In recent days a chart from the GLOBSEC Trends survey has been circulating again on social media: it shows that 85 per cent of Poles, 71 per cent of Czechs and 40 per cent of Slovaks blame Russia for the war in Ukraine. The figures date from spring 2023. The chart has resurfaced at a time when the Slovak prime minister, Robert Fico, claims that part of the West wants to provoke a war between NATO and Russia.
More recent data show where Kremlin propaganda works today. According to the spring 2026 Eurobarometer, 46 per cent of Bulgarians, 27 per cent of Slovaks and 15 per cent of Czechs have a positive view of Russia. These differences match how resilient individual societies are to disinformation. Czechia stands out elsewhere: two thirds of Czechs support sanctions against Russia, but fewer than a third support funding weapons for Ukraine.
Our sources: attitudes towards Russia, sanctions and disinformation across the EU come from the Standard Eurobarometer 105 of spring 2026 (26,415 respondents). The resilience of societies to disinformation is assessed by the Media Literacy Index 2026 of the Open Society Institute in Sofia. Czech and Slovak data are supplemented by the polling agencies STEM (Czechia) and Focus (Slovakia); blame for the war in Central and Eastern Europe is measured by the GLOBSEC Trends survey (1,000 respondents in each country). Sections are ordered from the most recent surveys to the oldest. Where sources differ, we give both.
Russian influence in numbers
−0.79
correlation between resilience to disinformation and a favourable view of RussiaThe lower a country ranks in the Media Literacy Index 2026, the more people there have a positive view of Russia.
32%
of Czechs support funding weapons for Ukraine65 per cent support sanctions against Russia. No other EU country shows such a gap between the two measures.
20%
of Slovaks would leave the European Union24 per cent would leave NATO. Yet roughly half of Slovaks accept the Kremlin's account of the war.
Where people are less resilient to disinformation, they think better of Russia
Across the European Union, 14 per cent of people have a positive view of Russia. But the differences between countries are huge. According to Eurobarometer, 46 per cent of Bulgarians, 45 per cent of Cypriots and 40 per cent of Greeks see Russia positively. In Slovakia the figure is 27 per cent, in Hungary 26, in Czechia 15. In Finland and Denmark it is 2 per cent.
These differences closely match how resilient individual societies are to disinformation. The Media Literacy Index 2026 builds each country's score from the quality of education (PISA test results), media freedom, trust between people and how people use the state's digital services. Denmark, Finland, Ireland and the Netherlands top the index with 71 points out of 100. Last in the EU is Bulgaria with 32 points, just behind Cyprus, Romania and Greece.
The correlation coefficient between the two figures is −0.79. The lower a country ranks in the index, the more people there view Russia positively. The chart does not say that low media literacy in itself produces sympathy for Russia. Both figures also reflect history, the Orthodox tradition, energy dependence, and politicians who legitimise Russian arguments. But it does show where propaganda has the easiest job: where education is weaker, the media are less free and trust between people is low.
Two exceptions sit above the curve. Estonia has one of the best index scores in the EU, and yet a fifth of its population has a positive view of Russia – the country has a large Russian-speaking minority. Austria scores 61 points in the index, and 23 per cent of people there see Russia positively, more than in Czechia or Germany.
Czechia lies on the curve: 59 points in the index, tenth place in the EU. One Czech figure from Eurobarometer, however, stands out. Across the EU, 87 per cent of people believe that the rapid spread of disinformation is a major problem for democracy – but only 64 per cent of Czechs. That is the lowest of all 27 countries; next come Romania with 76 and Portugal with 79 per cent.
Yet Czechs do encounter disinformation. 65 per cent of them say they come across it often, similar to Germans or Bulgarians. In Slovakia the figure is 84 per cent, in Hungary 86. Czechs see disinformation, but they regard it as a threat less often than anyone else in the EU.
The finding makes sense alongside what the European External Action Service described in its fourth report on foreign information manipulation from March 2026. Ahead of the Czech parliamentary elections in autumn 2025, it recorded "hundreds of anonymous TikTok accounts" spreading manipulative content.
Two thirds of Czechs support sanctions, fewer than a third support weapons for Ukraine
Support for specific EU measures also shows where propaganda works. Economic sanctions against Russia are supported by 70 per cent of EU citizens, funding weapons for Ukraine by 56 per cent. In Czechia the two figures are further apart than anywhere else in the EU: 65 per cent of Czechs want sanctions, 32 per cent want weapons.
Only Bulgarians, Greeks and Cypriots support weapons for Ukraine less. Ukraine's candidate status in the European Union is supported by 29 per cent of Czechs, the lowest in the entire EU of 27.
Sentiment is shifting fastest in Slovakia. Compared with autumn 2025, support for sanctions there fell by ten points to 58 per cent, support for weapons by nine points to 35 per cent, and support for Ukraine's candidate status by 19 points to 39 per cent. The 19-point drop in support for candidate status is the largest in the EU.
Czechs increasingly reject Russians, Slovaks see Russia as a threat less often
Attitudes towards Russians as people are worsening in Czechia. According to STEM, in January 2026 32 per cent of Czechs would accept a Russian as a neighbour. In 2016 it was half.
According to a STEM survey from June 2025, roughly two thirds of Czechs believe that Russia is clearly to blame for the war; in 2022 it was about 75 per cent. The claim that NATO provoked the conflict is accepted by roughly three in ten Czechs.
Slovakia also differs from Czechia in how people perceive Russia itself. According to GLOBSEC, in 2025 half of Slovaks considered it a security threat, compared with 74 per cent in Czechia and 86 per cent in Poland. 32 per cent of Slovaks regard Russia as a strategic partner, five points more than a year earlier. Meanwhile, 35 per cent of Slovaks described the United States as a threat, the highest share in the region.
Fico speaks a language that half of Slovaks agree with
On Saturday 19 September 2026, the Slovak prime minister, Robert Fico, published a video on Facebook in which, according to the Slovak news agency TASR, he declared that the failure of the strategy to destroy Russia through the war in Ukraine is leading more Western politicians to believe that, if it cannot be done through the Ukrainian army, everything must be done to provoke a conflict between NATO and Russia. "For more than four years the West has been pouring oil on the fire in Ukraine, unsuccessfully," he said. He added: "Under my government, no one will send Slovak soldiers outside Slovakia's territory on an invented pretext to fight against Russia or any other country." In the same video, according to the Slovak daily SME, he acknowledged that on Russia's part the war is a violation of international law.
In this way Fico is speaking to voters who already hold similar views. In GLOBSEC surveys from 2023 and 2024, roughly 51 per cent of Slovaks blamed the West or Ukraine for the war. The same voters have for years been targeted by the far-right party Republika, the Slovak National Party of Andrej Danko and the former justice minister Štefan Harabin, together with a whole ecosystem of pro-Kremlin websites and Facebook pages.
At the same time, there is a line most Slovaks will not cross. In a July 2025 survey by the Focus agency, 69 per cent of Slovaks wanted to remain in the European Union and 65 per cent in NATO. 20 per cent were in favour of leaving the EU, 24 per cent of leaving NATO. There were more in 2023, just before the election that returned Fico to the head of government: at that time, according to GLOBSEC, 28 per cent of Slovaks wanted to leave the EU and 33 per cent NATO.
Between the half of Slovaks who repeat the Kremlin's account of the war and the fifth to a quarter who want to leave the West, there is therefore roughly a quarter of society. These people accept the Russian version of who is to blame for the war, but they do not want to leave the European Union and NATO. Propaganda has not fully convinced them, and this is a group that politicians with a Western orientation can also compete for.
Where the will to leave is genuinely strong is shown by the supporters of particular parties. Among supporters of the Slovak National Party, 69 per cent want to leave the EU and 76 per cent NATO. Among Republika voters, the figures are 51 and 59 per cent respectively. The SNS has been part of Fico's government since 2023.
Russia's Pravda network produces millions of articles a year, read mainly by machines
People's attitudes are one side. The other is the infrastructure Russia is building to influence them. In February 2024 the French agency Viginum described the Portal Kombat network of 193 websites that republish and translate content from Russian state media and pro-Kremlin Telegram channels. It is run by TigerWeb, a company based in occupied Crimea.
By April 2024 the network had grown to 224 portals. Among the 31 newly registered domains were pravda-cz[.]com and pravda-sk[.]com, both created on 20 March 2024. Since then the network has covered almost all EU member states except Luxembourg and Malta.
Voice of Europe: a case uncovered in Prague
In March 2024, on the basis of findings by BIS, the Czech counter-intelligence service, the Czech government imposed sanctions on the Voice of Europe website and on the pro-Russian politicians Viktor Medvedchuk and Artem Marchevskyi. According to BIS, hundreds of thousands of euros passed through the website to politicians from six EU countries ahead of the European Parliament elections. In May 2024 the EU then banned the broadcasting of Voice of Europe and three Russian state media outlets. The German MEP Petr Bystron (AfD), suspected of accepting money in Prague, was stripped of his immunity in May 2025. He denies the allegations.
According to an overview by DFRLab researchers, by April 2025 the network had published more than 3.7 million articles. It targeted France (394,000 articles) and Germany (377,000) the most. Traffic to its websites, however, is negligible. The network writes mainly for search engines and AI language models. In February 2025 the American organisation American Sunlight Project coined the term "LLM grooming" for this – the deliberate contamination of the data on which AI is trained.
It works. In March 2025 the company NewsGuard tested ten chatbots and found that they repeated Pravda network narratives in 33 per cent of their answers. Links to Pravda websites appeared in 44 language editions of Wikipedia, more than 1,900 in total. And by November 2025 the Common Crawl dataset, on which large language models are trained, contained around 40,000 English-language articles from the network. A year earlier there were 37.
A second major operation, called Doppelganger, imitates the websites of real European media and spreads fake articles on them. It was uncovered in September 2022, when Meta removed more than 1,600 fake accounts on Facebook. A year later the German Foreign Office counted some 50,000 fake accounts on X which, in one month from December 2023 to January 2024, published more than a million posts in German. Behind the campaign are the Moscow-based companies Social Design Agency and Structura. The EU imposed sanctions on them in July 2023, and in September 2024 the US Department of Justice seized 32 of their domains.
Ahead of the German election in February 2025, the CORRECTIV newsroom uncovered 102 fake news websites in German linked to the Storm-1516 operation. In December 2025 the German foreign intelligence service, the BND, officially attributed it to Russia.
Romania and Moldova have shown that elections can be influenced too
Russian influence has so far gone furthest in Romania. In November 2024 the far-right candidate Călin Georgescu unexpectedly won the first round of the presidential election with 22.94 per cent of the vote. Romania's Supreme Council of National Defence then declassified documents according to which some 25,000 TikTok accounts were activated two weeks before the vote. On 6 December 2024 the Constitutional Court annulled the election. However, according to findings by the Romanian tax authority, reported by the investigative outlet Snoop, part of the campaign was paid for by the governing National Liberal Party, and its hashtag was then taken over by Georgescu's supporters.
In neighbouring Moldova, the October 2024 referendum on enshrining the country's European path in the constitution passed by a hair's breadth, with 50.35 per cent of the vote. Moldovan police claim that the network of the fugitive oligarch Ilan Shor sent 39 million dollars to voters via the Russian bank Promsvyazbank. In the parliamentary elections of September 2025, the pro-European PAS party retained its majority with 50.2 per cent of the vote.
Since 2022 the European Union has gradually banned the broadcasting of RT and Sputnik and other Russian state and pro-Kremlin media. Since April 2026 the ban has also applied to their "mirror" websites. By the end of September 2026 the EUvsDisinfo database had recorded more than 19,800 cases of pro-Kremlin disinformation.
The 2023 chart: in Slovakia and Bulgaria, fewer than half of people blamed Russia for the war
The war in Ukraine is mainly the fault of Russia, which attacked Ukraine. That was the answer chosen in the GLOBSEC Trends 2023 survey by 85 per cent of Poles, 71 per cent of Czechs – and 40 per cent of Slovaks. Another 34 per cent of Slovaks blamed the West, which supposedly "provoked" Russia, and 17 per cent blamed Ukraine, which allegedly oppressed its Russian-speaking population. In total, 51 per cent of people in Slovakia thus repeated the Kremlin's account of the war. In none of the eight Central and Eastern European countries surveyed was the figure higher.
The differences between neighbours are greater than their shared history would suggest. Poland, Lithuania and Latvia have experienced Russian occupation, and three quarters of people or more there blamed Russia for the war. Czechia, with 71 per cent, is just behind them. Then the curve breaks: Romania 65 per cent, Hungary 54, Bulgaria 44 and Slovakia 40.
The chart shows the situation in spring 2023, the last time GLOBSEC published the same question for all eight countries at once. More recent figures for individual countries point to stability rather than a turning point. In Czechia, 68 per cent of people blamed Russia in 2024, in Hungary 55 per cent. Romania moved significantly: the share of people blaming Russia fell there by ten points in a year, to 55 per cent.
As recently as spring 2022, a few weeks after the start of the invasion, 51 per cent of Slovaks blamed Russia. Within a year the share dropped by 11 points and has not recovered since. In 2024, 41 per cent of Slovaks blamed Russia, the lowest in the region. In Bulgaria it was 44 per cent, the same as in 2023.
