Forget the bot farms. Some of the hardest Russian influence operations to counter may involve real people, operating legally and in plain sight.
That is the argument made by Alberto Pagani, a political scientist at the University of Bologna and an expert on intelligence and cognitive warfare, in an analysis for our sister website Formiche.net.
Pagani describes a Russian influence infrastructure that increasingly goes beyond outlets such as RT and Sputnik. It includes training for foreign journalists and content creators, networks of social media accounts and, increasingly, artificial intelligence to multiply and tailor content.
Why it matters: Italy has built considerable capacity to spot cyber threats and foreign interference. Pagani’s contention is that the country is much less prepared for the grey area where influence is exercised through journalists, influencers, cultural initiatives or other perfectly legal activities.
- That makes the response more complicated. Democracies can take down malicious infrastructure. They cannot simply prevent someone from attending a course in Moscow, receiving a scholarship or publishing views favorable to the Kremlin.
Look at the people. Pagani points to SputnikPro, which runs courses for foreign journalists, influencers and content creators, including training on AI and content production, and to the RT Academy.
- Some of the material is far removed from conventional political propaganda: videos about everyday life in Moscow, “traditional values” or the friendship between Italians and Russians.
- Pagani’s warning is that looking at individual posts misses the wider picture. What matters is the ecosystem in which that content is produced, amplified and circulated.
AI is making that easier. The figures cited in his analysis show FIMI operations using AI rising from 41 in 2024 to 147 in 2025. The Pravda Network, meanwhile, published 7.5 million articles in 2025.
- AI, in this reading, is less a new propaganda weapon than a force multiplier. The same message can be produced faster, repackaged and pushed through scores of accounts and formats.
Italy can see the problem. Then what? This is where Pagani’s criticism turns to Rome.
- Italy already has the institutions: DIS, AISE, AISI, the National Cybersecurity Agency, AGCOM and the postal police, alongside capabilities within the defense and foreign policy apparatus.
- But they operate with different mandates. Cyber authorities deal with technical threats; police investigate crimes; regulators monitor platforms; intelligence agencies collect information.
What is missing, Pagani writes, is the political direction tying those pieces together. A foreign influence campaign can therefore be detected and analyzed without automatically triggering a coordinated response involving intelligence, diplomacy, regulators and public communication.
- For Pagani, that is the gap Italy has yet to close: not intelligence, but what happens after the intelligence arrives.
No censorship required. There is an obvious problem with any government effort to police foreign influence: in a democracy, legitimate speech cannot become collateral damage.
- Pagani is explicit on this point: his proposed response works within the protections of the Italian Constitution rather than around them. Journalists remain free to write, universities to host conferences and citizens to maintain lawful relationships with foreign organizations.
- Instead, he points to transparency over foreign funding, faster public communication, media literacy and public tracking of foreign influence campaigns.
- He cites Sweden, Taiwan and France as examples of governments that have developed different versions of those tools.
- For Italy, he proposes a foreign-funding transparency register, media-literacy programs, a civilian body dedicated to cognitive defense and, above all, permanent coordination between institutions that already possess much of the necessary expertise.
Then comes politics. Pagani sees the final obstacle in Italy as political.
- He contrasts Italy with France, where he points to recent statements by Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella condemning Russian interference despite the Rassemblement National’s historically more accommodating position toward Moscow.
- His assessment of the Italian debate is much harsher. He singles out Roberto Vannacci, Matteo Salvini and Giuseppe Conte, arguing that prominent political forces have failed to produce a comparable cross-party response to Russian interference.
That is also where his argument lands. Italy, Pagani writes, does not primarily lack experts, agencies or constitutional tools to respond to cognitive warfare. It lacks a political decision to make them work together.
- And that matters because the harder part of Moscow’s influence apparatus may no longer be the infrastructure that authorities can shut down. It is the activity they cannot — and, in a democracy, should not — simply ban.
