Nov. 1—Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD) bragged last week that it has co-authored a report with the Information Environment Assessment (IEA) team of NATO’s Public Diplomacy Division. According to the CCD, said report, released Oct. 25 on “Information Threats Targeting NATO’s Support to Ukraine,” is the first such produced by “the [NATO] Alliance in cooperation with a non-member country.” CCD head Andriy Kovalenko boasted, “I am proud that the Center has become the first institution with which NATO is working in this area.”
As EIR has reported, the CCD is the chief “information warfare” unit of the Ukrainian government, tasked with feeding the names of targets to the Ukrainian security apparatus and Ukraine’s “international partners.” These targets have been anyone—both in Ukraine and Russia as well as in Europe and the United States—who has spoken out in favor of peace and an end to the war. The CCD and its operatives have repeatedly labeled such individuals as “information terrorists.”
The CCD broke the news in an Oct. 26 Telegram posting titled “The CCD Deepens Cooperation with NATO.” They write that the joint NATO Public Diplomacy–CCD report had been presented the day before to a meeting of the Strategic Communications Committee of the NATO–Ukraine Council by Kyrylo Viktorov, the CCD’s Deputy Head of its Department of Countering Information Threats to National Security.
Coordination between the CCD and NATO is not new, but producing a joint NATO-CCD report targeting opposition to NATO involvement in the war against Russia signals that a new phase of coordination has begun.
In January 2024, NATO’s European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats produced a report, “How Ukraine Fights Russian Disinformation: Beehive against the Mammoth,” covered in the May 31, 2024 issue of EIR, which argued that European nations and the United States need to replicate the CCD “model” across the board. The report describes the Ukrainian model: the centralized deployment of a vast network of proliferating government-private agencies madly fingering people and networks which dare question NATO or its wars as targets for prosecution and/or physical elimination.
It can be assumed that NATO is now moving to implement that proposal. Such a decision is consistent with the U.S.-UK drive to silence opposition to NATO’s escalating strategic war against Russia which EIR reported in its Oct. 18 issue, “Anglosphere Escalates Censorship To Defend Its Escalation Toward War.”
The NATO-CCD Offensive in Action
No link to the joint CCD-NATO report itself has been made available, but NATO’s webpage on “Setting the Record Straight, Debunking Russian Disinformation on NATO” gives a good idea of how Orwellian NATO’s view of “Russian disinformation” is. Say “NATO is aggressive” or “NATO promised Russia it would not enlarge after the Cold War,” and you are accused of repeating “disinformation campaigns by the Kremlin.”
The CCD has been deployed across the board in recent weeks in its role to elaborate its “model.” On Sept. 30, the CCD briefed journalists and editors of leading media from Italy, Spain, France, Portugal and other EU countries at a meeting co-organized by the Berlin-based Prisma Ukraïna network, whose aim was to increase cooperation with European media in “combating Russian disinformation.” Here, CCD chief Kovalenko again emphasized the need for acting “proactively” against the “harmful informational influence of the aggressor state abroad.”
On Oct. 17, the CCD’s top two officials, Kovalenko and his Deputy Anayit Khoperiya, were interviewed by RAND Corporation representatives about the CCD’s work. The CCD reported that the interview was for a congressionally-mandated report commissioned by the U.S. Secretary of Defense on “the information war waged by Russia against Ukraine” which RAND is preparing, in which it has to “assess the counter-disinformation operations conducted by the United States, NATO, and Ukraine.” Khoperiya in particular “highlighted the significance of international cooperation and the exchange of expertise between partner countries in the fight against disinformation,” the CCD reported.
At the end of October, the CCD teamed up with the Swedish Psychological Defence Agency (a cognitive warfare outfit as creepy as its name implies) to run a four-day “training seminar” for Ukrainian civil servants on “Countering FIMI”—the absurd acronym Western intelligence agencies invented for so-called “Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference.” Two members of the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s “Information Threat Analysis Cell” joined a team from the Swedish cognitive warfare unit and a researcher from the Swedish government’s RISE Research Institutes to instruct the poor Ukrainian public officials on “the latest approaches to analyzing informational threats and practical tools to counter FIMI.”
Coming Next: Ending Freedom of Religion
Freedom of religion has already been eliminated inside Ukraine. A relentless, year-long campaign of social, legal and physical intimidation against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church–Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP), the largest religious denomination in Ukraine with a history of more than 1,000 years, culminated on August 20, 2024, when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed the law which effectively banned the church in Ukraine outright. London-based Molfar OSINT, an official partner of the CCD, had contributed to the campaign by posting a list of the church’s top clerics, with photographs and information on where to locate them, on its “Enemies of Ukraine” page (alongside its list of Western “Kremlin propagandists”).
The charge against the UOC-MP was that it was an instrument of the Russian Orthodox Church, which, in turn, is labeled as a key part of “the Russian Empire” that is to be destroyed. The CCD issued a report in August 2024, “Holy War: Military Activities of the ROC,” which designated Russia’s leading church as an instrument of Russia’s military, not a religious body. The obvious implication of the report is that the Russian Orthodox Church should be sanctioned and banned internationally.
At the end of September, the CCD escalated its campaign against the Russian Orthodox Church, presenting that report to the two-day European Disinformation Workshop, organized by the EU’s Joint Research Center (JRC) in Ispra, Italy Sept. 25-26. Attendance at the hybrid (in person and online) workshop was by invitation only, and EIR has yet to find any report on what transpired there other than what the CCD reported on its own role. Its Deputy Head, Khoperiya, participated in a panel discussion titled “Addressing Disinformation as a Security Threat Outside the European Union,” where she presented the Center’s “Holy War” report, and identified the Russian Orthodox Church as one of the ways that “the Russian Federation is trying to increase support for its aggressive actions among the domestic and international audience.”
The CCD concluded its short report on this intervention with the following threat:
During the discussion of the speech, the participants of the event emphasized the importance of studying religious propaganda and its impact on international security.
Making such a statement in Italy, home to the Vatican where the Pope has been outspoken in calling for immediate peace negotiations, cannot be taken lightly.
