cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/10630643

Here is the study: The Russian FIMI Playbook in Moldova (pdf)

Moldova underwent the most intensive FIMI (foreign information manipulation and interference) Europe has ever seen, and its defences held.

The core lesson: FIMI is a governance challenge, not a media challenge; Russian operations amplify governance deficits that already exist.

Five priorities follow, for Chișinău and Brussels alike:

• treat FIMI as a good-governance problem;
• prioritize resilience over censorship;
• follow the money — banks, cards, crypto;
• learn faster than the adversary; and treat democratic oversight as an asset, not an obstacle;
• ultimately, Russia is competing less for control over information than for control over citizens‘ trust.

…

Democratic resilience depends not only on a pro-European political orientation but equally on the continued strengthening of checks and balances, judicial independence, parliamentary oversight, and institutional accountability – in short, on good governance.

At the European level: treat Moldova as a front-line source of FIMI lessons and systematize their transfer across the enlargement space; make joint monitoring of the G7 RRM type permanent rather than election-bound and extend it to other exposed partners, backed by common analytical cells and a shared TTP database; take action at the EU level on platform accountability — above all Telegram and TikTok — and on crypto-based FIMI financing; and integrate FIMI-resilience and governance-quality benchmarks into the enlargement methodology itself.

Rather than treating FIMI as one instrument among many, European policy should understand it as the connective tissue that links and amplifies all other hybrid instruments.

Russia seeks to weaken democracy not only through disinformation, but also by eroding the institutions that generate public trust; the most sustainable response is therefore not stronger censorship, but stronger democratic governance.

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[Edit typo.]