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JOINT MOTION FOR A RESOLUTION on new allegations of Russian interference in the European Parliament, in the upcoming EU elections and the impact on the European Union
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo...4-0262_EN.html
The European Parliament,
– having regard to its resolution of 8 February 2024 entitled ‘Russiagate: allegations of Russian interference in the democratic processes of the European Union’[1],
– having regard to its resolution of 13 July 2023 on recommendations for reform of European Parliament’s rules on transparency, integrity, accountability and anti-corruption[2],
– having regard to its resolution of 1 June 2023 on foreign interference in all democratic processes in the European Union, including disinformation[3],
– having regard to its resolution of 9 March 2022 on foreign interference in all democratic processes in the European Union, including disinformation[4],
– having regard to its previous resolutions on EU-Russia relations, in particular its resolution of 23 November 2022 on recognising the Russian Federation as a state sponsor of terrorism[5],
– having regard to the European External Action Service (EEAS) report of 23 January 2024 entitled ‘2nd EEAS Report on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Threats – A Framework for Networked Defence’,
– having regard to the Commission communication of 12 December 2023 on Defence of Democracy (COM(2023)0630), and the proposals for the Defence of Democracy package therein,
– having regard to the European Council conclusions of 17 April 2024,
– having regard to its resolution of 1 March 2022 on the Russian aggression against Ukraine[6],
– having regard to its Rules of Procedure and the Code of Conduct for Members of the European Parliament,
– having regard to Rules 132(2) and (4) of its Rules of Procedure,
A. whereas increasing attempts by state and non-state actors from third countries to directly or indirectly interfere with democratic decision-making and electoral processes in the Union and its Member States are being reported; whereas there is clear evidence of such attempts by Russia to interfere in electoral processes and policymaking worldwide and especially against the EU and its Member States, through a wide array of different hybrid warfare methods, embedded within a broader strategy to undermine the proper functioning of European democratic processes and legislative procedures; whereas these methods include but are not limited to cyberattacks, including on the European Parliament, elite capture of European decision-makers, election meddling, as well as by funding movements and lobbies;
B. whereas new studies and reports shows that, in recent months, well-known disinformation networks have scaled up operations aimed at disseminating pro-Kremlin narratives on social media, especially on platforms such as X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok; whereas there is proof that Russian influence networks have used AI and bots in social media and relied on the large-scale publishing of political advertisements purchased through fake accounts; whereas traditional media outlets have also been used to push their interests in the political agenda; whereas this hybrid war was the precursor for and continues to support Russia’s illegal war of aggression against Ukraine; whereas this foreign interference constitutes a form of external pressure that can effectively undermine the exercise of EU and Member States’ sovereignty;
C. whereas Russia has systematically maintained contacts with far-right and far-left parties, and other personalities and movements to gain support from institutional actors within the Union in order to legitimise its illegal and criminal actions; whereas analysis of voting patterns and speeches in the European Parliament has shown these parties to have been the most sympathetic to Russia, including calls as extreme as those made in public in January 2024 by Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Miroslav Rada?ovský – who was also paid by Russian sources to observe the parliamentary elections in Russia in 2021 – for the destruction of Europe; whereas the Hungarian Fidesz party has been spreading pro-Kremlin messages and propaganda;
D. whereas under President Putin, Russia has identified democracy, human rights and the European way of life as a threat to its dictatorial government and hence for years has been pursuing a strategy of systematically trying to weaken and ultimately destroy democracies both in the EU and in candidate countries such as Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, the Western Balkans and other neighbouring countries such as Armenia;
E. whereas according to media reports confirmed by Polish, Czech and Belgian security services, as well as by the Prime Ministers of Belgium and Czechia, certain MEPs and candidates in the upcoming European elections have received payment from the Russian Government or its proxies to spread propaganda and disinformation and to influence the elections to the European Parliament in various European countries;
F. whereas on 27 March 2024, after having uncovered a pro-Russian network attempting to conduct influence operations with implications for Czechia and the EU, via the Prague-based ‘Voice of Europe’ news site, the Czech foreign ministry announced that it had sanctioned Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, for running a Russian influence operation from Czech territory using this news site, along with a middleman called Artem Marchevskyi, for his activities conducted with the aim of undermining European support for Ukraine and influencing the 2024 European Parliament elections by portraying the EU as a belligerent entity, and describing Ukraine as an irremediably corrupt country; whereas shortly after this revelation, the website was taken offline by the authorities but was back online on 11 April, operating from a website hosted by a cloud services and website service provider based in Kazakhstan;
G. whereas on 28 March 2024, Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo stated, during a debate in the Belgian Parliament, that based on investigations conducted by Belgian intelligence services in collaboration with their Czech counterparts, it was evident that Russia had approached European parliamentarians and paid some of them to promote Russian propaganda; whereas, on 12 April 2024, Prime Minister De Croo further announced the opening of criminal prosecution and requested an urgent meeting of the European Union Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation (Eurojust) and called for the broadening of the mandate for the European Anti-Fraud Office and the European Public Prosecutor’s Office;
H. whereas on 28 March 2024, Poland’s Internal Security Agency announced that it had conducted searches as part of a collaborative investigation with other European security services into alleged Russian espionage linked to ‘Voice of Europe’, recovering large sums of cash and leading to charges against a Polish citizen suspected of Russian espionage; whereas according to the Internal Security Agency, this individual is believed to have been embedded within Polish and EU parliamentary circles, carrying out tasks commissioned and financed by counterparts from Russian intelligence;
I. whereas on 29 March 2024, Austrian authorities arrested a former Austrian intelligence officer on multiple charges, including allegedly providing mobile phone data of former high-ranking Austrian officials to Russian intelligence, involvement in planning a burglary at a prominent journalist’s apartment, and drafting ‘suggestions for improvement’ following a Russian-ordered killing in Germany; whereas the arrested former Austrian intelligence officer was in close contact with far-right politicians from the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) in the country’s parliament and government;
J. whereas on 16 April 2024 media reports circulated that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had questioned German MEP Maximilian Krah, the lead candidate of Alternative for Germany (AfD) for the European elections and member of Parliament’s Committee on International Trade and Subcommittee on Security and Defence, last December in New York over suspicions that he was receiving money from Kremlin agents; whereas, on 23 April 2024, press reports indicated that an assistant to MEP Maximilian Krah had been arrested on suspicions of spying for China, showing a pattern of cooperation with malign foreign actors seeking to undermine European democratic values and processes;
K. whereas on 18 April 2024, the German authorities arrested two suspected saboteurs in the German state of Bavaria who were allegedly spying on military installations for possible bomb or arson attacks on behalf of a Russian intelligence service, allegedly to sabotage German support for Ukraine in the war against Russia; whereas the arrests indicate that Russia’s secret services are evidently entering new dimensions, which include attacks on military facilities, in addition to disinformation campaigns and cyberattacks;
L. whereas a Czech media outlet claims that the Czech secret services have audio recordings confirming the payment of money of Russian origin to Petr Bystron, a candidate for the European elections, member of the German Bundestag and foreign policy officer for AfD; whereas according to German newspaper Der Spiegel, the money was handed over either in cash at covert meetings in Prague or via cryptocurrency; whereas reputable German media outlets have also recently revealed that an employee of an AfD member in the German Bundestag was identified as a contact person for the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB); whereas, according to media reports, the same person had been checked twice by German authorities when entering Germany from Russia and was carrying cash sums of EUR 9 000;
M. whereas, on 12 February 2024, VIGINUM, the French Government agency responsible for identifying foreign digital interference, published a report detailing a vast Russian disinformation campaign dubbed ‘Portal Kombat’, consisting of 193 websites tasked with disseminating pro-Russian narratives among Russian-speaking and European populations across Europe and the United States; whereas, in late 2023, the French authorities indicated that the Stars of David found painted in several locations in Paris were part of a destabilisation operation tied to a pro-Russian businessman from Moldova;
N. whereas, according to media analyses, since August 2023, 16 far-right MEPs from Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Slovakia, Estonia, Spain, Croatia, Denmark and Belgium participated in debates and interviews organised by ‘Voice of Europe’; whereas the vast majority of these politicians tend to normalise manifestations of hatred and intolerance based on race, national origin or sexual orientation and to project a vision of Russia as the authentic keeper of traditional family values; whereas the public discourse of those politicians is leading to dangerous divisions in society as a whole, and is a threat to democracy;
O. whereas investigative journalists exposed a classified addendum to Russia’s official ‘Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation’, in which the Russian Foreign Ministry calls for an ‘offensive information campaign’ and other measures spanning ‘the military-political, economic and trade and informational psychological spheres’ against a ‘coalition of unfriendly countries’ led by the United States, noting that ‘it is important to create a mechanism for finding the vulnerable points of their external and internal policies with the aim of developing practical steps to weaken Russia’s opponents’ and that the outcome of Russia’s war in Ukraine will ‘to a great degree determine the outlines of the future world order’;
P. whereas a recent study by the Commission[7] found that, in the first year of Russia’s war against Ukraine, online platforms ‘enabled the Kremlin to run a large-scale disinformation campaign targeting the European Union and its allies, reaching an aggregate audience of at least 165 million and generating at least 16 billion views’; whereas Russian funding of political activities and politicians within the European Union also contributes to an increase in the reach of pro-Kremlin propaganda, contributing to a disproportionately negative impact on civic discourse online;
Q.
whereas through its cultivation of contacts and relationships, Russia aims to build political and economic influence to destabilise democracy in the European Union; whereas press reports have highlighted contacts between some secessionists in Catalonia,
going so far as to the holding of a meeting between the former Russian diplomat Nikolai Sadovnikov and the then-separatist leader and former President of Catalonia, now sitting MEP
Carles Puigdemont, in Barcelona, on the eve of Catalonia’s illegal referendum in October 2017; whereas some MEPs and members of national and regional parliaments have consistently voiced sentiments that can be considered pro-Russian, for example by attributing the start of the conflict to Ukraine, participating as unofficial election observers in Crimea, and expressing a wish for its defeat in the war, downplaying the possibility of Ukraine’s accession to the EU, opposing further weapon shipments to Ukraine, and advocating for territorial concessions from the government in Kyiv; whereas in March, a delegation of AfD members of the Bavarian regional parliament was invited to observe the so-called presidential elections in Russia and subsequently assessed the elections as open, democratic and free in public statements;
R. whereas the Kremlin has sponsored and supported a number of far-right parties in Europe, including by providing the party of Marine Le Pen with a loan of EUR 9.4 million in 2013; whereas since then, Le Pen and her party members have further bolstered their pro-Kremlin stance by attending political events in Russia, including their participation in sham election observation missions during regional or national elections;
S. whereas several investigations have revealed that, due to Russian interference, electoral rules have been breached or circumvented, in particular the existing provisions on the transparency of election campaign financing with allegations of covert funding from non-EU sources, notably from Russia;
T. whereas there is credible evidence that, in 2020, Peter Pelligrini, then Prime Minister of Slovakia, requested the help of the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban to obtain support from the Kremlin ahead of Slovakia’s 2020 parliamentary election; whereas this resulted in a visit by Prime Minister Pelligrini to Russia in February 2020, three days before the elections were held; whereas the 2023 parliamentary elections were targeted by further Russian interference and disinformation campaigns; whereas Peter Pelligrini is now President-elect of Slovakia and due to take office in June 2024;
U. whereas following reports of a Latvian MEP providing extensive assistance to Russian intelligence services, Parliament launched its own administrative probe, resulting in President Metsola imposing sanctions on the MEP, including a five-day fine of her daily allowance amounting to EUR 1 750 and a ban from certain roles representing Parliament until the end of this parliamentary term in July;
V. whereas the European Parliament Special Committee on foreign interference in all democratic processes in the European Union, including disinformation (INGE and ING2), has exposed in detail the efforts and operations led by Russia in order to infiltrate, influence and interfere with European democracies and the European institutions;
W. whereas some political groups unsuccessfully tried to deny the last extension of ING2’s mandate to address all forms of corruption and foreign interferences in the European Parliament, advocating instead for an investigation committee focusing only on Qatargate;
X. whereas, while MEPs have been regularly targeted by spyware, as shown by the recent revelations on the past targeting of two MEPs and one staffer on Parliament’s Subcommittee on Security and Defence, there has been a surge in cyberattacks and foreign interference targeting the work of the European Parliament in the run-up to the European Parliament election;
Y. whereas in September 2023, the European Parliament, following the Qatargate revelations, updated and significantly strengthened its internal integrity framework, among other things, through an in-depth revision of its Rules of Procedure, the Code of Conduct for MEPs and the relevant Bureau decisions; whereas the reviewed Code of Conduct establishes that any elected MEP found to be in breach of transparency rules can be given a penalty by the President of the European Parliament;
Z. whereas it is critically important to combat the proliferation of disinformation and foreign interference in European democracy, and to take further measures to safeguard the right of European citizens to accurate and trustworthy news sources, as well as to shield the European information landscape from manipulation by authoritarian regimes; whereas Reporters Without Borders recently put forward 12 proposals for a New Deal for the Right to Information;