The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, long a target of the Kremlin’s information operations, is being flooded with disinformation from Moscow amid the invasion of Ukraine launched on February 24. Prior to the war, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin gave a lengthy history lesson in his televised speech, claiming that Ukraine was created by Bolshevik Russia, and that it should not exist as an autonomous nation. This conflict has already taken an immense human toll and triggered the largest intra-European refugee crisis since the Second World War. And yet the human impact of the war, the full implications of which remain to be seen, extends beyond the physical world into the virtual realm. As missiles strike Ukrainian cities, a parallel war is being fought online — not only in Russia and Ukraine, but around the world, as the Russian state strives to disseminate its messaging. On the home front, Putin has successfully quarantined his people within an information vacuum through unprecedented crackdowns. In addition to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, the Kremlin has blocked access to the most popular independent media outlets, forcing hundreds of journalists to flee the country. In response, EU officials have banned content from the Russian-state-owned media outlets Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik across the European Union.
