A New Axis of Disinformation: What Europe Must Do Now

While European officials debate content moderation, Russia and China have established an information alliance that threatens the integrity of the 2026 electoral cycle. Last month, Chinese Premier Li Qiang and Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin met in Hangzhou to formalise coordination across, amongst other domains – information operations – that synchronises narrative control, digital regulation, and technological leverage within the media domain. Built on a 2015 bilateral agreement and accelerated through joint working groups since 2022, this partnership now operates across the cyber, space, and AI (Artificial Intelligence) domains – challenging Europe’s open information system at its most vulnerable.

This matters because it represents the culmination of a decade-long progression. Russia and China have moved from limited cybersecurity dialogue to structured coordination on media, data governance, and now AI-enabled influence operations. For Moscow and Beijing, the cognitive domain is now as deeply embedded in national security strategy as any kinetic capability. Europe, meanwhile, still treats information warfare as a fact-checking problem rather than the systematic, strategic threat it has become.

This coordination is actively reshaping Europe’s information environment in ways that intersect with – and exploit – deeper political shifts. Their objective is clear: to help bring pro-Russian, anti-Western, and anti-democratic voices amenable to their worldview into mainstream Western discourse. This is not just about undermining Euro-Atlantic unity and support for Ukraine; it is about eroding the political will to confront either regime. 

While right-wing parties once considered fringe, now top polls across all of Europe’s major capitals – London, Paris, and Berlin. While these gains stem from multiple factors, including economic anxiety and immigration concerns, Russian and Chinese information operations systematically amplify these fissures, accelerating polarization and lending algorithmic momentum to anti-establishment narratives that serve their strategic interests.

This is not Cold War information warfare with digital tools. Two major factors make today’s threat qualitatively different. Algorithmic amplification generates millions of impressions within days, where Soviet dezinformatsiya required years, and democratic erosion occurs within electoral cycles rather than generational timescales. The information environment itself has fundamentally changed – open, algorithmic, and vulnerable to manipulation at unprecedented speed and scale.

Why the Information Alliance matters to China

In July 2025, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told Europe’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, that Russia’s defeat in the war would lead the US to focus entirely on China. It revealed Beijing’s calculus: Russia is a strategic buffer that diverts Western resources and a partner that exerts active pressure on the West, from Europe to the Pacific. As long as Moscow remains non-Western and authoritarian, China will increasingly offer intelligence, technological, and narrative support.

For Beijing and Moscow, information operations are low-cost, low-risk tools that influence democratic processes and undermine Euro-Atlantic unity without crossing the kinetic threshold that would trigger a decisive Western response. This approach aligns with China’s “security-first” doctrine under Xi Jinping. Beijing increasingly frames confrontation with the West through the lens of the “three warfares” – media, psychological, and legal – an approach that perfectly complements the Kremlin’s information warfare doctrine and makes joint activities in the cyber, cognitive, and intelligence domains structurally easier. 

China’s role is moving from a passive observer to an active participant in Russia’s multi-layered campaign against European security. Not least, China is also actively learning from and replicating Russian-style information warfare techniques, including decentralised disinformation networks, AI-generated conspiracy content, and fake local news sites to influence public opinion in Japan and Taiwan. 

The implications extend beyond politics to economics. Russia-China information operations target European defense industries, renewable energy investments, and technology sectors – undermining investor confidence and market stability. Chinese platforms’ role in Russian operations raises corporate governance questions: executives at ByteDance, Tencent, and Weibo face stark choices – not least losing market access and forced divestiture. 

Three Domains of Convergence

The Sino-Russian information alignment sits within broader hybrid warfare coordination across three key strategic domains. For Beijing – cyber, space, and AI – offer opportunities to expand geopolitical reach by leveraging Russia’s access and capabilities to project influence without excessive cost or triggering Western military response:

1. Cyber.

Since 2024, the volume of cyber-espionage targeting EU institutions has surged. ENISA, the EU’s cyber agency, assessed that Russian and Chinese state-backed intrusions were jointly responsible for the overwhelming majority of attacks against public institutions across the EU last year. Both nations simultaneously targeted ministries, diplomatic networks, critical infrastructure, and strategic industries, including semiconductors.

This reflects deliberate coordination through institutionalised channels. Russia and China have held annual cybersecurity consultations since 2015, with an accelerating tempo recently. Actors increasingly mirror techniques to obscure attribution, reinforcing convergence. ENISA data shows that nearly every EU member state experienced Russia (47%) or China (43%) as the source of attributed intrusions.

This simultaneous targeting pattern – from foreign ministries to telecommunications and maritime sectors – combined with documented intelligence-sharing mechanisms established through bilateral working groups – reinforces a unified pressure campaign on Europe, even when executed separately.

2. Space.

Russia is relying on Chinese space-based intelligence to compensate for its ageing satellite fleet and the impact of sanctions, a cooperation that Western intelligence officials now assess extends directly into kinetic warfare support. Chinese intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (ISR), and Synthetic-Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites reportedly provide Russia with higher-resolution imagery and faster battlefield evaluation than its own systems.

Ukrainian units have spotted Chinese satellites passing over during major Russian strike waves this year. This raises serious concerns that China’s space capabilities are directly enhancing the Kremlin’s targeting, battle-damage assessment, and long-range strike planning. This is the key lesson: information warfare is no longer about shaping perceptions but also about integration with warfare tools.

European governments warn of increasingly aligned Russian and Chinese activities in orbit: surveillance, stalking, and jamming of Western satellites. Moscow and Beijing are expanding coordination into the ultimate high ground, where interference with communications, navigation, and intelligence satellites directly affects military operations and European critical infrastructure.

3. AI.

Russia and China have recognised that AI is a force multiplier for their ideological, economic, and military alignment. This was formalised on November 4, 2025, when both governments agreed to establish a joint Expert Council on AI governance and standards, designed to prepare concrete cooperation initiatives. Just two weeks later, Russia and China held formal consultations on the military application of AI.

This partnership combines China’s scalable, low-cost AI architectures with Russia’s programming talent and battlefield data from Ukraine. This is especially important, given that some US AI companies are now disclosing Nation State information operations using their platforms. The operational implication: Chinese large language models can power automated bot networks, generate localised disinformation at scale, and enable real-time adaptive messaging – transforming Russia’s information operations from labor-intensive to algorithmically automated.

The Russian-Sino Narrative Convergence on Ukraine

Social media has become a frontline battlefield for this cognitive alliance. Chinese platforms – TikTok (with 200 million European users) and Weibo – amplify pro-Russian narratives through algorithmic design, lax moderation, or deliberate non-enforcement. A major Russian campaign exploited TikTok’s algorithm to demoralise Ukrainian society: ‘peace at any cost,’ anti-mobilization content, narratives about the futility of territorial recovery. 

Russia also, through intermediaries, uses these platforms for military recruitment, including recruiting over 100 Chinese nationals – raising questions about platform governance and state coordination. Analysis of Chinese Weibo activity demonstrated cross-promotion with Russian state outlets like Russia Today and Sputnik, pushing war-related content that used narratives of Western hegemony, gaining broad engagement among Chinese users.

Since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Chinese state media, diplomats, and online proxies have amplified Russian narratives, from blaming NATO for escalation to framing Western sanctions as self-defeating. Chinese media outlets and official public statements have increasingly used Russia’s terminology of “conflict” or “crisis” while also avoiding the word “invasion” and reframing the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine as a defensive reaction to Western provocation. This framing also portrays the West as escalating the conflict by providing more military aid to Ukraine while downplaying Russia’s responsibility. 

These campaigns succeed through coordinated manipulation of authentic or semi-authentic content. It is not ‘fake news’. It exploits algorithmic systems to create false impressions of public sentiment – as seen in Romania’s and Poland’s elections. Evidence from the 2024 European Parliament elections showed Russia-linked operations targeting audiences in France and Germany to promote polarizing narratives on migration, energy, and Ukraine, helping far-right parties gain ground. While multiple factors drive political shifts, Russian and Chinese information operations systematically amplify these divisions.

Simultaneously, support for Ukraine is being systematically eroded across Europe. Polling shows approval for welcoming Ukrainian refugees is declining in the EU, with particularly sharp drops among economically insecure populations. In Poland, a surge in Russian-attributed activity has seen support for Ukraine fighting without territorial concessions fall from 59% (April 2022) to 31% (December 2024). Coordinated disinformation campaigns exploit and accelerate these sentiments, weakening European resolve to sustain support for Ukraine.

Why Current Responses Fall Short

Europe has not been passive. The EU’s Code of Practice on Disinformation – strengthened in 2022 – and the 2024 Digital Services Act (DSA) represented meaningful steps toward platform accountability, requiring transparency reports and rapid response to illegal content. The EU has also imposed sanctions on specific state media outlets and created specialised hybrid threat task forces – valuable in establishing norms and creating friction for the most obvious campaigns. 

However, these responses were designed for isolated incidents rather than systematic, state-coordinated activity spanning platforms. The Code of Practice relies heavily on voluntary cooperation, which has proven inconsistent when platforms face pressure from the Chinese market or Russian obfuscation tactics. The DSA focuses primarily on content moderation rather than the broader cognitive manipulation enabled by algorithmic amplification and cross-platform coordination. 

Neither addresses the integration of information operations with a broader hybrid warfare characterizing the Sino-Russian approach. Europe is bringing regulatory tools to what has become a national security threat operating at internet speed and at platform scale. The gap is not in Europe’s commitment, but in the mismatch between Europe’s defensive posture and its adversaries’ prioritisation. 

Recommendations: Time for Active Cognitive Defence

European leadership must recognise that information warfare is no longer a peripheral challenge – it is a strategic, systemic, tier-one national security threat. While new regulations have provided necessary guardrails to meet this evolving threat, European governments and institutions must urgently pursue three parallel lines of action that elevate information defense to the same institutional level as kinetic security. 

First, Europe must now establish strategic red lines in the information domain and answer – what will it not tolerate?  Russian and Chinese influence campaigns are not isolated acts of propaganda; European leaders must explicitly signal that systematic information manipulation targeting elections, public sentiment, or social stability constitutes a violation of sovereignty – for example, documented state-coordinated networks before national elections would trigger predetermined diplomatic and economic responses.

The EU and NATO must develop these shared thresholds for attribution and consequences – just as the Alliance once debated cyber’s role in Article 5 –  ensuring that persistent cognitive attacks carry costs comparable to other forms of hybrid aggression. Just as we have red lines against physical violations of borders, we must now establish diplomatic, legal, and economic red lines in the information domain.

Second, Europe must institutionalise Cognitive Resilience as a permanent mission – Ad hoc crisis responses are now insufficient. The announcement of the establishment of a European Centre for Democratic Resilience is a welcome and necessary step.  Europe needs a standing architecture to detect, counter, and deter foreign information operations within a common operational framework. Ukraine’s experience has shown that cognitive resilience relies on permanent, real-time operational coordination across government, technology platforms and civil society. Europe can also look to adapt its existing cyber ecosystem – including National Cyber Agencies and Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs) – to defend the information space.

Finally, Europe must impose Strategic Costs and strengthen Deterrence. Resilience alone is insufficient. Europe must develop robust attribution mechanisms, publicly expose state-linked operations, and coordinate tangible responses: targeted sanctions on intelligence officials, asset freeses on entities funding disinformation networks, visa bans on state media executives, and technology export restrictions on AI systems used for influence operations The example of Romania, where the Constitutional Court annulled an election after intelligence services provided evidence of 25,000 coordinated TikTok accounts shows threats can be thwarted – but as of yet – carry no real consequences.

The Path Forward 

The United States, too, while focused on China in the Indo-Pacific, cannot afford to degrade allied Europe by coordinated Sino-Russian cognitive warfare – despite the political hurdles such a topic poses in Washington. China’s support for Moscow is driven by its strategic competition with the US. It plays a key role in supporting European cognitive resilience through intelligence sharing, joint attribution mechanisms, and, critically, platform cooperation enforcement. The transatlantic alliance that deterred Soviet aggression must now extend deterrence into the information domain or watch democratic cohesion dissolve from within.

The Sino-Russian information partnership is institutionalised, resourced, and operationally integrated across cyber, space, and AI domains. Europe faces a binary choice: institutionalise cognitive defense at the same level, with comparable resources and political priority, or accept gradual erosion of democratic cohesion and strategic autonomy. The 2026 electoral cycle – with major votes in Germany, Hungary, and France – will test whether Europe treats information warfare as a nuisance or an existential challenge. The only question is whether European leaders will act before the next elections, or after. The decision point is now.