Tomasz Chłoń, Poland’s special envoy for countering disinformation, recently sounded a serious alarm regarding how the Kremlin is weaponizing artificial intelligence to wage a sophisticated information war against the West. As someone who has served as a diplomat across NATO, Estonia, and Slovakia, Chłoń understands that while the goals—destabilizing Western unity—remain the same as they were during the Cold War, the tools have become far more dangerous. He explains that Russian operations follow a calculated “marination” process: they plant toxic narratives in obscure, fringe corners of the internet and systematically amplify them until they seep into the bloodstream of mainstream public debate.
The most unsettling evolution in this strategy is the deliberate manipulation of the large language models (LLMs) that power the chatbots and search engines we use every day. Chłoń warns that these AI tools have become a new battlefield. Because these systems learn from massive datasets scraped from the internet, the Russians are effectively “poisoning the well” by flooding the web with false, Kremlin-friendly content. As a result, when an average user asks a chatbot a question, the AI may inadvertently serve up skewed, pro-Russian propaganda. It is an invisible form of digital gaslighting that turns our most relied-upon information tools against us.
Poland sits at the epicenter of this struggle, serving as a primary target for Moscow due to its unwavering support for Ukraine and its pivotal role as a security anchor on NATO’s eastern flank. The impact of this psychological warfare is measurable; recent polling shows a decline in public support for Ukraine in Poland, dropping significantly from the height of the 2022 invasion. Chłoń points out that this is no accident. Disinformation is crafted with surgical precision to exploit deep-seated human emotions, specifically our fears and grievances, with the ultimate goal of fracturing society and undermining the political will to help our neighbors.
One of the most frustrating aspects of this battle, according to Chłoń, is the difficulty of getting the truth to stick. While disinformation campaigns can be deployed cheaply and virally, positive facts are often ignored. For instance, data shows that Ukrainian workers and businesses contribute significantly more to the Polish economy than they receive in aid, and that many Polish industries would face collapse without their labor. Despite these objective truths, communicating them is like shouting into a hurricane. The emotionally charged lies about the war are simply louder and more “sticky” than the complicated, dry reality of economic contribution.
The operational reality of countering this is equally grim. Chłoń highlights that disinformation is the ultimate “asymmetric weapon”—it is incredibly cheap, hard to trace, and remarkably effective compared to the high costs and risks associated with conventional military action or physical sabotage. Meanwhile, the platforms tasked with gatekeeping this information—the social media giants—are failing to keep up. Reports suggest that these companies act on less than 15 percent of reported violations, and the bureaucratic process for flagging content is so intentionally Kafkaesque that it could take a professional team months just to report a single cluster of bad actors.
Moving forward, Chłoń argues that Europe needs a radical shift in how it prioritizes its security budget. While EU nations are pouring massive amounts of funding into conventional hardware and missiles, we are severely under-investing in the digital defense needed to protect the public mind. He suggests that we need to pivot toward stronger support for the civil society groups tasked with monitoring these lies and perhaps even using fines levied against non-compliant tech platforms to fund the defense of our information ecosystem. We are currently losing the war for the truth, not because the facts are missing, but because we aren’t yet willing to invest the resources required to protect the space where those facts are debated.