Let’s be honest: the story sounded amazing. Ukrainian drones flew deep into Russian territory and struck a major Yandex data center, and almost right away, a sharp line on Cloudflare’s charts showed automated traffic from Yandex’s network plummeting. Within hours, social media was buzzing with a very tempting conclusion: Ukrainian bombs had just crippled the Russian troll farms. Some personalities online claimed this was proof that Kremlin-backed disinformation networks were paralyzed. Some users said they had personally seen fewer suspicious posts on X, Facebook, and other social networks. Politicians and historians began speculating that the impact could be felt in…

On the edge of Helsinki, there is a building that doesn’t look like a war room. Yet inside, a quiet battle is being fought around the clock. This is the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats—the Hybrid CoE—a unique international hub created in 2017, in direct response to the unsettling new realities that emerged after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the wave of election interference that followed. It now includes 35 partner countries, and Austria has been part of it since 2018. Last August, Austria’s foreign minister, Beate Meinl-Reisinger, visited the centre, and what she saw there clearly…