While Europe's attention is rightly focused on building ships, tanks, and drones, another form of warfare is undermining the foundations of our democracies – not with missiles, but with messages. The French government’s latest VIGINUM report on the Russian information manipulation operation Storm-1516 reveals a sobering truth: we are under sustained cognitive attack by state actors operating at an unprecedented level of sophistication.
This is not just the latest Russian disinformation campaign, it’s a full-spectrum influence operation designed to corrode trust, hijack reality, and ultimately reshape public sentiment across Europe and North America.
Storm-1516 has been active since August 2023. In that time it has already conducted 77 coordinated disinformation operations against Europe. Its primary objective is to discredit Ukraine and fracture European and transatlantic resolve. These are not subtle efforts. They make outlandish claims that President Zelenskyy is embezzling Western aid to buy luxury villas, accuse his wife of trafficking, his allies of murder, and Ukrainian intelligence of silencing critics.
The VIGINUM report also notes that many of the narratives spread by Storm-1516 reached high levels of online visibility, and some were even amplified by prominent Western figures and politicians.
The point is not so much to convince as to confuse, leaving audiences unable to distinguish fact from fiction, until disbelief itself becomes the default. When you hear someone say, “I don’t know what to believe anymore,” you know it’s working.
What makes Storm-1516 more dangerous than previous efforts is its industrial scale and technological evolution. This is disinformation in the age of mass precision; an AI-enabled operation capable of generating and amplifying multilingual content using burner accounts, deepfakes, and typosquatted media that mirror legitimate sources. Among them so far have been fake sites pretending to be Le Monde, Bild, The Guardian, and Deutsche Welle. These are cognitive special operations that go beyond mere propaganda. They target our trust, institutions, and shared sense of reality.
In one instance, the team behind Storm-1516 created a fake French political website offering voters a €100 “Macron bonus” in exchange for their ballot. This was meant not only to deceive, but to delegitimise the electoral process itself. In another, deepfake videos fabricated threats from Hamas to attack the Paris Olympics. As usual, these digital ghosts leave no return address.
These are not lone wolves or rogue pranksters. They are proxies of state power, coordinated to create chaos and weaken Europe’s willingness to support Ukraine and our ability to respond collectively to Russian aggression.
This moment calls for more than reactive fact-checking. Hybrid threats such as these are best understood as attacks on democratic governance; not just institutions, but the connective tissue between state and society.
Governments, media platforms, civil society, and the private sector must now pivot to a new aim of cognitive resilience: not just hardening our systems, but inoculating our societies. This includes expanding digital literacy, accelerating the takedown of AI-fuelled fake content, and enhancing joint detection capabilities between EU member states and democracies worldwide.
Above all, we need to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth: we are already in a cognitive war. This war is fought at the speed of algorithms; its battlefronts are our minds and information spaces.
Storm-1516 is a glimpse of what comes next. Disinformation is now scalable, microtargeted, and convincing enough to swing elections, fracture alliances, and paralyse responses.
The time to act is not after more damage is done. The time is now.
Chris Kremidas-Courtney is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the European Policy Centre
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