EU elections in 2019 are likely to be the next big target for Russian propaganda, MEPs have warned. “Next year the citizens of Europe will elect a new European Parliament. This raises an uncomfortable question: how many seats will Russia get?”, Danish centre-left MEP Jeppe Kofod said in Strasbourg on Wednesday (17 January). “Let’s not kid ourselves, Russian meddling in democratic elections is no longer the exception, it is becoming the norm,” he added. Kofod spoke at an EU parliament debate on what the assembly described in its press release as a “Kremlin-orchestrated” campaign of “leaks, fake news, disinformation campaigns, and cyberattacks” that stretched back to the UK referendum on leaving the EU in mid-2016 and which also targeted the French and German elections and Catalonia’s independence referendum last year.
“The pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign is an orchestrated strategy – delivering the same disinformation stories in as many languages as possible, through as many channels as possible, as often as possible,” the EU’s security commissioner, Julian King, said on Wednesday.
He said a counter-propaganda cell, called Stratcom, in the EU foreign service had documented “more than 3,500 examples of pro-Kremlin disinformation” in European media in the past two years.
Full Article: Next year’s EU election at risk of Russian meddling.