On a damp February morning in Vilnius, the kind where low clouds rest on the red rooftops of the old town, a group of organizers and researchers had gathered to put the final touches on what was meant to be the most important counter-disinformation event of the year. The conference, called Disinfo 2026, had been planned for months with the kind of meticulous optimism that defines the Baltics: Lithuanian ministries had booked rooms, EU parliamentary aides had confirmed attendance, American independent analysts had submitted papers, and a small army of volunteers had rehearsed how to escort visiting experts through a…

The quiet panic that always accompanies the word “plague” is not hard to understand. Few diseases carry such historical weight, such an almost mythical ability to terrify the human imagination. In Siberia, that fear has collided with a story that is still shrouded in confusion, contradiction, and silence. When news emerged that a young laboratory technician had died in the Irkutsk region, after allegedly working with plague bacteria at a research institute, the world held its breath. Then came whispers of a second suspected case, a colleague with pneumonia of an undetermined cause, and suddenly this was not merely a…