Under heavy cloud cover, Russia fired a massive barrage of Geran-2 attack drones, the Russian-built version of Iran’s Shahed-136, at western Ukraine early Sunday. The Ukrainian General Staff said Russia launched 863 drones at Ukraine over the previous 24 hours, one of the largest barrages of the war. French open-source analyst Clément Molin wrote on […]
Ukraine’s Defense Forces struck a Russian chemical plant in Volgograd overnight on September 10-11, 2026, using FP-5 “Flamingo” cruise missiles, according to Fire Point, the Ukrainian company that manufactures the weapon. Fire Point said the missiles hit their target directly and sparked a large fire at the facility. The target, Volgogradpromproekt, is a specialty chemicals […]
Ukraine’s Navy said one of its Sargan-3000 uncrewed surface vessels destroyed a Russian drone boat in the Black Sea, describing the engagement as the first battle in history between two uncrewed naval vessels. The Navy said its Defense Intelligence partners spotted the Russian craft before the Sargan-3000 closed in and destroyed it using a remote-controlled […]
Russia’s state-owned tank manufacturer Uralvagonzavod has delivered another batch of T-90M “Proryv” and T-72B3M tanks to the Russian Army, the company said, timed to coincide with Russia’s Tank Crew Day. As with previous shipments, Uralvagonzavod did not disclose how many tanks were included in the batch or where they are headed. The company said the […]
A fire and a series of explosions tore through an ammunition storage site in central Bulgaria overnight into Saturday, September 12, 2026, roughly five weeks after fire and explosions destroyed a separate EMCO storage building near Belitsa, Bulgaria, on August 10. No injuries were reported in either incident. The blaze broke out near the village […]
The world’s nine nuclear-armed states expanded their arsenals in 2025, according to a new assessment from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Researchers Hans M. Kristensen and Matt Korda found that most countries deployed new nuclear-armed or nuclear-capable weapons during the year, even as the overall number of warheads in the world continued to decline. […]
Ukrainian drones struck Russian military aircraft near Anapa on September 9, 2026, destroying a helicopter and damaging a fixed-wing jet, according to both Russian and Ukrainian accounts of the same overnight operation that also hit Russia’s naval base at Novorossiysk. Russian sources reporting on the strikes said a single drone destroyed a Mi-8AMTSh helicopter, tail […]
Anthropic reveals how criminal groups are increasingly targeting AI vendors' own infrastructure, including to steal a pre-release Claude model.
The post Anthropic Says Russian Hackers Used Claude AI to Automate Malware Evasion appeared first on SecurityWeek.
Ukraine’s Defense Forces struck Russia’s naval base at Novorossiysk overnight on September 8-9, hitting the Kalibr-missile frigate Admiral Essen and starting a fire on its deck superstructure, according to Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence agency, known as HUR. HUR said operators from its Active Operations Department carried out the strike as part of a joint deep-strike operation […]
Russian aircraft dropped 8,766 glide bombs on Ukrainian front-line positions in August 2026, the highest monthly total recorded since the invasion began, according to Ukrainian General Staff figures compiled by the OSINT monitoring group Oko Gora. The total works out to an average of 283 bombs a day over the 31-day month. Oko Gora put […]
Russia, China, and Iran are all sharing the same playbook for corrupting Western elections. The United States is on track to be the next target this November.
A troveof Russian documents leaked in May outlines Moscow’s plans to use AI to warp foreign decision-making and sway elections. The Kremlin’s “Projects 2026” strategy reveals Russia’s plot to influence upcoming elections in Europe and Israel. Their tactics are similar to those used by China and Iran for years, and what emerges isn’t a Russian innovation — it’s a shared authoritarian playbook.
Projects 2026 calls for the creation of an opinion leader database to monitor the social media profiles of 10,000 influential individuals across Europe, including the 100 most prominent opposition figures in France alone. This is precisely the model Chinese state-aligned company GoLaxy piloted against the United States in 2025. The firm reportedly built constantly evolving psychological profiles of 117 members of Congress and roughly 2,000 additional American opinion leaders.
Researchers at Vanderbilt University warned that GoLaxy appeared prepared to target these individuals with messaging aligned with Beijing’s priorities. By monitoring the social media profiles of Western leaders, China and Russia are able to map the target’s values, beliefs, emotional tendencies, and vulnerabilities, making their influence operations more tailored and impactful.
In addition to using AI to build psychological profiles, the authoritarian playbook calls for countries like Russia and Iran to flood their targets with tailored generative AI content. Projects 2026’s “AI News” initiative calls for producing more than 500 short videos to target French audiences across six social media platforms. This tactic mirrors Iranian information operations during the 2025 and 2026 wars with Israel and the United States, when pro-Iranian networks pushed AI-generated and AI-assisted videos tailored to different audiences across X and TikTok, which racked up millions of views. These countries are running highly productive propaganda engines.
The most durable piece of Projects 2026 isn’t the content at all — it’s the plan to create fictitious think tanks and research institutes that can hand Russian narratives a “legitimate information source,” making them more likely to be cited by real news outlets and large language models. The leak shows this already underway: A site called the “World Center for Strategic Studies,” registered in March 2026, published unsigned analysis aimed at Western think tank audiences, with versions planned in German, French, and Spanish. The fake think tank doesn’t need to fool a discerning reader. It needs to get quoted, indexed permanently, and cited by the next AI model that goes looking for sources on the topic.
Iran ran a cruder version of this same play: Iranian state-sponsored cyber espionage groups have repeatedly impersonated real institutions — such as the Royal United Services Institute, the Aspen Institute, and the Washington Institute — to steal credentials and plant material under a trusted name. Projects 2026 proposes something more sustainable: Don’t just hijack existing credibility but manufacture new institutions and let them accrue it over time.
Projects 2026 also proposes building a real Israel-based research institute staffed by Israeli citizens with genuine academic credentials. This approach is reminiscent of the 2014 “Iran Expert Initiative,” where Iranian Foreign Ministry officials attempted to court and influence Western think tank researchers to promote their perspectives and give them legitimacy. Emails leaked in 2023 showed that Iranian diplomats had worked with Western experts across 10 think tanks to aggressively tout the merits of the 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and major world powers, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
In the age of AI, influencing think tanks is narrative laundering at its most dangerous. Once a fabricated or state-aligned source gets cited by a legitimate outlet or indexed by a search engine, it can become part of the training and retrieval corpus that AI systems draw upon.
While the plays are reusable, the targets are new, and for Russia, the target is European elections.
The leaked documents outline a plan to swing Armenia’s parliamentary vote through a Russian-diaspora outlet and a “Mitteleuropa” initiative aimed at reshaping alignments in Hungary and Slovakia. This is where the surveillance, flooding, and laundering modules converge. To counter it, policy solutions must be swift and targeted.
First, allied governments should require disclosure of foreign funding and foreign state links for any media outlet, think tank, or “research institute” operating ahead of an election in an at-risk state — closing exactly the gap that lets a “World Center for Strategic Studies” pass as domestic and independent. Research by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) into Qatari money in American higher education shows what a real transparency regimen requires: disclosures reaching individual researchers, not just institutions; low reporting thresholds with real penalties; registration in the style of the Foreign Agents Registration Act for state-directed “institutes” masquerading as independent organizations; and provisions against the kind of obstruction Qatar used to block Texas A&M’s funding records in court. Russia is proposing to build the same laundering vehicle in Europe that Gulf money has already normalized in American academia. The fix already exists — it just needs to be strengthened.
Second, platforms should both demonetize and remove unlabeled AI-generated political content during designated pre-election windows in at-risk states. X’s own emergency policy during the Iran war, which suspended digital influencers’ ability to monetize their content for 90 days on undisclosed AI-generated war footage, shows platforms already have the infrastructure to act fast when the stakes are high enough. But demonetization alone left the content up and circulating; independent researchers found AI-generated war footage kept flooding feeds regardless of the policy. Elections warrant a harder line: If posts feature undisclosed AI-generated content during an active election period, they shouldn’t just lose ad revenue. They should come down.
Third, Washington should prepare for future attempts at election influence by boosting the protection mechanisms it already has in place. Currently, 31 states have passed election deepfake laws, but they are under legal scrutiny because they touch on domestic speech. Federal action targeting foreign actors rests on firm ground. The 2002 McCain-Feingold Act prevents electioneering communications by foreign actors, but this only applies to broadcast, cable, and satellite communications. It must be updated to explicitly include paid internet and digital advertisements. It should also close the gap on AI-generated political content and require labeling so that foreign deepfakes can’t hide behind current ambiguities.
Projects 2026 is not evidence that Russia has cracked something new. It’s evidence that Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran are now running the same AI playbook against the same democracies, taking turns testing which module works best. The future outlined in Projects 2026 may not be here yet, but objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.
Leah Siskind is director of impact and an AI research fellow for the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI) at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). For more analysis from Leah and FDD, please subscribe HERE. Follow FDD on X @FDD and @FDD_CCTI. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.
Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief
Russia spent a record 44% of its federal budget on the military in the first half of 2026, according to calculations published by Janis Kluge, a research fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, based on data from Russia’s Finance Ministry. Direct military spending totaled 10.7 trillion rubles, about $125 billion at […]
American and Russian military aircraft will appear at the same airshow this week, as the U.S. Air Force sends fighters and cargo planes to Egypt’s El Alamein International Airshow alongside a Russian delegation set to showcase its Su-57E stealth fighter. The 2026 Egypt International Airshow officially opens September 8 at El Alamein International Airport, drawing […]
Two Russian Su-35S fighter jets collided in Russia’s Kursk region, according to Fighterbomber, a Telegram channel with reported ties to the Russian Aerospace Forces. Follow-up reports indicate one pilot was killed in the collision and another was seriously injured, though the full circumstances of the incident are still being determined. Neither Russia’s Defense Ministry nor […]
Russia’s state arms exporter says its Su-57 stealth fighter has proven itself in actual combat, a claim the company is making ahead of an international airshow in Egypt where it plans to showcase the jet and unveil new weapons built for it. Alexander Mikheev, CEO of Rosoboronexport and deputy chairman of the Union of Machine […]
Satellite imagery has confirmed damage to two radar systems, a maintenance facility and an ammunition depot at Russia’s Millerovo airbase in Rostov Oblast, following a Ukrainian drone strike on the night of August 30, according to images published by the Dnipro OSINT. Ukrainian outlet Militarnyi reported that Ukraine’s 1st Separate Center of the Unmanned Systems […]
Photos taken at an air show in Novosibirsk captured a newly built Su-34 fighter-bomber still in factory gray primer, adding to a steady stream of the twin-seat jets Russia has produced for its air force even as it continues fighting in Ukraine. The aircraft was spotted at Mochishche Aerodrome in Novosibirsk during the 15th annual […]
A Ukrainian gunsmith who services captured Russian assault rifles for Ukrainian troops says the newest generation of Kalashnikov rifle, the AK-12, consistently shows worse barrel quality than the decades-old AK-74 it was meant to replace, based on a detailed inspection of five trophy weapons spanning more than 40 years of production. Dmytro, who runs a […] 
Login