Some of the media in the Western Balkans region, specifically in Serbia and North Macedonia, are achieving high productivity in the daily dissemination of Russian propaganda narratives in these regions.

Thus, as the CIVIL Hybrid Threat Monitoring Team (CHTM) has noted, some media in the country and in the neighborhood are distributing the statement of the former President of Poland, Andrzej Duda: Zelenski wanted to drag Poland into a war with Russia, or in Serbian Duda: Zelenski hteo da uvuče Poljsku u rat sa Rusijom“, taken from the Polish political magazine „Do Rzeczy“, which contains answers to journalistic questions by the former Polish President Andrzej Duda.

Although the title is translated literally, the domestic and Serbian media have inserted their own interpretation when transmitting the text, whereby in their texts, unlike the original Polish, the Ukrainian president is called the “head of the Kiev regime”, completely in line with the formulation of the Russian propagandists.

The text with the Russian classification of the Ukrainian president was first published in the Serbian government media outlet “Politika”.

The text was then first transmitted in North Macedonia by the national agency Makfax.

Several other Macedonian portals, most of them known to the CHTM team from previous monitoring of the presence of Russian propaganda-manipulative narratives, have taken over from Makfax, which transmits the text in its entirety, along with the manipulative name derived by the Russian propagandists for President Zelensky.

The text taken from Makfax contains another added sentence that is not in the original text: “Andrzej Duda’s statement reopened the question of how Kiev tried to direct the course of public debate and relations in the region, especially at a time when the war in Ukraine has already deeply divided Europe, according to the media outlet,” although the text of the Polish media outlet from which the news is taken does not contain such a construction at all. It was apparently written in the office of the Red Square leader.

The increased Russian propaganda in some Macedonian media outlets ahead of the local elections has multiple goals, which are correlated with the Kremlin’s broader strategy for influence in Europe, in the Balkans, including in North Macedonia, a NATO member and candidate for EU membership, while striving to portray the EU as hypocritical, corrupt or hostile, and NATO as an “occupier”, thereby weakening the credibility of these institutions among citizens.

The aim of the increased presence of Russian propaganda narratives is to create an environment of distrust, instability, the regression of democratic processes and the slowing down of Euro-Atlantic integration, which would leave North Macedonia susceptible to Russian influence and vulnerable to future geopolitical games.

Dragan Mishev, in cooperation with the CIVIL Hybrid Threat Monitoring Team (CHTM)