OPINION: Russia is flooding Europe with disinformation. The U.S. elections are next.

In 2022, European monitors who track Russian disinformation spotted an ambitious online influence operation they called Doppelganger. The Moscow-run effort cloned the websites of legitimate newspapers, magazines and news services, including Britain’s Guardian and Germany’s Bild, posted replicas under similar domain names and filled them with Kremlin propaganda.

The campaign was not shocking, given Russia’s kitchen-sink efforts to manipulate Western public opinion. More surprising is that, at least two years after they were detected, Doppelganger’s phony sites continue popping up around the internet like mushrooms after a cloudburst, despite ongoing efforts to close them down.

The sites’ persistence reflects the flood of Russian interference — and the near-impossibility of monitoring it, let alone stopping it — ahead of elections next month for the European Parliament. They’re also a foretaste of what Americans can expect in the fall’s presidential contest, in which Moscow will try to amplify the venomous clamor of U.S. politics.

Social media has made the distribution of disinformation and propaganda almost free. Now generative AI has slashed the cost of producing it in the run-up to the E.U. parliamentary voting between June 6 and 9, when some 200 million voters across the bloc’s 27 member states are expected at the polls.

The barrage of disinformation, manipulation and malice is ubiquitous. A website impersonating France’s Defense Ministry announced 200,000 French recruits would be sought for service in Ukraine. A well-known German broadcast journalist known as “the Putin connoisseur,” and sympathetic to Moscow, was revealed to have been paid more than $600,000 by a Russian billionaire allied with the Kremlin. Belgian, Polish and Czech authorities say they have uncovered evidence that the Kremlin was greasing the palms of European parliamentarians.

Previous elections have taken place amid the toxic torrent of Russian meddling. What’s different this year is the war in Ukraine has raised the stakes for Vladimir Putin — and the possible payoff, in terms of subverting Western backing for Kyiv.

“The motivation is clear, and there’s no real fear of being caught,” Bret Schafer, who studies Russian disinformation for the German Marshall Fund of the United States, told me. “What are we going to do, sanction them? That’s already happened.”

The European ballot will not yield ironclad evidence that Russian scheming has tilted the vote against mainstream parties, or strengthened ones sympathetic to Moscow and opposed to further Western backing for Ukraine. Polls forecast those blocs, especially on the populist right, will make gains, but it will be impossible to say how far Moscow’s mischief moved the needle.

But as a trial run for the U.S. elections this fall, and a test of democratic accountability, the E.U. elections are already raising red flags. Specifically, they are laying bare the barriers facing governments, academics and civic groups in discovering what Russia is up to.

Those officials and groups are largely dependent on tech companies, especially social media behemoths including X, formerly Twitter, and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, to spot Moscow’s online handiwork.

But despite a new E.U. law intended to ensure that tech giants are transparent and vigilant, the signs so far are that government agencies and civil society groups are not getting the information they need to assess Russia’s disinformation and interference.

Last month, E.U. officials opened investigations into Facebook and Instagram — on top of an existing probe of X — on suspicions they are not meeting their obligation to contain the metastasis of lies and manipulation. Those rules took effect this year under the bloc’s new Digital Services Act; failing to obey them could mean stiff fines.

Both X and Meta have been narrowing data access for scholars and civic groups, whose vigilance is key to tracking the scale and shape of Moscow’s machinations. Increasingly, that means the West is flying blind to Russia’s online predations.

Under Elon Musk’s ownership, X last year began charging more than $40,000 monthly for data access to accounts and posts that were free before the platform’s rebranding. That sum is beyond the means of most academics, researchers and nongovernmental groups. Meta has also announced it will shutter its own data-tracking tool, known as CrowdTangle, which has provided analysts with critical insights.

Alexandre Alaphilippe, executive director of the EU DisinfoLab, the civil society group that revealed the Doppelganger operation’s existence, told me its resilience and persistence, even after being exposed, is a worrying sign.

The question, Alaphilippe said, isn’t whether Russia is winning the propaganda war in Europe. “It’s whether democracy is up to the challenge of holding everyone accountable. Do we have the democratic safeguards?”

If the answer in Europe is no - which looks increasingly likely - then the picture will look even grimmer elsewhere. Especially in the United States, where dysfunctional politics and First Amendment safeguards make monitoring Russian mischief even harder.

Lee Hockstader has been the Washington Post’s European Affairs columnist, based in Paris, since 2023. Previously he was a member of the Post editorial board, a national correspondent, a foreign correspondent and a local reporter.

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