Warning: the Kremlin is trying to split the West by spreading "altered facts," conducting blackmail and setting up front organizations, the U.S. State Department said — in 1981.
So-called active measures were common during the Cold War, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union sought to unify and divide Europe with equal urgency. Now those tactics appear to be back, retooled for the digital age as President Vladimir Putin embraces the even older Russian foreign policy tradition of "derzhavnost," or "great powerness."
Fears of Russian interference are rampant across the continent.