There’s a great deal at stake in the upcoming Czech election — for Russia. So perhaps it’s no wonder that Czechia has been flooded by pro-Russian disinformation of late.

A victory by populist right-winger Andrej Babiš, who is ahead in the polls, would see him join Viktor Orbán and Robert Fico around the EU table. The Hungarian and Slovak leaders are on friendly terms with Russian President Vladimir Putin and have consistently torpedoed EU unity on Ukraine.

Incumbent Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala has framed the Oct. 3-4 vote as no less than a battle over the country’s geopolitical future.

“It’s about where the Czech Republic will go. Whether we remain a strong democracy, with full freedom, with prosperity, a country that is firmly part of the West … or whether we drift somewhere to the East,” Fiala told a rally in Plzeň in western Czechia earlier last week that was attended by POLITICO.

Against that backdrop, analysts have warned Czechia is being inundated by pro-Russian propaganda and disinformation. 

The volume of fake news has increased steadily since Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine to a record high of some 5,000 articles per month, according to Vojtěch Boháč, an investigative journalist with Czech outlet Voxpot.

A recent Voxpot investigation found that the 16 largest disinformation websites churn out more content than all Czech traditional media outlets combined.

Articles ranged from critical takedowns of the EU and NATO to extraordinary conspiracy theories, including claims that Brussels is promoting cannibalism as a solution to climate change.

Analysts stressed that the pro-Russian disinformation drive is less about backing a specific candidate than undermining Czechia as a whole. 

Recently, much of the political messaging has shifted to questioning the legitimacy of the election, calling into question the very value of democracy, said Kristína Šefčíková, head of the information resilience program at the Prague Security Studies Institute.

“In the informational space, we can essentially see the Kremlin playbook being used,” she said. 

Russia isn’t the only foreign power interfering in Czech domestic affairs — China also plays a notable role — but its influence is by far the most visible.

“Russia is definitely topic number one right now here,” Šefčíková added.

Moscow’s candidate?

Under Fiala, Czechia has spearheaded an arms initiative to accelerate ammunition supplies to Kyiv and has welcomed a vast number of Ukrainian refugees, who now make up about 5 percent of the country’s population — the highest per capita number in the entire EU.

A win for Babiš, a former communist turned billionaire who co-founded the far-right Patriots for Europe group in the European Parliament, could well change that.

His party manifesto pledges to axe the ammunition plan, and in interviews Babiš has called for “compromise” to end the fighting in Ukraine and avoid a larger war with Russia. His party, ANO, has also called to scrap a legal amendment that helps prosecute those who pass on sensitive information to foreign powers, including Russia.

“Babiš is against this ammunition initiative, against spending on defence, he talks about peace without any conditions,” Fiala told the FT. “He helps Vladimir Putin, it’s very clear.”

Babiš, meanwhile, has accused Fiala of trying to escalate the conflict in Ukraine, saying the prime minister “dreams of war with Russia.”

“President Trump rightly warned President Zelenskyy and, by extension, Europe that he is playing with World War III,” Babiš said in March. 

Babiš’ line echoes that of Georgia’s ruling party, Georgian Dream, which has stoked fears of war with Russia to justify a sharp turn away from Europe.

But Tomáš Cirhan, a political analyst at Masaryk University in Brno, said Babiš is trying to win votes by appealing to a part of Czech society that is concerned increased defense spending will come at the expense of local services.

He’s “a pragmatist populist politician trying to say what he needs to get their support, rather than being ideologically a pro-Russian person,” said Cirhan, noting Babiš’ “firm” track record on Russia when he was prime minister from 2017-2021. 

Much will depend on whether Babiš forms a coalition with far-left or far-right fringe parties, which are far more explicitly anti-EU and pro-Russian, Cirhan added. 

Babiš did not respond to a request for comment.

Revenge sabotage

Although the Kremlin has consistently denied any foreign interference in Czechia, the fake news barrage fits into a broader strategy of what experts describe as an aggressive campaign of hybrid warfare.

In its annual report published in July, the Czech intelligence service said Russia had used the Telegram messenger service to recruit new agents to spy on and target aid and military sites related to Ukraine. 

Many of the agents did not know they were working for Russia, the report said, having been recruited by middlemen. 

A spokesperson for the Czech Military Intelligence Service, Jan Pejšek, told POLITICO that the country’s strong support for Ukraine had “led to a reaction in the form of increased activity of Russian intelligence services on Czech territory, including cyber attacks.”

The ultimate goal, said Šefčíková of the Prague Security Studies Institute, “is to sow confusion, fear and uncertainty about what’s true and what is real.” 

Combating it is not straightforward.

Like many European countries, Czechia has banned Russian state media outlets like Sputnik and RT. In March last year it led a successful European effort to sanction the Voice of Europe news website for leading a pro-Russian influence operation. 

Yet according to Boháč of Voxpot, as many as one quarter of Czech fake news either directly translates or paraphrases lines from Russian state media. “There is a systematic breaching of sanctions,” he said, blaming a lack of political will to enforce the rules.

In emailed comments, a spokesperson for Czechia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said enforcement of sanctions fell under the remit of the country’s Financial Analytical Office (FAÚ) and “where relevant, the police.”

The FAU redirected POLITICO to the Ministry of Finance, which cited the “legal obligation of confidentiality” as a reason not to give further details. Russia’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

Czechia’s relatively short history as a liberal democracy means the government is loath to appear as a censor, according to Cirhan, the political analyst.

 “Any attempts to close some media outlets or some websites claiming that they are disinformation websites is a very sensitive topic indeed,” he noted.

Spot the foreign influence

Further complicating the fight against interference is that proving Russian involvement is not always straightforward — even for seasoned propaganda-watchers. 

There have been some documented cases of financial and other ties among Czech media figures or politicians and Russian-linked entities. But “in other cases there is ideological or narrative alignment, but no direct proof,” said Šefčíková. 

Establishing the exact share of what is Kremlin-directed malign activity versus homegrown content that happens to align with Russian interests is “almost impossible,” she added. 

However, the best defense against fake news is trust in traditional media and democratic institutions, she argued.

In that case, the country stands a good chance of fighting back against disinformation. In 2024, the Disinformation Resilience Index — a regional ranking of 10 Central and Eastern European countries — rated Czechia as “strong.”

But the report also warned of a “rising sense of uncertainty within Czech society and a growing distrust towards the state, its political leaders, the media, and even among Czech citizens themselves.”

It’s likely to be music to Moscow’s ears.