# DECODING: How Russia Poisons AI Systems to Rewrite Reality Before the War Even Ends

> We thought we had understood Russia's disinformation methods. Fake Twitter accounts. Troll farms in St. Petersburg. Mirror sites imitating legitimate media. Poor-quality but viral deepfakes. All of that was already alarming. But a classified document leaked to Bloomberg in June 2026 reveals that the Russian disinformation machine has changed dimension. It no longer only targets

- Author: Maxime Marquette
- Publisher: MadMax (https://mad-max.co)
- Section: Analysis
- Published: 2026-06-29
- Canonical URL: https://mad-max.co/en/article/decryptage-comment-la-russie-empoisonne-les-ia-pour-reecrire-la-realite-avant-me

## Introduction: The New Frontier of Russian Cognitive Warfare

### When algorithms become propaganda weapons

We thought we had understood Russia's disinformation methods. Fake **Twitter** accounts. Troll farms in **St. Petersburg**. Mirror sites imitating legitimate media. Poor-quality but viral **deepfakes**. All of that was already alarming. But a classified document leaked to **Bloomberg** in **June 2026** reveals that the Russian disinformation machine has changed dimension. It no longer only targets humans. It now targets **artificial intelligence itself** — language models, chatbots, algorithmic search engines. It wants to contaminate reality at the source, before humans even consult it.

The organization behind this is the **Social Design Agency** (**SDA**) — an entity based in **Moscow**, led by **Ilya Gambashidze**, already sanctioned by the **United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union** for its role in Kremlin-linked disinformation campaigns. What the internal documents reveal is a program called **"Project 2026"** — a long-term cognitive manipulation infrastructure, built to influence not the results of an election or the narrative of a battle, but the way **AI** perceives and reproduces reality. It is an operation of unprecedented sophistication. And it demands urgent attention.

### The SDA — the agency the West underestimates

The **Social Design Agency** is not a disinformation start-up. It is a company with significant resources, documented methods, and a long-term strategy. Before the **Bloomberg** revelations, its known activities included impersonation campaigns — creating fake accounts of European officials, journalists, and intellectuals — and coordinated disinformation operations in the digital spaces of several countries. It had already been flagged in operations targeting elections in **France, Germany**, and the **Baltic states**.

The internal documents reveal a major strategic evolution: the **SDA** has decided that short-term disinformation campaigns — targeting one election, one foreign policy debate — are no longer sufficient. It wants to build a permanent infrastructure that modifies, over time, the way **artificial intelligence** formulates answers to political questions. This is a war for positioning in tomorrow's informational ecosystem — waged not with hackers but with writers, SEO specialists, and data scientists.

*What strikes me about "Project 2026" is the strategic patience. Russia is not targeting the next news cycle. It is targeting the databases that will fuel AI systems in five or ten years. This is a form of cognitive warfare that our democracies are very poorly equipped to understand, let alone counter.*

## The Architecture of "Project 2026" — an Invisible Network

### From falsified encyclopedias to fake think tanks

The core of **Project 2026** rests on the creation of an alternative information infrastructure — a parallel ecosystem designed to resemble legitimate sources. According to the leaked documents, the **SDA** built or supported the creation of several types of entities: **cloned encyclopedic sites** imitating the formats of **Wikipedia** but with content revised to the **Kremlin**'s perspective, **fake think tanks** producing pro-Russian "analyses" presented as independent, and **fake news outlets** designed to rank highly in search results.

These entities do not merely exist. They produce content in volume — hundreds of thousands of web pages, continuously updated. The goal is to **saturate search engines** and, more importantly, the training datasets of **large language models** (**LLMs**). When an **LLM** is trained on billions of documents collected from the web, these fabricated documents are part of the corpus. They influence the statistical associations the model forms. They subtly bias the responses that **AI** will give to sensitive questions about **Russia, Ukraine, NATO, and the war**.

### Geographic targets — Armenia and Germany

The internal documents reveal two specific geographic targets for the **SDA**'s operations. The first is **Armenia** — a country at the crossroads of Russian and Western influence, whose relationship with **Moscow** has considerably deteriorated since **2020**. The **SDA** created for **Armenia** a **Wikipedia-style platform** — an online encyclopedia — intended to become the information reference on sensitive historical and political topics for Armenian users. The articles on this platform are constructed to appear neutral and encyclopedic, while subtly conveying pro-Russian narratives about the region's history, Armenian-Russian relations, and **Armenia**'s attitude toward **NATO**.

The second target is **Germany** — with an operation of a entirely different scale: **hundreds of thousands of web pages** in German, produced to flood search results on political and security topics. These pages imitate academic articles, expert analyses, think tank reports — everything that confers an appearance of legitimacy and seriousness. The goal is to modify the informational landscape that Germans consult on topics like sanctions against **Russia**, weapons deliveries to **Ukraine**, or the energy policy of the **European Union**.

*The choice of Germany is no accident. It is the largest European economy, the country that had the most ambivalent relationship with Russia within the EU, the country whose support for Ukraine has been most hesitant. Targeting German public opinion means targeting the link most susceptible to buckling in the Western solidarity chain.*

## How AI Absorbs Disinformation — the Mechanics of the Poison

### LLMs and their structural vulnerabilities

To understand why **Project 2026** is so dangerous, one must understand how **large language models** (**LLMs**) work. These systems — **GPT**, **Gemini**, **Claude**, **Mistral**, and their successors — are trained on immense text corpora collected from the internet. Their "understanding" of the world is entirely statistical: they learn that certain words, ideas, and associations appear frequently together in human texts. They reproduce these associations in their responses.

If tens of thousands of "apparently legitimate" documents claim that **NATO provoked the war in Ukraine**, that **Western sanctions are ineffective and unjust**, that **Zelensky is a corrupt dictator** — and if these documents are well-referenced, well-written, well-structured — they influence the statistical weights of the model during training. The result: **AI** systems that present these pro-Kremlin narratives as legitimate perspectives among others, that introduce them into their responses without identifying them as propaganda, that "balance" documented facts with fabricated claims.

### The "flood the zone" strategy as an algorithmic tactic

The researchers cited by **Bloomberg** describe the **SDA**'s approach as a **"flood the zone"** tactic. The principle is simple: produce so much content that search algorithms and **AI** training systems can no longer distinguish noise from signal. When there is one credible pro-Ukrainian document for every ten well-constructed pro-Russian ones, the algorithms weight "truth" based on volume — and the volume is on the Russian side.

This tactic is not new in **SEO** — unscrupulous marketers have used it for years to manipulate search results. But its application for large-scale political manipulation, targeting specifically **LLMs** and their training datasets, represents a qualitative evolution. It is asymmetric warfare in the informational space: a well-funded content factory against the moderation and fact-checking teams of major platforms and **AI** developers.

*"Flood the zone" is not just a disinformation tactic. It is an attack on the very concept of shared truth. If everything is equally credible, nothing is true. And in an informational space where nothing is true, the propaganda of the strongest wins. This is exactly what Russia wants.*

## Fake Think Tanks — Imitating Academic Legitimacy

### Creating the appearance of credibility

One of **Project 2026**'s most insidious innovations is the creation of fake research institutes and fake think tanks. These entities publish "reports," "analyses," "studies" — with footnotes, bibliographic references, apparent methodologies — that imitate legitimate academic output. When an **LLM** is trained or queried on a topic, these fake documents appear in its sources with the same apparent authority as a publication from the **Institute for the Study of War** or a recognized university research laboratory.

The mechanism is particularly effective because it exploits the trust we instinctively grant to academic forms. A "report" with charts and appendices seems more credible than a poorly constructed blog post, even if its content is entirely fabricated. **LLMs**, which have no intrinsic mechanism for verifying source credibility — only a recognition of formal patterns — are particularly vulnerable to this form of manipulation.

### The rewriting of established references

Even more sophisticated: the **SDA**'s internal documents mention operations consisting of **republishing legitimate research** with subtle but significant modifications. A real academic article on Ukrainian foreign policy can be reproduced with minor but meaningful changes to its conclusions, reattributed to a fake author, and circulated in formats that make it appear identical to the original. Search engines and **AI** training systems index both versions — the original and the falsified one — without distinction.

This level of sophistication requires real linguistic skills, knowledge of academic formats, and significant human resources. This is no longer a "troll factory" producing low-quality content. It is a professional organization employing competent writers, translators, **SEO** specialists, and probably **generative AI** experts to accelerate content production. Quality is the camouflage.

*I know the difference between a good research article and a well-constructed fake — but I am not certain that current detection tools know it as well. That is what concerns me. We built disinformation detectors for the era of crude trolls. Russia has moved into the era of surgical disinformation.*

## Performance Metrics — the Industrialization of Manipulation

### Measuring the effectiveness of propaganda like a marketing campaign

One of the most revealing aspects of the **SDA**'s internal documents is the existence of detailed **performance metrics**. The disinformation campaign is managed like a commercial enterprise: traffic objectives, engagement rates, narrative propagation indicators, tracking of their diffusion across platforms and languages. The **SDA** operators measure the effectiveness of each piece of content, identify the formats and narratives that "perform" best, and adjust their production accordingly.

This industrialization of disinformation is deeply troubling. It means that **Project 2026** is not an opportunistic operation — it is a structured program with budgets, teams, measurable objectives, and continuous improvement processes. It improves permanently, guided by data. This is the logic of **growth hacking** applied to mass manipulation. And it is particularly effective in a digital ecosystem where the algorithms of platforms naturally favor content that generates engagement — something emotionally charged propaganda does very well.

### Cross-platform narrative tracking

The **SDA**'s metrics include **systematic tracking of narrative propagation** across different platforms and languages. When a pro-Russian narrative — say, the idea that Western sanctions harm **Europe** more than **Russia** — is inserted into an article in **German** on a fake think tank, the **SDA** tracks its diffusion: is it cited by legitimate media? Picked up by **chatbots** in their responses? Amplified by local political figures? This tracking capability allows identifying the most effective amplification vectors and exploiting them systematically.

This is the description of an influence operation at **the state of the art**, using the same analytical tools as the world's best communications agencies — but in the service of a state that violates international law and kills Ukrainian civilians. It is difficult not to feel a certain horror before the sophistication of this machine, at the very moment when Ukrainian soldiers are dying in the streets of **Kostyantynivka**.

*What haunts me in these metrics is the managerial normalcy they reveal. People in an office in Moscow, with their dashboards, their KPIs, their performance reviews — measuring the effectiveness of their lie campaign like a marketing campaign. The banality of evil in its digital version.*

## Existing Responses — and Their Limits

### What the West is already doing

Western governments are not blind to these threats. The **United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union** have sanctioned the **SDA** and its director **Ilya Gambashidze** — official recognition that this entity constitutes a threat to democracies. Specialized agencies in detecting influence operations — such as the **Global Disinformation Index**, the **Digital Forensic Research Lab** of the **Atlantic Council**, or the fact-checking teams of major platforms — document and flag these campaigns.

Major **AI** developers also have teams responsible for the quality and security of training data. **OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta** invest in filtering mechanisms to reduce the proportion of poor-quality or clearly falsified content in their corpora. The results are imperfect — the task is colossal — but the effort exists. Search engines have their own anti-spam systems that penalize networks of artificially created sites.

### Why these responses are insufficient

These efforts, as real as they are, are insufficient in the face of the scale and sophistication of **Project 2026**. The first problem is speed: the **SDA** can produce thousands of documents per day with the help of **generative AI**. Verification teams cannot verify this volume at the same speed. The second problem is content quality: well-written, correctly formatted text, without obvious errors, with references that appear legitimate — this is far more difficult to filter automatically than crude troll posts.

The third problem is structural: major technology companies have commercial incentives to maximize the size of their training corpora. More data is generally a better model. This pressure toward quantity creates a systemic bias against rigorous filtering. And the fourth problem is geopolitical: part of the content produced by the **SDA** is hosted in jurisdictions where Western authorities have no direct capacity for action — **Russia, Belarus**, and servers in uncooperative third countries.

*You cannot win an informational war by playing defense only. For every disinformation article removed, the SDA produces ten new ones. The problem must be attacked at the source — and the source is the financial and technological infrastructure that allows these operations to exist. Sanctions are a start. Only a start.*

## The Implications for Ukraine — a War on Two Fronts

### Disinformation as an extension of military aggression

For **Ukraine**, the operations to manipulate **AI** systems are not an abstract threat. They have concrete consequences on the war. Every pro-Russian narrative that manages to be reproduced by popular **chatbots**, to appear in the search results of journalists, decision-makers, and European citizens, weakens — even marginally — support for **Kyiv**. These margins matter in democracies where the political will to provide weapons, funding, and sanctions depends on public opinion support.

**Russia** has long understood that its capacity to sustain the war depends as much on its ability to erode Western support for **Ukraine** as on its military capabilities on the ground. This is why the **SDA**'s operations are not separate from the war — they are an integral part of it. They are the digital expression of the same strategy: weaken the cohesion of the adversary, sow doubt, fragment the political consensus that allows Ukrainian resistance to hold.

### Ukraine fights back — active information warfare

**Ukraine** is not passive in the face of this threat. The Ukrainian government has developed significant capabilities in detecting and responding to Russian influence operations. **Ukraine**'s **Center for Countering Disinformation**, the strategic communication teams of the **Ministry of Defense**, and civil organizations such as **StopFake** and **Texty.org** permanently analyze disinformation campaigns and publicly expose their mechanisms. These organizations have developed unique expertise because they have been living with Russian disinformation far longer than their Western partners.

**Ukraine** has also proactively used revelations about Russian operations — like the **SDA** documents leaked to **Bloomberg** — to alert its partners and justify the strengthening of defensive measures. These revelations have diplomatic value: they demonstrate concretely, with documented evidence, why Western democracies must treat information warfare as a national security priority, not as a secondary communications problem.

*Ukraine has something the West does not have: direct, deep, daily experience of Russian disinformation since 2014. We should listen to it more carefully. Not only about the military war — about the information war too. Its disinformation experts are the world's best on this precise subject.*

## The Implications for Western Democracies

### The challenge of regulating LLMs

**Project 2026** raises a fundamental regulatory question that Western democracies have not yet resolved: how to protect **language models** against the deliberate contamination of their training data? This is a technical AND political question. Technically, it requires more rigorous standards for identifying and filtering sources in training corpora. Politically, it requires the will of governments to treat this threat with the same urgency as other forms of cyberattack.

The **European Union** took a first step with the **AI Act**, which imposes transparency and data quality obligations on developers of large models. But the **AI Act** was not specifically designed to counter state-sponsored influence operations — and its enforcement mechanisms are still being put in place. More specific regulations will likely be needed, targeting specifically large-scale operations of training data manipulation, to create an effective legal framework against the **Project 2026s** of tomorrow.

### The responsibility of AI developers

The major **AI** companies — **OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta** — have a direct responsibility in responding to this threat. They have the technical capability to implement more robust verification mechanisms for their training data. They have security and trust teams that can develop tools to detect networks of coordinated content. They can collaborate with governments and security researchers to share information on the tactics of influence operations.

This is not merely a question of abstract ethical responsibility. It is also a matter of commercial interest: if **LLMs** become vectors of state propaganda, their credibility will be permanently compromised. Users who discover that their chatbot is repeating lies fabricated in **Moscow** will no longer trust that tool. Informational pollution harms **AI** companies as much as democracies. Aligning economic incentives with security imperatives is possible — and necessary.

*AI companies have too long treated the quality of their data as an internal technical problem. Project 2026 demonstrates that it is a national security problem. It is time to end the commercial naivety and accept that information warfare is now being waged in training corpora.*

## Total Cognitive Warfare — an Evolving Russian Doctrine

### From Gerasimov to Gambashidze

Russian strategists have theorized **"hybrid warfare"** since at least **2013**, the date of the famous article by General **Valery Gerasimov** on unconventional warfare methods. The doctrine sketched there — mixing military, economic, informational, and psychological actions — has guided the Russian approach in **Ukraine**, **Syria**, and the Baltic states for a decade. **Project 2026** is the most recent and most sophisticated expression of this doctrine.

What is new is the integration of **generative AI** capabilities into the disinformation machine. The **SDA** can now produce volumes of content unimaginable five years ago, at derisory marginal costs. A language model trained on the internal documents of **Project 2026** could generate thousands of articles per day, in dozens of languages, with formal quality sufficient to fool automatic filters. This is the **weaponization** of **generative AI** in the service of cognitive warfare — and it is already underway.

### The ultimate goal — rewriting history as it happens

The ultimate objective of **Project 2026**, as it emerges from the internal documents, goes beyond influencing current events. It aims to **rewrite history as it happens** — to implant in the digital corpora that will fuel tomorrow's **AI** systems a version of events favorable to **Russia**, so that future historians, journalists, and citizens who query these tools receive a biased answer. It is an attempt to manipulate not only today's public opinion, but tomorrow's collective memory.

Faced with this, the response cannot be purely defensive. Massive investment is needed in verified archives, in high-quality data sources for **AI** training, in tools for content traceability and attribution. A truth infrastructure as robust as the lie infrastructure that **Russia** is building must be constructed. This is a colossal investment. But not making it means allowing the reality of this war — and of this era — to be rewritten by those most interested in falsifying it.

*History is written by the victors, they say. But now it can be pre-written in AI training corpora before the war is even over. This is a dimension of this conflict I find particularly troubling — and particularly revealing of the nature of the adversary we face.*

## Possible Solutions — Building Resilience

### A multi-level response

No single solution can respond to the complexity of **Project 2026**. An effective response must be multi-level. At the technical level: develop tools to detect networks of coordinated content, improve source verification mechanisms in **AI** training data, create standards for digital document traceability (**watermarking**, authenticity certificates). At the regulatory level: strengthen laws on foreign influence operations, impose transparency obligations on platforms regarding their measures against coordinated manipulation.

At the diplomatic level: sanction not only organizations like the **SDA** but also the intermediaries that host their technical infrastructure — hosting companies, domain name registrars, content delivery network services. These actors have a responsibility in the disinformation ecosystem. Making them financially accountable for the content they host would create powerful incentives to refuse to serve known influence operations.

### Media literacy — the long-term defense

At the societal level, the deepest and most durable response is **media literacy** — training citizens to critically evaluate information sources, to identify markers of coordinated content, to understand how **AI** systems work and what their limitations are. This education cannot be optional nor reserved for elites. It must be integrated into educational systems as a fundamental civic competency, in the same way as reading or arithmetic.

Countries like **Finland** and the **Baltic states** — which have long experience of Russian disinformation and a strong tradition of media literacy education — show that this approach is possible and effective. These societies are significantly more resilient to Russian influence operations than their neighbors who have invested less in this direction. This is the model to replicate, at the **EU** scale and beyond.

*I have spoken to teachers who integrate critical analysis of AI into their classes. They tell me students understand quickly, once you explain how these systems work. The problem is not the intelligence of citizens — it is the lack of information about the mechanisms of their manipulation. Naming the problem is already half the solution.*

## The Ethical Dimension — Truth as a Civilizational Stake

### When shared reality is under threat

There is a deep philosophical dimension to what **Project 2026** is doing — and it goes beyond the stakes of the war in **Ukraine**. Democracy rests on a fundamental premise: that citizens can access a sufficiently shared reality to deliberate collectively. If malicious actors can systematically contaminate the information sources that feed collective judgments — including the **AI** that serve as intermediaries between citizens and knowledge — they erode the very possibility of democratic deliberation.

This is **Russia**'s deep strategic objective: not to convince the West that its version of the facts is correct — but to create enough confusion and doubt to paralyze collective response. If every factual claim is contested, if every source is suspected of bias, if even the tools that should help navigate information are compromised — then Russian aggression can continue without democracies being able to respond coherently and decisively. This is the logic of strategic cynicism taken to its conclusion.

### Resistance as a democratic duty

Faced with this threat, resistance is a democratic duty. Not only for governments, technology companies, or security researchers — for every citizen. Verify sources. Flag suspicious content. Support **fact-checking** organizations. Take seriously the reports on Russian influence operations. Do not treat disinformation as a problem "somewhere out there" but as a threat that crosses borders and arrives in the search engines and chatbots we all use.

**Ukraine** is fighting physically for its survival. The **West** is fighting — or should be fighting — for the survival of a shared reality without which democracy is impossible. These two struggles are not separate. They are the two faces of the same war against the same adversary, who seeks not only to conquer territories but to dissolve the truths on which our societies rest. Recognizing this unity of combat is the first step toward a resistance equal to the challenge.

*I sometimes think we do not take seriously enough the fact that this war is not only about territory. It is about the very possibility of a shared reality. And if Russia succeeds in poisoning AI systems, it poisons this reality at the source. This may be the most important front of all — and the one on which the West is least prepared.*

## The Near Future — What Is Being Prepared

### The next generation of influence operations

Security researchers who have examined the **SDA** documents warn that **Project 2026** is probably already surpassed by what is being prepared. The resources invested in this operation — human, financial, technological — will continue to grow. Access to **generative AI** will multiply content production capability. Russian language models (**GigaChat** and its successors) can be used to generate content in dozens of languages without recourse to human translators. The next phase of Russian influence operations will be more automated, more adaptive, and harder to detect than what we observe today.

Faced with this, the West must accelerate. Regulatory discussions on **AI** and disinformation cannot proceed at the usual pace of bureaucratic institutions — the political time of democracy is systematically slower than the technological time of the adversary. Rapid response mechanisms are needed, emergency capacity-building, massive investments in the security teams of major platforms. This is not a luxury. It is civil defense for the digital age.

### The role of media — recovering the authority of verification

Professional media have a crucial role to play in this context — provided they recover the authority that some have lost in the face of the explosion of unverified digital sources. Rigorous verification of facts, transparency about sources, honesty about uncertainties, refusal of false equivalence between documented claims and fabricated narratives — these fundamental journalistic practices are the best defense against informational pollution.

Journalists covering the war in **Ukraine** have often set the example: verification of geolocated images, analysis of official documents, investigation of claims by both parties. This high standard should be the norm, not the exception. And citizens who want to contribute to informational resistance can begin by supporting — financially and by granting their trust — these professionals who do the difficult and thankless work of distinguishing the true from the false in a world where the boundary is deliberately blurred.

*There is something strange and almost absurd about the fact that one of the most important lines of defense against Russia is subscribing to rigorous independent media. And yet it is true. Supporting quality journalism is a political act in this context. An act of resistance, even.*

## The Responsibility of Platforms — a Global Governance Challenge

### Between freedom of expression and informational security

**Project 2026** highlights a fundamental tension in the governance of digital platforms: between protecting freedom of expression — an essential democratic value — and the necessity of defending informational integrity against attacks by adversarial states. Platforms like **Google, Wikipedia, YouTube**, and **LLM** developers cannot simply remove all pro-Russian content without risking censoring legitimate opinions. But allowing the **SDA**'s structured operations to contaminate their databases means becoming involuntary vectors of Russian cognitive warfare.

The answer to this tension cannot come from technology companies alone. It requires a clear regulatory framework, democratically developed, that distinguishes between inorganic coordinated content — produced industrially by state actors — and organic content, even if polemic or uncomfortable. Automatic detection systems for coordinated content networks have progressed considerably since the first Russian operations of **2016**. But they are in constant competition with the methods of influence operators who adapt to circumvent them. It is an informational arms race that will not stop.

### International cooperation against state actors

Influence operations like **Project 2026** do not respect national borders. They simultaneously target countries, languages, and platforms in multiple jurisdictions. The effective response must therefore be itself transnational. Cooperation frameworks such as the **EU Rapid Alert System** (**RAS**) on foreign interference, or intelligence exchanges between national cybersecurity agencies, represent promising beginnings. But their scope remains limited and their funding insufficient in the face of the scale of the threat.

A multilateral early warning mechanism — shared among governments, platforms, and civil society organizations — could allow new disinformation campaigns to be identified far more quickly. When a researcher in **Estonia** identifies a new network of pro-Russian websites, this information should be available in real time to counterparts in **Germany, France**, and the **United States**, and to the security teams of major platforms. This type of sharing already exists informally. Formalizing and institutionalizing it would be a major investment in democratic resilience.

*Governing information in the age of state influence operations is one of the most complex challenges democracies have ever faced. There is no simple solution. But ignoring the problem means leaving the field free to actors who respect none of the rules that democracies impose on themselves. And that is losing by forfeit.*

## Ukraine and Active Counter-Information — a Model to Export

### Documenting to dismantle

**Ukraine** has developed since **2014** unique expertise in active counter-information. Organizations like **StopFake, InformNapalm**, and the government's **Center for Countering Disinformation** have documented thousands of Russian disinformation campaigns, built verified fact databases, and trained journalists and citizens in critical source analysis. This expertise is not theoretical — it stems from daily experience of living under constant informational bombardment.

This expertise deserves to be exported. Joint training programs between Ukrainian experts and their counterparts in the **Baltic states, Poland, Finland**, and the **Scandinavian countries** — which themselves have long experience of Russian disinformation — could create a European network of excellence in counter-information. This network is not only defensive: it can also develop offensive capabilities — documenting Russian operations, publicly exposing them, creating reputational costs for the actors involved.

### Citizens as the first line of defense

The most important lesson that **Ukraine** has to teach may be the simplest: informational resilience begins with citizens. A society where citizens are trained to verify sources, to recognize markers of coordinated content, to flag influence operations — is a resilient society. Finnish media literacy programs have shown that this objective is achievable at scale. Countries like **Estonia, Latvia**, and **Lithuania** have developed civic cultures of resistance to disinformation that should serve as models.

Technology can help. Browser extensions that flag low-reputation sites, image verification tools integrated into messaging applications, context labels on controversial political content — all of these technically accessible innovations reduce the impact of large-scale disinformation campaigns. These tools do not eliminate the problem. They reduce its radius of action. And in an information war, every reduction in radius of action is a marginal victory that, accumulated, can change the final outcome.

*Ukraine is teaching us something fundamental: resistance to disinformation is not the business of experts or governments alone. It is the business of every citizen. And it begins with one simple thing: critical curiosity. Asking who produces this content, why, and for whom. This reflex Russia cannot erase. It can only hope we forget to exercise it.*

## Conclusion: The Information War Will Not End with the Fighting

### A threat that will survive the ceasefire

**Project 2026** teaches us an uncomfortable truth: even if a ceasefire were signed tomorrow, Russia's information war would continue. It would continue because its objectives extend beyond the immediate Ukrainian conflict — they target global influence, the rewriting of history, the circumvention of democratic resilience. The **SDA** and its equivalents will not disappear with a peace agreement. They will adapt, redirect their targets, continue contaminating the informational ecosystems that feed democracies' decisions.

This is why the response to this threat cannot be conditional on the end of the conflict. It must begin now, with the urgency the situation demands. The revelations about the **SDA** and **Project 2026** are not information to archive — they are alarm signals calling for immediate, coordinated action, equal to the challenge. Information is the raw material of democracy. Protecting it means protecting democracy itself.

### What we owe Ukraine

There is something morally important about the fact that it is **Ukraine** — an aggressed country, a country at war, a country fighting for its survival — that documents and denounces these operations with the most precision and urgency. Ukrainian disinformation experts have accumulated irreplaceable experience since **2014**. Their expertise deserves to be taken seriously, supported, and amplified by Western democracies. And what we owe them, at minimum, is to take the information war they have been waging alone for years as seriously as we take the military war.

*The information war does not end with a ceasefire. It continues, it evolves, it adapts. And the only way to win it durably is to build societies where truth has sufficient value that citizens fight to defend it. This is a longer struggle than any military war. But it is the struggle that will determine the future of democracies.*

**By Maxime Marquette, columnist**

## Columnist's transparency note

### Editorial stance

I am not a journalist but a **columnist and analyst**. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

I do not claim the cold objectivity of traditional journalism, which stops at reporting facts. **I claim analytical clarity**, rigorous interpretation and a deep understanding of the complex issues that concern us all. My role is to give meaning to the facts, to place them in their historical and strategic context, and to offer a critical reading of events.

### Method and sources

This text keeps the basic distinction between **verified facts and interpretive analysis**. The rule never changes: a factual claim is published only when a verifiable source supports it, and the sources this article actually used are listed under **Sources**, never here.

**Primary source families** used by the publication, when the story has them: official statements from governments and international institutions, public statements by political leaders, reports from intergovernmental organisations, dispatches from recognised international news agencies.

**Secondary source families**: specialised publications, internationally recognised news media, analyses from established research institutions, reports from industry organisations.

When an article cites statistical, economic or geopolitical data, it comes from the institutions that produce it (intergovernmental organisations, central banks, national statistics offices), and the exact institution is named under **Sources**.

### Nature of the analysis

The analyses, interpretations and perspectives in the analytical sections of this article are a **critical, contextual synthesis** based on the information available, the trends observed and the expert comments cited in the sources consulted.

My role is to interpret these facts, to set them in the context of today's geopolitical and economic dynamics, and to give them a coherent meaning within the larger story of the changes shaping our time. These analyses reflect expertise built through continuous observation of international affairs and an understanding of the strategic mechanisms that drive global actors.

This article describes a documented state of affairs on its publication date, not a prediction: later developments may shift its outlook. No update is promised in advance; when an article is corrected or completed, the change is dated in the text.

## Sources

### Primary sources

- [Euromaidan Press — Russia manipulates global AI chatbot ecosystems with fabricated narratives (Bloomberg data) — June 23, 2026](https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/06/23/russia-expands-disinformation-strategy-to-target-ai-ecosystems/)

- [Euromaidan Press — Vlasiuk: 2025-made components from 6 countries found in Russian drones — May 2026](https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/05/02/german-japanese-swiss-american-taiwanese-british-all-2025-made-parts-found-in-russian-drones-vlasiuk-says/)

### Secondary sources

- [Kyiv Independent — Ukraine sanctions 66 Russian companies linked to military-industrial complex — May 2026](https://kyivindependent.com/ukraine-sanctions-66-russian-companies-individuals-linked-to-russias-military-industrial-complex/)

- [Ukrinform — Zelensky imposes sanctions on entities supporting Russia's defense industry — April 2026](https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-polytics/4109048-zelensky-imposes-sanctions-on-entities-supporting-russias-defense-industry.html)

- Kyiv Independent — Western-made parts keep ending up in Russian and Iranian weapons — March 2026

- [Ukrainska Pravda — Zelenskyy sanctions nearly 70 collaborators working for Russia — June 26, 2026](https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2026/06/26/8041254/)

---

Source: Maxime Marquette, MadMax. When citing, name the author and link https://mad-max.co/en/article/decryptage-comment-la-russie-empoisonne-les-ia-pour-reecrire-la-realite-avant-me