Russia no longer engages in propaganda. It is training those who will do so in your own country

Moscow is spreading propaganda. This is nothing new; we have known this for some time. What is most interesting is how Moscow is organising itself to make that propaganda work remotely, without having to deal with it directly any longer. The mechanism is vividly reconstructed in the new report by the Institute for the Study of War on Russian cognitive warfare.

The Kremlin is building an international network of journalists, influencers and young media professionals, trained through programmes run by Sputnik, RT, Rossotrudnichestvo and other organisations linked to the Russian state. This is not about convincing anyone of anything today. It is about training people who will produce news tomorrow, in their own countries, in their own language, within their own newsrooms. Traditional propaganda has always required a propagandist. This strategy builds an entire ecosystem of propagandists, making it pervasive without the need for central coordination.

According to the ISW, between July 2025 and July 2026, SputnikPro and RT Academy organised at least fifty international journalism training events. Around half of these included modules on artificial intelligence: tools for producing text, images and videos; automating parts of the editorial process; managing social media; and analysing data.

The Kremlin does not appear to be interested solely in established professionals. It is seeking out the next generation. The ISW documents programmes aimed at young journalists, university students and influencers. In June 2026, for example, Sputnik organised an AI training programme in Moscow for young media professionals from various countries, teaching them how to use artificial intelligence to generate text, images and videos, and for data analysis.

This is perhaps the most underestimated aspect of this story. Russia is not necessarily seeking to win today. It is investing in making propaganda a permanent fixture, and it states this explicitly: building a global class of journalists and influencers trained in Russia serves to ensure the continuity of Moscow’s ability to shape international narratives, keeping some of them almost dormant for years, ready to be reactivated when they become useful.

This is a very different strategy from simply bombarding people with fake news. Fake news is content. This is infrastructure. And infrastructure is much harder to detect, because it does not necessarily resemble an influence operation. It may take the form of a scholarship, a professional course, a university seminar, a masterclass on artificial intelligence, or a networking opportunity. The ISW has documented at least fourteen events organised by SputnikPro and RT Academy at foreign universities in the first six months of 2026; in some cases, these were specifically dedicated to AI applied to journalism, whilst in others they focused on media strategy or fact-checking.

Here, the word ‘interference’ begins to fall short. It conjures up an external entity entering a system. What emerges from the report is something more gradual and more difficult to define: the gradual emergence, over time, of internal actors who believe they are viewing the world through their own eyes, but are in fact wearing lenses manufactured elsewhere.

The ISW report documents a very extensive global network, stretching from Africa to Asia, from Latin America to the former Soviet states. Italy does not appear in the partial list of countries and institutions included in the report, and this must be stated just as clearly.

But on the map of Russian influence networks in Rome, there is one address worth taking a closer look at: Piazza Benedetto Cairoli 6, which since 2011 has been the headquarters of the Russian Centre for Science and Culture, housed in the historic Palazzo Santacroce, a stone’s throw from Campo de’ Fiori. The Centre states that its objectives include strengthening Russia-Italy relations in the cultural and humanitarian spheres, collaborating with public and non-governmental organisations, and providing information on Russian foreign and domestic policy; it operates in close collaboration with the embassy.

Over the years, the same premises have also been home to the professional practices of the lawyer Guido Alpa and Giuseppe Conte, who at the time explained that he had been a professional ‘co-tenant’ of the Alpa practice, with entirely independent and separate operations. Today, other law firms are also based at the same address.

There is no reason to turn this coincidence of address into an insinuation. It does not prove any link between those offices and the Russian Centre, let alone with the training activities described by the ISW. But it is a detail that illustrates well just how physically ordinary the geography of influence is. Sometimes a Russian cultural centre is simply located in an elegant building in the centre of Rome, at the same address as professional practices and perfectly legitimate businesses. Cognitive warfare, after all, works precisely because it does not look like warfare.

This is an issue that should be of concern to Italy as the next European elections draw nearer. A recent report on Italian intelligence assessments indicates that Russia, China, Iran and other actors may attempt to influence the 2027 European elections via social media platforms.
Copasir Chairman Lorenzo Guerini has emphasised the need to better understand how foreign states use social media to disseminate narratives that serve their own interests.

And this is precisely why the ISW report is useful: it shifts the focus of the question. No longer ‘who is pro-Russian’, but how, over time, networks are built through which a foreign power can make its narratives more effective. It is a more uncomfortable question, but also a far more useful one. After all, Italian media outlets had already documented how Russia had sought to use media networks in third countries – following the European ban on RT and Sputnik – alongside social media pages and Telegram channels, to spread and manipulate public debate in Italy.

The news today is that a missing piece must be added to this list: not just content, not just accounts, not just bots, but people. People trained to produce content, who are learning to use artificial intelligence, who can return to their own countries and work for publications that have nothing Russian in their names, who can become – perhaps many years later – editors, journalists, consultants and influencers.

It is a slower strategy than a disinformation campaign. But it can last much longer. And this is where we see why artificial intelligence matters so much: Russia is not just using it to create propaganda; it is teaching others how to use it. The machine no longer merely produces content: it produces the ability to produce it.

Communication does not merely serve to describe the world. It serves to construct our representation of it. It determines what we see, what we ignore, which facts take centre stage, which fears are given a name, and which conflicts appear inevitable. Words are not a mirror of reality: they help to shape it.

In Genesis, creation begins like this: ‘Let there be light’, and there was light. The symbolic principle is powerful: the world is created through the word. As in Genesis, the strategy described by the ISW is also a matter of words. Or, more precisely, of who will have the tools to use them and shape the narrative of reality. This does not mean that anyone taking a Russian language course automatically becomes an agent of Moscow, nor that all content produced by these people is false. It means that a foreign power is investing in the future ability of others to describe the world through categories that it itself helps to shape. 

The advantage is clear: not having to produce and distribute one’s own propaganda every time, but rather building local expertise and networks capable of generating content independently, adapting it to the context and integrating it into the normal flow of information. Fake news is content. People are the infrastructure. The aim: to shape the world in one’s own image.