How to beat Vladimir Putin in the battle for hearts and eyeballs

The west is belatedly waking up to the power of the Kremlin’s media machine. The supreme commander of Nato called the annexation of Crimea “the most amazing information warfare blitzkrieg we have ever seen”. Zhanna Nemtsova blames the climate of hate created by Kremlin propaganda for the murder of her father, opposition politician Boris Nemtsov.

The Soviet empire may be gone but the Kremlin still has media hegemony over 142m Russian citizens and an estimated 93m elsewhere in the former USSR for whom Russian is a first or second language (plus as many as 3m in Germany). A project by the European Endowment for Democracy, a Brussels foundation — of which I was an author — sought ways to tackle this challenge. We soon found differences between the situation today and the in cold war...............

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