Russian leaders and propagandists have at once denied the existence of a Ukrainian nation and called for purging or cleansing the Ukrainian territory, in terms that often mirror rhetoric preceding past genocides. In this report, the authors seek to shed light on how Russia’s extremist, hate-peddling narratives deployed in the war have spread online through social media.

Russian propaganda is making inroads into some of the major European languages—Spanish and German, as well as French and Italian.

REMVE narratives are also finding more-receptive audiences among relatively small linguistic communities in Eastern Europe. Serbian- and Bulgarian-language communities emerge as particularly vulnerable to cross-language and cross-cultural transmission of REMVE messages on both X and Telegram.

However, Russia’s ability to successfully mainstream its propaganda and mobilize its audiences against Ukrainians is limited: The most virulent REMVE conversations on these two platforms remain highly Russian-language dominated, are concentrated in specific communities, and do not draw much attention from others in the networks.

Full research report: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RRA3400/RRA3450-1/RAND_RRA3450-1.pdf