Russia weaponizes MEGA and EU rifts in its information operation to spread Union collapse narrative
Two coordinated campaigns and five tiers of distribution. More than thirty outlets across fourteen countries. One goal: convince Europeans their union is already finished, that the EU is collapsing, and incite hatred toward Brussels.
The information operation started with ‘pseudo-analytical’ articles in Russian state media (sanctioned in the EU), followed by disinformation websites (like Pravda and Front) and amplified by pro-Kremlin media in Europe and anti-EU posts on multiple Telegram channels.
When a new alliance under the MEGA (Make Europe Great Again) banner gathered in Brussels on February 2, 2026, the event was real. The politicians were real. The speeches were real. What happened in the 72 hours that followed was a planned information operation of foreign influence.
A precisely timed, multilingual, cross-platform amplification campaign pushed one specific reading of that conference into living rooms across Germany, Slovakia, France, Hungary, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, Finland, Estonia, Belgium, and the Czech Republic. At the same time, a second campaign was feeding those same audiences a story about the EU’s top leadership tearing itself apart from the inside. The two campaigns ran in parallel, targeted different anxieties, and were carried by many of the same outlets.
This is not a story about invented facts. The MEGA conference did take place. The friction between Ursula von der Leyen and Kaja Kallas is real and has been reported by mainstream European media. What makes this a disinformation operation is something more precise: real events were selected, stripped of context, and amplified through a network of outlets that disguised where the content came from. The facts were twisted to suit the Kremlin’s agenda.
The goal was not to fabricate reality but to reshape how people understand it — to turn a fringe political conference into proof that the EU is illegitimate and to turn a management disagreement between two officials into evidence of imminent collapse. And to make Russia’s role in any of this completely invisible.
On February 6, 2026, the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti published an opinion piece by Petr Akopov, a Russian propagandist and political commentator who writes regularly for the outlet. The article was titled “Europe Against the European Union: Brussels Knows What It Is Doing.” Its opening line was the slogan that would travel across more than twenty websites in six languages over the following three days: “We love Europe and therefore despise the European Union.”
Akopov attributed the line to Filip Dewinter, the leader of the Belgian far-right party Vlaams Belang, who had co-hosted the MEGA founding conference in Brussels. Dewinter’s actual statement at the event was that “the future of Europe lies in nation states, not in liberal globalism.” Around that statement, Akopov built a political argument presented as analysis: that the EU’s support for Ukraine in the Russian-Ukrainian war is not about values or security but about manufactured fear, an “artificially inflated fear” designed by European elites to hold together a bloc that would otherwise fall apart on its own. Those at the MEGA conference, he wrote, “advocate for true European unity, including all of Greater Europe — from Russians to Portuguese.” EU leaders, by contrast, want to “unite Europeans on the basis of fear and hatred.”
This framing does specific political work. It erases Russia’s responsibility for the Russian-Ukrainian war entirely. It reframes European support for Ukraine as elite manipulation. And it positions a far-right Brussels conference as the authentic voice of European civilisation. RIA Novosti published the piece, and it was simultaneously promoted through RT DE, the German-language branch of the Russian state broadcaster RT, which is banned across the EU. RT DE published it on its website and, to get around its YouTube ban, distributed the accompanying video through Odysee, a platform RT uses specifically as a workaround to spread its video reports. The video opened with the same words as the article.
* https://ria.ru/20260206/evropa-2072575129.html
* https://de.rt.com/meinung/269542-mega-europa-gegen-eu/
* https://odysee.com/@RTDE:e/MEGA-ein-Europa-gegen-die-EU:0
What happened next is the most visible evidence of coordination. Within hours of the RIA Novosti article going live, the Russian outlet News Front published translations of Akopov’s piece in six languages across its network of country-specific websites. The French version appeared at 14:00, Slovak at 15:00, Polish at 16:00, Hungarian at 17:00, German at 18:00, and Spanish at 19:00. Six languages, five consecutive hours, all carrying the same text, all crediting “Petr Akopov, RIA Novosti” at the bottom. No independent newsroom publishes the same article in six languages within five hours. This was not journalism. It was an anti-EU information operation disguised as journalism.
* https://sk.news-front.su/2026/02/06/mega-europa-vs-eu/
* https://fr.news-front.su/2026/02/06/rendre-sa-grandeur-a-leurope-leurope-contre-lunion-europeenne/
* https://pl.news-front.su/2026/02/06/make-europe-great-again-europa-przeciwko-unii-europejskie j/
* https://hu.news-front.su/2026/02/06/tegyuk-ujra-naggya-europat-europa-az-eupai-unio-ellen/
* https://de.news-front.su/2026/02/06/make-europe-great-again-europa-gegen-die-europaische-union/
* https://es.news-front.su/2026/02/06/hacer-que-europa-vuelva-a-ser-grande-europa-contra-la-union-europea/
Two days later, on February 8, a second Russian network joined the operation. News Pravda runs under country-specific domain names — germany.news-pravda.com, francais.news-pravda.com, belgium.news-pravda.com, poland.news-pravda.com — designed to read as local news to anyone who encounters them without prior knowledge. The German edition published the full Akopov article with a note buried at the bottom: “Translated from Russian. The article was originally published by RIA Novosti on February 6, 2026. That disclosure existed. But a reader arriving at a site called deutsch.news-pravda.com is not primed to look for it.
* https://germany.news-pravda.com/world/2026/02/08/230325.html
* https://francais.news-pravda.com/world/2026/02/08/721220.html
* https://deutsch.news-pravda.com/world/2026/02/08/603759.html
* https://belgium.news-pravda.com/fr/world/2026/02/08/10478.html
* https://poland.news-pravda.com/world/2026/02/06/228652.html
* https://news-pravda.com/world/2026/02/06/2059447.html
* https://deutsch.news-pravda.com/world/2026/02/06/601778.html
The Belgium edition of News Pravda added content from the X account Brainless Partisans, which has 113,900 followers. That account published its version of the anti-EU framing sourced from a Telegram channel, and it spread directly on X as well. “Brussels is no longer a capital, it is an ideological archive center,” Brainless Partisans wrote. And further: “Permanent conflict with Russia makes no strategic sense for Europe, except to artificially maintain a Union held together only by fear. And fear, like any drug, requires ever-stronger doses. Until the overdose.”
* https://x.com/BPartisans/status/2020484702017044907
* https://x.com/BPartisans/status/2020484852542312532
By February 9, the Akopov article had arrived at a set of websites that present themselves as ‘alternative’ European media. The German site Krisenfrei published the full piece under the byline “Von Pjotr Akopow (rtdeutsch)” and included a detailed author biography identifying Akopov as a RIA Novosti political observer. The two Slovak pro-Kremlin sites Infovojna and Slovanské Noviny published identical versions of the article, both crediting “Autor: Pjotr Akopov / Zdroj: ria.ru / sk.news-front.su” at the bottom of the page. Three steps in the chain, printed in plain sight, invisible to anyone who did not know what to look for.
* https://krisenfrei.com/mega-ein-europa-gegen-die-eu/
* https://www.infovojna.com/article/mega-europa-vs-eu
* https://slovanskenoviny.sk/mega-europa-vs-eu/
The final distribution layer was Telegram, where content moved fastest and its origin was least visible. At least eleven channels distributed the Akopov article in German, Polish, and Slovak between February 7 and 9, with subscriber counts ranging from a few hundred to over eleven thousand.
The largest, Spravy Slovakia, had 11,346 subscribers and was linked directly to the News Front Slovak edition. The RT DE Live Newsticker had 1,150 subscribers and was linked to rt.com directly. MT News Deutsch had 3,086 subscribers. Fresse Frei, with 1,464 subscribers, described itself as publishing RT DE podcasts, its name being a crude wordplay on the German word for press freedom. RT Deutsch had 4,844 subscribers. Matroschka Today, with 598 subscribers, posted the full RT article text alongside a link to the Odysee video. Echte Nachrichten had 1,550 subscribers. Just Now News had 1,107. Prawda PL, with 386 subscribers, carried the Polish version. Zwischenspeicher had 216.
At the other end of the scale, a channel called Kremllieferservice—which translates directly as “Kremlin Delivery Service”—posted the same article with a link to an RT mirror domain. That a channel would name itself after its own function is either unusual self-awareness or a complete absence of concern about being identified. Either way, the name is accurate. Every channel in this network is linked to an RT domain, a News Front page, or a European proxy site. None linked to independent reporting.
* https://t.me/spravy_slovakia/25643
* https://t.me/rt_de_live_newsticker/22665
* https://t.me/MTnews_Deutsch/26513
* https://t.me/fresse_frei/4966
* https://t.me/echtenachrichten/43102
* https://t.me/matroschka_today/86946
* https://t.me/pravdaplcom/52432
* https://t.me/rtdeutsch_rtde/33151
* https://t.me/kremllieferservice/33154
* https://t.me/zwischenspeicher/176112
* https://t.me/justnow_news/40096
The operation also had a version built for a different audience. On February 7, the journal InterAffairs.ru, published by the Russian International Affairs Council — a think tank with close state ties — released an English-language conference report on MEGA, presenting it as a legitimate political development. The piece described the alliance as “dedicated to defending Western civilisation” and repeated the claim that Starmer, Macron, and Merz had “repeatedly jeopardized” Trump’s efforts regarding the Russian-Ukrainian war, citing conference speakers as its source. Nothing was framed as contested. This was the version of the operation built for policy circles and analytical audiences who would dismiss RT but might forward an InterAffairs.ru link to a colleague without checking where the journal sits institutionally.
* https://en.interaffairs.ru/article/europe-is-waking-up-from-its-liberal-slumber-a-make-europe-great-again-mega-inaugural-conferen/
While the MEGA content was moving through its network, a second operation was running in parallel. Its target was the working relationship between European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas.
The tensions between the two are real. Western mainstream outlets reported on friction over institutional authority, including a dispute about the Mediterranean region portfolio. But the version of this story that circulated through Russian and pro-Kremlin-position media was built on a single anonymous claim that appeared first on a platform linked to Russian intelligence services.
On January 31, 2026, the Strategic Culture Foundation published a lengthy article by Dutch writer Sonja van den Ende. The Strategic Culture Foundation has been designated by both the EU and the United States as a channel linked to Russian intelligence, used to give disinformation the appearance of geopolitical analysis. Van den Ende’s piece described the EU as a “self-imposed island of isolation where the appearance of a good life and democracy is maintained by politically funded media.” It argued that the friction between von der Leyen and Kallas “usually means the end of a bloc, organisation, or country.” And it quoted an anonymous senior EU official saying that Kallas “privately calls von der Leyen a dictator, but she can do little about it.”
That anonymous claim, on that platform, became the factual anchor for everything that followed.
One detail in the text travelled intact to every site that republished it. Throughout the article, von der Leyen is referred to not by her name or title but as “Führerin” — a German word with direct and unmistakable associations with the Nazi period. The word appeared repeatedly and was copied verbatim across Switzerland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Finland, and Estonia. It was designed to trigger a specific emotional response in German-speaking audiences, and it worked as designed every time it was republished.
* https://strategic-culture.su/news/2026/01/31/how-eu-politicians-live-in-own-bubble-enemies-their-isolated-eu-island/
On February 1, 2026, the day after the Strategic Culture publication, three major Russian state outlets published the story within hours of each other. None had conducted independent reporting. All three cited Strategic Culture as their source.
RIA Novosti described the disagreement between von der Leyen and Kallas as evidence of “the approaching collapse of the EU.” Izvestia ran the headline “Strategic Culture Points to the Harm for the EU of the Von der Leyen and Kallas Disagreements,” naming the source in the headline itself — an editorial choice that functions as a public legitimisation signal for the platform. Lenta.ru wrote that the conflict had pushed Europe to live on a “voluntary island of isolation, inventing countless enemies around itself.”
A platform linked to Russian intelligence published a claim on January 31. Three state outlets amplified it the next day. The direction of travel is clear.
* https://ria.ru/20260201/ssora-2071495442.html
* https://iz.ru/2035066/2026-02-01/sc-ukazala-na-vred-dlia-es-raznoglasii-fon-der-liaien-i-kallas
* https://lenta.ru/news/2026/02/01/es-predrekli-raskol-iz-za-konflikta-kallas-i-fon-der-lyayen/
From the Russian state layer, the campaign moved into Europe through the same network that had carried the MEGA content and through several additional sites.
News Front SK published the Slovak translation on February 1 at 15:00, within hours of the Russian state wave. The Slovak site Oral.sk republished the same content the same day.
* https://sk.news-front.su/2026/02/01/strategic-culture-nevrazivost-medzi-von-der-leyen-a-kallas-by-mohla-znicit-eu/
* https://oral.sk/nevrazivost-medzi-von-der-leyen-a-kallas-by-mohla-znicit-eu/
The story then spread through the Slovak and Czech cluster. Slovanské Noviny, Infovojna, CZ24.news, and Infokuryr all published versions crediting Strategic Culture or News Front as their source.
* https://slovanskenoviny.sk/staty-eu-na-cele-s-eurokomisiou-su-coraz-viac-izolovane-od-zvysku-sveta-a-vytvaraju-si-nespocetne-mnozstvo-nepriatelov-po-celej-planete/
* https://www.infovojna.com/article/staty-eu-na-cele-s-eurokomisiou-su-coraz-viac-izolovane-od-zvysku-sveta-a-vytvaraju-si-nespocetne-mnozstvo-nepriatelov
* https://cz24.news/nevrazivost-medzi-von-der-leyen-a-kallas-by-mohla-znicit-eu-strategic-culture/
* https://www.infokuryr.cz/n/2026/02/10/jak-politici-eu-ziji-ve-vlastni-nepratelske-bubline-na-svem-izolovanem-ostrove-eu/
In the German-language zone, three sites published texts that were identical word for word. Uncutnews in Switzerland, Krisenfrei in Germany, and DDBnews in Germany ran the same article, with the only difference being that DDBnews attributed it to an author named simply “Uwe” with no surname. Three outlets, one text, zero original journalism.
* https://uncutnews.ch/wie-eu-politiker-in-ihrer-eigenen-feindesblase-auf-ihrer-isolierten-eu-insel-leben/
* https://krisenfrei.com/wie-eu-politiker-in-ihrer-eigenen-blase-von-feinden-auf-ihrer-isolierten-eu-insel-leben/
* https://www.ddbnews.de/wie-eu-politiker-in-ihrer-eigenen-feindesblase-auf-ihrer-isolierten-eu-insel-leben/
In France, the piece appeared on Newsnet. In Hungary, Pestisracok published it under the headline “Catfight — The Von der Leyen and Kallas Brawl Foreshadows the End of the EU,” adding a local editorial voice while keeping the core narrative intact. In the Netherlands, Sonja van den Ende—the same author who had written the original Strategic Culture piece—published an expanded Dutch version on Indignatie.nl under the headline “Europe’s Submission to Uncle Sam,” adding anti-American material while keeping the EU disintegration framing at the centre.
* http://www.newsnet.fr/302926
* https://pestisracok.hu/vilagugar/2026/02/cicaharc-von-der-leyen-kallas-balheja-eu-veget
* https://indignatie.nl/europas-onderwerping-aan-uncle-sam/
Van den Ende’s reach across European outlets tells its story. The same author supplied content to at least seven outlets across six countries: Uncutnews in Switzerland, Indignatie in the Netherlands, Krisenfrei and DDBnews in Germany, Infokuryr in the Czech Republic, and the Finnish and Estonian editions of eestieest.com. One author, one original text, seven outlets, and six languages are all served by the same author. That is a distribution network with a house author.
The Finnish publication fi.eestieest.com and the Estonian publication eestieest.com both translated the article in full and published it for audiences in two NATO members on Russia’s immediate border. And the claim at the centre — that Kallas privately called von der Leyen a dictator — was published in Estonian. Kaja Kallas is Estonian. Her standing in her home country, where she is most known and where reputational damage would land hardest, was not an incidental choice of target. That was the point.
* https://fi.eestieest.com/Kuinka-EU-poliitikot-elävät-oman-vihollisensa-kuplassa-eristyneellä-EU-saarellaan/
* https://eestieest.com/kuidas-el-i-poliitikud-elavad-omaenda-vaenlase-mullis-oma-isoleeritud-el-i-saarel/
Looked at separately, each campaign could be explained away. Fringe websites covering a political conference. Some editorial overlap between small alternative outlets. A story about EU leadership tensions that spread across a few countries. Taken alone, the coincidences could be dismissed.
Looking at them together, the picture is different.
The same Slovak sites — News Front SK, Infovojna, Slovanské Noviny, Oral.sk — amplified both campaigns. The same German sites — Krisenfrei, DDBnews — amplified both. These are not outlets that happened to cover two overlapping stories. They are standing relay infrastructure that activates whenever a Russian narrative needs European distribution, regardless of the topic.
The timelines are not coincidental. In the MEGA campaign, RIA Novosti publishes on February 6, News Front follows in six languages the same day, News Pravda follows on February 8, and European proxy sites follow on February 9. In the Kallas and von der Leyen campaign, Strategic Culture publishes on January 31, Russian state media follows on February 1, and European amplifiers follow within 24 to 72 hours. In both cases the direction of travel is always the same — from Moscow outward, not from European civil society inward.
And both campaigns pointed to the same conclusion. The MEGA campaign told European audiences that their leadership is the enemy of real European values and that the Russian-Ukrainian war is a manufactured crisis. The von der Leyen and Kallas campaign told those same audiences that the institution is already tearing itself apart from the inside. Together they constructed a single message: the EU is antidemocratic, isolated, and collapsing.
The question of what should come instead was left carefully unanswered. It did not need to be asked. Sowing the doubt was enough.
Russia weaponizes MEGA and EU rifts in its information operation to spread Union collapse narrative #cybersecurity #infosec
