Ukrainian drone strikes on Yandex data centres brought parts of Russia's digital infrastructure to a standstill last week. But as reports emerged of a dramatic collapse in automated traffic from the tech giant's networks, a more ambitious claim began circulating: the strikes had also crippled Russia's notorious troll farms. The evidence was less convincing. Repsense examined social media activity in Lithuania to see whether the supposed decline was reflected in the content itself.

Reality has structure, but it takes light to reveal it. It does not create the landscape, but it determines what becomes visible, what recedes and what begins to matter. 

Reality still sets limits on what can be claimed. Narrative dominance, however, emerges when one frame begins to organise the field itself - becoming the background against which everything else is understood. 

The Commission president has called manipulation of the information space warfare, and Europe's counter-disinformation tools were built for something much smaller.

SEB has provided €1M in venture debt financing to Repsense, a Lithuanian artificial intelligence startup. It is SEB's first deal of this kind in Lithuania and the first venture debt financing in the country provided by a local bank. The financing will speed up Repsense’s next stage of growth.

Forget trench coats and dead drops. In Germany, attracting the attention of suspected Russian handlers may require something rather more 2026: praising Vladimir Putin online and waving a Russian flag outside the Bundestag.

For months, RTL journalist Angelique Geray lived online as “Katya”, a fictional pro-Russian influencer with a taste for Putin, Russian sailor shirts and conspicuous displays of Kremlin enthusiasm.

Suspected handlers eventually contacted her, moved the conversation to Telegram and offered paid assignments. Bitcoin included.

Repsense has become a member of AMEC, the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication. AMEC brings together media analytics companies, communication agencies, consultants, experts and researchers from around the world, and sets the global standards for communication measurement.

The mobilisation that pulled crowds to the Ceuta border this summer ran publicly for weeks before the first crossing – the same recruitment texts, pushed into fourteen Facebook groups, at one point six groups in 81 seconds. A new Repsense study analysed 25,335 posts across nine platforms and traced the machinery behind both crossing attempts.

When a crisis hits Russia, the Kremlin takes on average 18 hours to agree an official position – and until it does, the information space has no owner. A new NATO StratCom COE study by Repsense mapped 3.13 million media items over 15 months and found the propaganda system runs on a schedule: Crisis, Control, Crusade.