Sure. I think that for the last few years there has been an obsession with misinformation on social media and that kind of thing as though that were the primary issue. While the Russians do exacerbate those problems, and it's useful to them, what they are actually doing is manufacturing constituencies that elites can then use.
The target for Russian information operations is actually elites in certain countries, people like yourselves. What we are observing is that the Russians have set up a series of “centres of special influence”, as they call them, for command and control, and are targeting a number of countries, including the U.K., Germany, France and the U.S., where they are conducting active measures and ultimately trying to shift policy through pushing targeted narratives at elites.
In the U.S., for example, those narratives include the argument that every dollar spent defending Ukraine is a dollar making you weaker in the Indo-Pacific, essentially exacerbating policy debates there about prioritization. Pushing the argument that money should be spent to support domestic needs and fight inflation rather than support Ukraine is another one, even though Russia is the cause of a lot of that inflation through its energy campaign and economic warfare.
The really critical thing, to my mind, is being much more proactive in identifying the individuals who engage with elite communities and try to seed these ideas in our policy debates. It's about combing through and identifying individuals who are not participating politically in good faith.