EUROPE–RUSSIA — Russia Has a Story. Does Europe?

Can an open democratic Europe build narrative strength without sacrificing the openness it exists to defend?

R.M. Westerink; 24 August 2026 

The Question Left by Russia

The first article in this series examined how Russia built an information and meaning environment capable of connecting history, identity, security, sacrifice and national purpose.[A] Its importance is not that every Russian believes every Kremlin claim. It is that the state has developed the capacity to place events inside a persistent story: Russia is a great civilization, repeatedly threatened from outside, entitled to defend its historical space, and strong enough to endure the costs imposed by its enemies.

That helps explain an aspect of the war that has repeatedly surprised Western observers. Military losses, sanctions, economic distortion and international isolation have imposed real costs, but those costs have not automatically translated into political breakdown. Material pressure enters a narrative environment that can reinterpret hardship as evidence of external hostility and endurance as evidence of national strength.

For Europe, this raises an uncomfortable strategic question. We have invested heavily in weapons, sanctions, intelligence, energy security and support for Ukraine. We have also developed increasingly sophisticated capabilities to detect and counter foreign information manipulation and interference. The European External Action Service now describes FIMI as a growing security and foreign-policy threat and has expanded monitoring, early warning and coordinated responses since the first EU efforts against Russian disinformation began in 2015 [1].

Those are necessary defenses. But defense against somebody else's story is not the same thing as possessing a story of our own.

Europe Is Not Without a Story

It would be wrong to conclude that Europe lacks values or a recognizable political identity. The European project is built around a substantial inheritance: personal freedom, democratic participation, equality before the law, protection against arbitrary power, social solidarity, freedom to be different, peaceful resolution of disputes, and the conviction that political power should be constrained by rules.

Our recent WE ARE EUROPE series explored these values from the citizen's perspective.[D] They are not merely institutional slogans. They describe much of the environment Europeans have gradually come to expect: governments can be replaced without violence; courts can rule against the state; citizens may criticize leaders; minorities retain rights; borders between member states are not settled by force; and political disagreement is managed through institutions rather than through permanent existential struggle.

Europe therefore has raw narrative material at least as substantial as Russia's. Its weakness lies elsewhere. We rarely connect these elements into a strategic account of who we are, what we are protecting, what future we are trying to build, and why that future should matter beyond the European Union itself.

Russia has been much more deliberate. Its narrative joins past, present and future. Europe often communicates in fragments: a regulation here, a sanctions package there, a defense initiative, an enlargement decision, a speech about values. Each may be justified on its own terms, yet the larger meaning can remain implicit.

The problem, then, is not that Europe has no story. It is that Europe has not developed comparable narrative capacity.

The Democratic Paradox

At this point the comparison with Russia reaches its limit. Europe cannot simply imitate the Russian model. Nor should it want to.

Russia can centralize narratives because political authority, major media, education, cultural institutions and coercive power can be aligned from above. European democracies are deliberately different. Governments change. Media compete. Universities challenge authority. Citizens are free to reject official interpretations. Twenty-seven member states bring different histories and political cultures into the Union.

That apparent weakness is also the substance of what Europe exists to protect.

The strategic challenge is therefore not: How can Europe manufacture one official story and make people believe it? It is almost the opposite: Can Europe create enough narrative coherence to defend an open society without turning openness into managed opinion?

The answer requires a distinction between narrative control and narrative capacity. Control seeks to determine what people may believe. Capacity ensures that a society can explain itself, expose manipulation, make credible information available, connect policies to purpose and sustain its own account of the future.

Europe does not need a Ministry of Truth. It needs the capacity to make its democratic story visible, intelligible and difficult to drown out.

The Minimum European Approach: Defend the Democratic Information Space

Europe has already begun building parts of this capability. The EEAS has moved from monitoring disinformation toward a more operational response model, including situational awareness, early warning, cooperation with member states and partners, and support for media and societal resilience [1][2]. The European Democracy Shield similarly emphasizes a whole-of-society approach, stronger detection and response, media freedom and pluralism, and citizens' ability to form and express opinions freely [3].

The European Parliament has also explicitly identified Russian historical revisionism and information manipulation as instruments used both to justify aggression against Ukraine and to influence democratic processes abroad. Its response has emphasized media literacy, quality journalism, research, education and coordinated action against foreign interference [4].

These measures point toward a democratic minimum. Europe must be able to identify hostile manipulation, expose the infrastructure behind it, protect elections and independent media, improve citizens' ability to recognize manipulation, and respond quickly when foreign actors deliberately exploit the openness of European societies.

But a defensive architecture has an inherent limitation. If Europe's information policy is defined primarily by what Russia says, Russia continues to choose the subject. Europe becomes the fact-checker of somebody else's strategic narrative.

A durable democratic capability must therefore do more than rebut falsehoods. It must make Europe's own proposition understandable.

From Defense to Confidence

This is where an earlier Europe Is Us argument—Europe needs a strategy of confidence—becomes important.[C] Democratic societies are strongest when they do not communicate as frightened systems permanently reacting to threats. They need to show that the political order they defend is not merely less dangerous than the alternative, but positively worth belonging to.

That does not require pretending that Europe is harmonious, efficient or morally superior. The European Union is slow, argumentative and incomplete. Its governments disagree. Its institutions make mistakes. Citizens are often frustrated with them. A credible European narrative should acknowledge those realities rather than conceal them.

Its confidence can come from a different claim: disagreement does not invalidate the system. It demonstrates what the system permits. Europeans can oppose their governments, organize politically, investigate corruption, change laws, criticize the Union itself and still remain participants in the common political space.

That is a powerful contrast with the Russian proposition. Europe need not tell citizens that history guarantees its success. It can tell them that they retain agency over the future.

The Offensive Question

Once that distinction is made, a more ambitious possibility appears. European strategic communication need not stop at protecting Europeans from Russian narratives.
Europe can also communicate directly to Russians.

The purpose would not be to persuade Russians to become Europeans, to humiliate Russia, or to prescribe a post-Putin political order. Nor should Europe mirror the Kremlin by trying to manipulate another population into obedience.

The proposition can be much simpler: Russian citizens are entitled to encounter alternatives.

They are entitled to know that Europe does not require a weak, fragmented or culturally erased Russia. They are entitled to hear that security does not require permanent confrontation; that national dignity is compatible with peaceful borders; that Russians and Ukrainians do not need to be enemies for either people to possess an independent political future; and that ordinary Russians could eventually have a relationship with Europe based on travel, trade, cultural exchange, security and mutual respect rather than mobilization against an external enemy.

The WE ARE EUROPE values make this proposition more concrete.[D] Freedom to live one's own life, equality before the law, protection against arbitrary power, freedom to be different and the peaceful resolution of political disagreement are not ethnic European possessions. They are choices about how human beings may live together. There is no reason to assume Russian citizens have less claim to encounter or consider them.

This is the central insight behind our earlier Beyond Russky Mir argument.[B] Europe does not need to defeat one civilizational mythology with another. It can widen the horizon beyond the mythology itself.

Why the Offensive Approach May Be Easier

Paradoxically, this outward-facing task may be easier for Europe than constructing a tightly coordinated internal narrative.

Inside the European Union, any common story must coexist with twenty-seven political systems, many languages, national histories, party competition and constant public contestation. That complexity is unavoidable. Toward Russian audiences, however, Europe does not need agreement on every European policy. It needs only a limited and credible proposition about the relationship it is prepared to offer.

That proposition can remain stable even while European governments disagree about taxation, migration, agriculture or institutional reform. Europe can say: we will defend ourselves; we will support the sovereignty of our neighbors; we will resist coercion; but we do not define the Russian people as our permanent enemy. A peaceful Russia respecting the political independence of its neighbors has a place in a future European security and economic order.

Such a message would also attack a vulnerability in the Kremlin narrative.
If Russian resilience depends partly on the belief that the West seeks Russia's defeat, humiliation or dismemberment, a credible European account of a different future complicates that interpretation. It introduces a distinction the Russian system works hard to blur: opposition to Russian aggression is not the same as hostility toward Russians.

This would not produce rapid political change. Narrative competition rarely works that way. Its strategic value lies in keeping another future imaginable.

From Message to Ecosystem

A story becomes strategically relevant only when people can repeatedly encounter it through sources they regard as credible. Europe therefore cannot solve this problem by writing a better slogan in Brussels.

The organizational principle should be deliberately different from Russia's. Europe does not need to organize the story. It needs to organize the conditions under which credible alternative stories can survive, travel and compete.

That means supporting independent Russian-language journalism, access to uncensored information, cultural and academic exchange where possible, credible Russian and European voices, documentation of the real effects of the war, and sustained communication about what a future relationship could look like. It also means technological resilience: helping information remain accessible when censorship, platform restrictions or state pressure attempt to close the space.

The state and EU institutions have roles, but they should not monopolize the message. In a democratic ecosystem, credibility often comes precisely from distance from government. Journalists, researchers, cultural institutions, diaspora networks, civil society, universities and individual citizens can carry different parts of the same broad proposition without reciting identical lines.

That is not a defect to be eliminated. It is how a European ecosystem could turn pluralism into an advantage.

A Strategic Capability, Not a Substitute for Defense

Narrative capability should not be romanticized. It will not stop a missile, defend a border or replace ammunition. Europe still requires military deterrence, economic resilience and credible support for Ukraine.

But the comparison should not be between communication and tanks as though one must replace the other. The relevant question is whether Europe is neglecting a comparatively inexpensive strategic domain that can influence the political environment in which military power has to operate.

Russia's own behavior suggests that Moscow does not regard the information environment as secondary. The EU has documented systematic Russian efforts to influence European and Ukrainian audiences, including campaigns intended to erode support for Ukraine and undermine democratic societies [2][5]. The Council has imposed measures on actors involved in propaganda and information manipulation aimed at European civil society and political processes [6].

If narrative and information operations are worth sustained Russian investment, Europe should at least ask whether leaving that field largely defensive is strategically rational.

The potential return is asymmetric. Europe does not need to convince the Russian population of a single European worldview. Even modest success—preserving access to alternatives, reducing the credibility of permanent-enemy narratives, or keeping a post-confrontation future imaginable—could make coercive mobilization harder to sustain over time.

Guardrails Matter

An offensive democratic approach becomes self-defeating if it abandons the principles it claims to represent.

European communication should therefore remain attributable where governments are speaking, distinguish evidence from advocacy, avoid fabricated identities and covert manipulation, protect editorial independence, and leave audiences free to reject the message. The objective is not psychological domination. It is competitive openness.

This limitation is not merely ethical. It is strategic. Europe's strongest argument is the difference between a system that needs to control interpretation and one confident enough to permit competing interpretations.

The democratic constraint is therefore also part of the message.

Russia Has a Story. Europe Can Offer a Future.

Russia has demonstrated what sustained narrative capability can contribute to national resilience. Europe should learn from that capability without copying the political system that created it.

The European answer cannot be one centrally imposed story. It can be something more compatible with what Europe already is: a strategic narrative environment built around truthful information, democratic confidence, institutional pluralism and a clear proposition about the future.

Internally, that means explaining more coherently what Europeans are defending and why. Externally, it means refusing to leave Russian citizens with only the Kremlin's description of what Europe wants for them.

Europe can say something Russia's present narrative has difficulty accommodating: We will resist aggression without defining Russians as our enemy. We will defend Ukraine's freedom without demanding Russia's humiliation. And we believe Russians, like Europeans, are entitled to imagine a future in which national dignity does not require permanent confrontation.

That is not propaganda. It is a political proposition—and one Europe has barely begun to organize the capacity to communicate.

The remaining objection is practical. Europe is fragmented, slow and institutionally cautious. Even readers persuaded by the argument may reasonably ask whether the European Union could ever organize such an ecosystem in practice.

That is the question for the next article:
How a democratic Europe could actually build it.

References

[1] European External Action Service (EEAS), “Information Integrity and Countering Foreign Information Manipulation & Interference (FIMI),” 17 March 2026.

[2] European External Action Service (EEAS), “2025 Report on EEAS Activities to Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI),” 24 June 2026.

[3] European Commission, European Democracy Shield, 2025: whole-of-society measures to strengthen democratic resilience, information integrity, media freedom and pluralism.

[4] European Parliament, Resolution of 23 January 2025 on Russia’s disinformation and historical falsification to justify its war of aggression against Ukraine, P10_TA(2025)0006.

[5] European External Action Service and Ukraine Center for Countering Disinformation, joint report on Russian FIMI targeting Ukraine’s path toward EU membership, 23 June 2026.

[6] Council of the European Union, “Information manipulation in Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine: EU lists two individuals and one entity,” 27 May 2024.

Earlier Europe-Is-Us articles informing this argument

[A] EUROPE–RUSSIA — How Russia Built the Story Russians Are Asked to Live In, August 2026
https://europe-is-us.blogspot.com/2026/08/europerussia-how-russia-built-story.html

[B] Beyond Russky Mir — Europe Is Us, May 2026.
https://europe-is-us.blogspot.com/2026/05/beyond-russky-mir.html

[C] Europe Needs a Strategy of Confidence toward Russia — Europe Is Us, June 2026.
https://europe-is-us.blogspot.com/2026/06/europe-needs-strategy-of-confidence.html

[D] WE ARE EUROPE — seven-article values series and Key Notes, August 2026.
https://europe-is-us.blogspot.com/2026/08/we-are-europe-key-notes-to-series.html