The journalist Monika Tódová has never spoken to the politician Michal Šimečka about the manipulation of the elections. But in a short video spreading just a few days before the recent Slovak election, they were heard talking about it. The 2023 Slovak parliamentary elections may allegedly be the first campaign where...
Several EU governments have infected journalists’ phones with spyware while using national security as a pretext. That threatens the lives of these writers and the democracy as a whole. "The abuse of spyware threatens the integrity of elections. And it’s not just about politicians, because how can elections be fair if...
If the war were to stop today, it would take Russia between three to five years to restore its military might and capabilities to the level they would need to strike the next neighboring country, says colonel Margo Grosberg, outgoing chief of Estonia’s military intelligence in a rare interview.
Employment agencies with ties to the governing Fidesz-party – known for its xenophobic and anti-immigration campaigning – are recruiting migrant workers overseas on behalf of Hungarian employers. Recruiters taking advantage of a recent legislation include a business partner of MEP Tamás Deutsch’s brother and the...
According to Dorka Takácsy, an expert on Russia and external research fellow of the Centre for Euro-Atlantic Integration and Democracy (CEID), the Hungarian NewsFront spreads dumbed-down, straightforward Russian propaganda narratives. “It works with endlessly sensationalist headlines and very short, few-sentence news flashes,...
Several Ukrainian experts have pointed out the potential risks of using internet-connected surveillance cameras, which may provide Russia with better options for intelligence gathering than their native tools, such as spy satellites. In Ukraine, two Chinese tech companies, Hikvision and Dahua, have a near-monopoly in the...
A member of the far-right party AFD in Germany from a small town in Bavaria; the Slovak Brother for Brother biker club; Serbian right-wing activists; a “Tatar” imam; a Hungarian ex-diplomat and amateur interpreter—these seemingly unrelated individuals have something in common. They have been contributing to or actively...
Drawn up in 2021 by the Kremlin’s Directorate for Cross-Border Cooperation, the Kremlin’s plans do not focus on cooperation. “This is the old KGB method: ‘We should weaken our enemies. And the best way to weaken them is from inside, not from outside.’ What they are good at is dividing societies, creating problems,...
Specialized equipment for signals intelligence (SIGINT) has been mounted in recent weeks on the roof of Russian facilities across Europe, from Warsaw to Budapest, Stockholm, or Brussels, which is linked to a massive network of espionage and capable of picking up the national security signals of the countries concerned. Russian...
