystem could look like — and why Europe should learn to recognise the interfaces between separate operations before they become operationally significant.

📖 Read the full analysis:
https://ecst-eu.org/the-next-generation-of-hybrid-warfare-russia-china-and-the-prospect-of-a-federated-fimi-ecosystem/

14/07/2026

🇵🇱⚠️ A flare on a football terrace, a patrol in pseudo-uniforms, a Ukrainian flag torn down in public — each may appear to be an isolated provocation. Taken together, they reveal how radical nationalism can turn stadium culture, historical memory and political resentment into an infrastructure of hostile influence.

In its new analysis, the examines how Polish football-ultra and far-right milieus can amplify narratives without necessarily receiving direct instructions from .

The real danger lies in convergence: when local actors begin creating precisely the distrust, polarisation and anti-Ukrainian hostility that Russian operations are designed to exploit.

https://ecst-eu.org/when-%e2%80%9cpatriotism%e2%80%9d-becomes-an-influence-vector-polish-far-right-ultras-anti-ukrainian-sentiment-and-russia%e2%80%99s-fimi-playbook/

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