What changed

B100074/2025

B100076/2025

European Parliament resolution on Russia’s disinformation and historical falsification to justify its war of aggression against Ukraine

The European Parliament,

– having regard to its previous resolutions on Russia’s war of aggressionRussia againstand Ukraine,

– having regard to the Charter of the UnitedUN Nations,Charter,

– having regard to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal CourtHague (ICC),Conventions,

– having regard to the Geneva Conventions,Conventions of 1949 and the additional protocols thereto,

– having regard to the Rome Statute of 1998,

– having regard to Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 19 October 2022 on a Single Market For Digital Services and amending Directive 2000/31/EC (Digital Services Act),

– having regard to Rule 136(2) of its Rules of Procedure,

A. whereas on 24 February 2022 the Russian regime declared the start of a ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine based on false claims that it needed to protect civilians;

A. whereas on 24 February 2022, the Russian Federation launched a continuous and unprecedented assault as part of its unprovoked, unjustified and illegal war of aggression against Ukraine; whereas the Russian aggression against Ukraine started in 2014 with the occupation of parts of the Donbas region and the occupation and annexation of Ukraine’s Autonomous Republic of Crimea;

B. whereas, in fact, since 24 February 2022 the Russian Federation has been carrying out an unprovoked, unjustified and illegal war of aggression against Ukraine, in continuation of previous aggressions since 2014, and continues to persistently violate the principles of the UN Charter through its aggressive actions against the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of Ukraine and to blatantly and grossly violate international humanitarian law, as established by the Geneva Conventions of 1949, in particular with the massive use of targeted attacks against the civilian population and infrastructure;

B. whereas Russia’s forces continue to conduct systematic and indiscriminate attacks against residential areas and civilian infrastructure in Ukraine; whereas heavy and intense bombardments combined with ground fighting continued throughout 2024; whereas waves of Russian attacks on energy infrastructure, disrupting power and water supplies, have seriously limited access to essential services for civilians, healthcare facilities and schools, all with long-term implications;

C. whereas the UN General Assembly, in its resolution of 2 March 2022, immediately qualified Russia’s war against Ukraine as an act of aggression in violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, and, in its resolution of 14 November 2022, it recognised the need to hold the Russian Federation accountable for its war of aggression, as well as legally and financially responsible for its internationally wrongful acts, and that it should pay reparations for the injuries and damage caused;

C. whereas alongside the physical war on the ground where Ukrainian soldiers risk their lives every day for their country’s freedom and independence, Russia is also waging a global war of disinformation in an attempt to justify its heinous crimes against Ukraine and influence discourse about the war in its favour, including by using false historical narratives to delegitimise Ukraine and falsely labelling Ukrainians as Nazis or Nazi sympathisers;

D. whereas the ICC has been conducting an investigation into the situation in Ukraine since 2 March 2022 and on 17 March 2023 it issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, and Maria Lvova-Belova, so-called Commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Office of the President of the Russian Federation, for the war crime of unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children; whereas the ICC has subsequently issued several more arrest warrants against Russian military officers;

D. whereas Vladimir Putin’s regime has developed a campaign based on a parallel universe of European history and uses social media to spread its disinformation; whereas Russia’s campaign of historical falsification demonstrates a pattern, particularly regarding the pre-World War II era; whereas one of the most prominent examples of this historical falsification is Russia’s interpretation of the 1939 German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, commonly referred to as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, justifying its claims to spheres of influence in Europe and promoting the concept of ‘Russkiy mir’, or ‘Russian world’; whereas among the EU Member States, Russia particularly threatens Poland and the Baltic States and their sovereignty on a regular basis through this type of historical revisionism;

E. whereas the start of Russia’s full-scale war of aggression against Ukraine was preceded by several public declarations by the President of the Russian Federation seeking to justify the use of force against neighbouring Ukraine by means of distorted historical arguments;

E. whereas a large part of disinformation comes from more covert online sources, such as networks of bots spreading disinformation and false narratives or paid influencers reproducing disinformation; whereas in June 2024 alone, there were 1 400 fake pro-Russian accounts on X, reaching 4.5 million users;

F. whereas the Russian regime has been making widespread use of disinformation, foreign information manipulation and interference to incite the Russian population to support its illegal regime and illegal war of aggression against neighbouring Ukraine and to reduce the support among the population of foreign countries for continued international assistance and support for Ukraine against Russia’s war of aggression;

F. whereas Russia’s disinformation campaign reaches beyond Ukraine and seeks to destabilise democracies in the EU and divide Europe, be it through social media or corrupt political actors;

1. Reiterates its condemnation, in the strongest terms, of Russia’s unprovoked, illegal and unjustified war of aggression against Ukraine; calls on Russia to immediately terminate all military activities in Ukraine and to completely and unconditionally withdraw all forces, proxies and military equipment from the entire internationally recognised territory of Ukraine, to end its forced deportations of Ukrainian civilians and to release all detained and deported Ukrainians, particularly children;

G. whereas a Moscow-orchestrated campaign used TikTok to influence Romania’s 2024 presidential and parliamentary elections by promoting a far-right candidate through multiple methods, including coordinated accounts, algorithms to boost his presence on the platform and paid promotion; whereas on 5 December 2024, the Commission issued a ‘retention order’ to TikTok under its Digital Services Act (DSA) to preserve evidence ‘related to actual or foreseeable systemic risks its service could pose on electoral processes and civic discourse in the EU’;

2. Rejects the various claims made by the Russian regime as vain attempts to justify an illegal war of aggression that constitutes a blatant violation of the UN Charter and of the responsibility of the Russian Federation as a permanent member of the UN Security Council to maintain peace and stability and that was immediately recognised as such by the other permanent members of the UN Security Council along with an overwhelming majority in the UN General Assembly;

H. whereas the personalised recommender algorithms of social media platforms actively promote and spread content that induces anger, such as disinformation, clickbait and hate content, including Russian disinformation;

3. Condemns the use of distorted historical arguments by the Russian regime in its attempt to manipulate Russian public opinion into supporting criminal actions such as the illegal war of aggression against the neighbouring country Ukraine;

I. whereas Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced a change to Meta’s content review policies on Facebook and Instagram, removing fact-checkers and replacing them with user-generated ‘community notes’, which will clear the way for increased and more successful Russian disinformation; whereas Elon Musk previously made similar changes to his social media platform, X;

4. Welcomes Ukraine’s immediate application against Russia before the International Court of Justice on 26 February 2022 to establish that Russia had no lawful basis to take military action in Ukraine and that its allegations of genocide were unsubstantiated;

J. whereas in December 2024, the Council adopted the EU’s 15th sanctions package of economic and individual restrictive measures against Russia, including specific measures targeting 16 individuals and three entities responsible for Russia’s destabilising actions abroad that are part of its broader international disinformation campaign;

5. Recalls that the deliberate attacks of the Russian Federation on the civilian population of Ukraine, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, the use of torture, sexual violence and rape as weapons of war, the deportation of thousands of Ukrainian citizens to the territory of the Russian Federation, the forced transfer and adoption of Ukrainian children, and other serious violations of international humanitarian law and human rights constitute war crimes for which all perpetrators must be held accountable;

1. Condemns in the strongest possible terms Russia’s continued war of aggression against Ukraine, as well as the involvement of Belarus in this war, and demands that Russia immediately terminate all military activities in Ukraine, unconditionally withdraw all forces and military equipment from the entire internationally recognised territory of Ukraine and compensate Ukraine for the damage caused to its people, land and infrastructure;

6. Reiterates, therefore, its full support for the ongoing investigation by the Prosecutor of the ICC into the situation in Ukraine based on alleged war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide; welcomes Ukraine’s formal membership of the ICC as of 1 January 2025 as an important contribution to international efforts to establish accountability for serious international crimes; calls on the EU to deploy further diplomatic efforts to encourage the ratification of the Rome Statute and all its amendments globally;

2. Expresses its undivided solidarity with the people of Ukraine, fully supports Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity within its internationally recognised borders and underlines that this war constitutes a serious violation of international law; stresses that the ultimate goal remains the achievement of a just and lasting peace in Ukraine on Ukraine’s terms, ensuring the safety and dignity of the Ukrainian people within a peaceful and stable Europe;

7. Furthermore also reiterates its call for the establishment of a special tribunal to investigate and prosecute the crime of aggression committed by the leadership of the Russian Federation against Ukraine; reiterates its call on the Commission, the Council and the European External Action Service to provide all necessary political, financial and practical support necessary for the establishment of a special tribunal; expresses its full support for the International Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression in Ukraine, based in The Hague and supporting the ongoing efforts of the Joint Investigation Team, as a first concrete step towards the establishment of the special tribunal;

3. Condemns Russia’s efforts to produce and promote false historical narratives serving its strategic geopolitical and neo-colonial goals of undermining support for Ukraine, justifying its war of aggression, threatening the statehood of EU Member States and causing division in Europe; expresses concern about the hesitant response to these narratives at both European and Member State level;

8. Urges the EU and its Member States to further increase their efforts to counter Russian disinformation and foreign information manipulation and interference in order to protect the integrity of their democratic processes and to strengthen the resilience of European societies, inter alia by actively promoting media literacy and by supporting quality media and professional journalism, in particular investigative journalism that uncovers Russian propaganda, its methods and networks;

4. Recognises that the suppression of historical archives, attacks on independent research institutions and official endorsements of extremist scholars have contributed to the imperial, colonialist and fascist state narratives in Russia, which also seek to dismantle the EU as a voluntary, open-ended and civic political project; calls for the EU and its Member States not just to counter these false narratives, but to dedicate project funding for researchers, non-governmental organisations and relevant institutions in the context of Europe’s historical, multifaceted, self-reflective memory;

9. Calls5. onWelcomes the EUCommission’s to15th expandsanctions itspackage sanctionsof againsteconomic Russianand mediaindividual outletsrestrictive conductingmeasures disinformationagainst andRussia informationand, manipulationin supportingparticular, andthe justifyingrestrictive Russia’smeasures warin the context of aggressionfighting againstRussia’s Ukrainedisinformation andcampaign; calls onfor the EU and its Member States to allocateswiftly sufficientand resourcesthoroughly implement these sanctions, and for like-minded partners to effectivelyadopt addresssimilar thissanctions; hybridcalls, warfare;further, on the Commission to expand and update similar sanctions in future sanctions packages;

10. Calls on EU citizens to critically evaluate information by questioning its origins and intentions, particularly when it pertains to narratives linked to Russia, and to crosscheck facts using diverse and reliable sources to resist attempts at manipulation by foreign malign actors;

6. Expresses deep concern about the recent announcements from social media companies’ leadership concerning relaxing their rules on fact-checking and moderation and how this will further enable Russia’s disinformation campaign around the world; calls on the Commission and the Member States to strictly enforce the DSA in response to these announcements by Meta and earlier by X, including as an important part of the fight against Russian disinformation;

11. Believes that Russia’s attempts to misrepresent and distort the history of Ukraine may also be interpreted as attempts to undermine the collective memory and identity of Europe as a whole; therefore calls on the Member States to invest more in education on, and research into, the common history of Europe and to support projects that promote a better understanding of the impact of the division of Europe during the Cold War;

7. Calls for stricter transparency for political advertising through the enforcement of the DSA and Regulation (EU) 2024/900 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 March 2024 on the transparency and targeting of political advertising, as well as for action against profit-driven algorithms based on personalisation, clicks and interaction, which amplify hatred and lies over truth; calls on the Commission and the Member States to take measures against recommender systems based on personalisation, clicks and interaction, as they are known in practice to promote disinformation and polarising, shocking content, they are too easy to manipulate, for example through bot networks, and they make European democracies and people directly vulnerable to foreign interference and manipulation, as shown in the recent case of Russian interference via TikTok in Romania’s elections;

12. Instructs its President to forward this resolution to the Vice-President of the Commission / High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, the Council, the Commission, the governments and parliaments of the Member States, the Council of Europe, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and the President, Government and Parliament of Ukraine.

8. Calls on the Commission to explore alternatives such as recommendations based on accounts followed in chronological order, alternative recommender systems that give more control to users and the interoperability of recommender systems; calls on the Commission to proactively research foreign interference and manipulation and promptly sanction sources that are known to be backed by the Russian state;

9. Calls for the EU and the Member States to step up their support for the independent Russian media in exile in order to enable diverse voices in the Russian-language media;

10. Instructs its President to forward this resolution to the Council, the Commission, the Vice-President of the Commission / High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, the governments and parliaments of the Member States, the President, Government and Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine and the Russian authorities.