media

“How Do Democracies Win?” was the main theme of this year\'s edition of Freedom Games, an annual prestigious forum of ideas organized in Lodz, Poland. Needless to say, the title of the forum is a question uneasy to answer. I would also not dare to provide a straight-forward answer to it.

The democratic transition in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) at the very end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s resulted in essential social changes. After the fall of Communism, certainty has disappeared from the everyday life of ordinary people.

With the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc in 1989, transformation has started. The countries such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria changed their political vector from the East to the West. Political and economic changes were done fast – to a greater or less successful degree.

The fact that the Polish public TV is the biggest fake news factory in the country has been well known for some time. But the news about the Ministry of Justice becoming a national center of hate speech truly electrified Poland in July.

There is a new hope for internet users: The troops of elves countering the internet trolls have proliferated in yet another country - the regional leader in countering malicious foreign influences: the Czech Republic.

During the EP election campaign, Political Capital and its three partners found out that both official Kremlin-backed portals (RT and Sputnik) and local pro-Kremlin media supported the campaigns of Eurosceptic parties by only describing their policy recommendations positively and exaggerating their chances in the EP elections1. Eurosceptic groups failed to achieve any kind of breakthrough […]

The street protests that have started in Tbilisi on June 20, 2019, became a direct result of the mistakes of Georgian officials and a brazen behavior of a Russian politician. The majority of Georgian people thinks that, first, Russia is dangerous and, second, we cannot be partners of Russia, and instead need more integration with Europe and NATO.

The Kremlin has used massive disinformation efforts, among others, to interfere in democratic processes across the West in the past few years. Consequently, the 2019 EP elections were always treated as potential targets for Russia, which was acknowledged by European institutions well in advance.

After the presidential election in March 2019, won by the pro-European candidate Zuzana Čaputová, the designated archenemy of pro-Russian and conspiratorial media, the European elections became the main issue in public and political discourses.

in March 2019, the editor-in-chief of Sputnik CZ, Sofija Ovanes, presented the work of her website publicly at a meeting in the Russian Center of Science and Culture in Prague. According to Mrs. Ovanes, ten people work in the editorial office of the Czech version of the website, which is based in Moscow.