On March 7, Sweden officially became a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Finland, like Sweden, applied for NATO membership in May 2022, but Finland was accepted in April 2023, almost a year before Sweden.
The membership process, which requires unanimous approval by members, exposed divisions in the alliance, with Turkey and Hungary dragging their feet in approving membership for Sweden and Finland. Much of this tension, however, was stoked by coordinated Russian disinformation campaigns and illustrates how the Kremlin has sought to undermine and divide NATO.
Russia allegedly financed the burning of a Quran in Sweden in front of the Turkish Embassy in Stockholm to covertly exacerbate tensions between Turkey and Sweden over policies toward the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
An investigation by Euroactiv, a Brussels-based website, exposed the scheme.
Chang Frick, a former contributor to the Russian state media outlet RT, asked the Swedish nationalist website Exakt24 “to put him in touch with someone who could burn the Quran,” Euroactiv reported. Frick then paid for a permit for far-right politician Rasmus Paludan to hold a protest near the Turkish Embassy in Stockholm, during which Paludan burned a Quran.
Russia officially condemned the Quran burning while simultaneously amplifying subsequent anti-Sweden protest images.
In August 2023, Sweden’s psychological defense agency, part of the Ministry of Defense, accused Russia of a disinformation campaign to undermine Sweden’s image in the Arabic-speaking world.
Between June and August 2023, the Russian state-owned media outlets RT, Sputnik and others published about a million posts in Arabic and other languages falsely claiming that the Swedish government supported Quran burning, the agency said.
In addition, in December 2023, the Dossier Center, a Finland-based Russian opposition investigative outlet, obtained Russian intelligence documents detailing plans to undermine Finland’s and Sweden’s NATO accession. Russian intelligence’s plans included organizing demonstrations against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in major European cities, spreading footage of such demonstrations across social media platforms and placing anti-Islam and anti-Erdogan graffiti in well-known spots in those cities.
This is not the first time Sweden has been portrayed as Islamophobic by false social media stories. In the past, the false claim that Swedish social services “kidnap Muslim children” led to domestic protests. This narrative, originally from an Arabic site whose creator expressed support for the Islamic State, has reportedly gained momentum again.
In Finland, a network of newly emerged NGOs mimicked the names of reputable Finnish outlets that counter disinformation while spreading pro-Kremlin narratives, StratCom COE, NATO’s Latvia-based Strategic Communications Center of Excellence, reported in February 2024.
StratCom found that Johan Backman, a Russian-speaking adjunct professor at the University of Helsinki, had created these fake entities.
A Newsweek article on February 18, 2022, just six days before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, described Backman as an “official representative to Finland” of eastern Ukraine’s Russia-occupied Donetsk and Luhansk people's republics and quoted him as saying: “Russia is doing everything to stop any possible war.”
Finland has also reported an increase in denial-of-service attacks by Russia. In June 2023, it expelled nine Russian diplomats in response to Russia’s actions.
However, Russia did not act alone. Other state actors including China and Iran amplified Russia’s efforts. NATO has detected the PRC's role with X accounts connected to China Daily, an English-language daily newspaper owned by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Yet Iran’s role was even more brazen.
“Iranian accounts and state media largely echoed the Kremlin's coverage of the Quran burning, claiming that it was done with the ‘approval’ of Swedish authorities and that it was a ‘deliberate’ insult to the Muslim world,” German Marshall Fund senior fellow Bret Schafer told Polygraph.info.
“They also covered protests throughout the Muslim world, framing the incident as part of a pattern of Western countries using ‘freedom of expression’ as a cover for anti-Islamic rhetoric. Few of these posts explicitly referenced NATO, but of course their effect was the same.”
Russian officials and media have also sought to portray Finland and Sweden as militarized conflict zones for Western aggression against Russia.
Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev threatened that Finland and Sweden would live with “nuclear weapons and hypersonic warheads” targeted at them should they join NATO.
The Russian defense and foreign ministries said the two nations were making a “dangerous historic mistake” and “forcing” Russia to take “countermeasures.”
Russia’s TASS state news agency published articles justifying potential Russian retaliation against Finland and Sweden, including one that quoted a Hungarian expert as citing grounds for “countermeasures” and another claiming that Western weapons for Ukraine had ended up in Finland and Sweden.
Posts on social media have also falsely linked statements by Finnish Defense Minister Antti Hakanen and member of parliament Jukka Kopra as direct calls for Finnish escalation or war with Russia.
Besides these Russian narratives, both Russian and seemingly non-Russian accounts have recently featured posts critical of the Swedish military using the same footage.
Notably, Hungary delayed ratifying Sweden’s NATO membership and was outraged over Finland joining the European Commission’s lawsuit against Hungary’s anti-LGBTQ+ child protection law.
Russia has also sought to sway domestic audiences in Sweden and Finland.
“Some false or misleading narratives appear to be targeting domestic audiences in Sweden, for example, related to polarizing topics like immigration and anti-government conspiracy theories, in an attempt to stoke anti-US and anti-NATO sentiments, or even distrust of democracy and anti-government sentiments,” Soufan Group senior intelligence analyst Mollie Saltskog told Polygraph.info.
Euronews debunked a viral video claiming to show Sweden overrun by migrants that was in fact footage from a market in Syria.
Russia’s hybrid war strategies failed to prevent Finland’s and Sweden’s accession to NATO, yet the Kremlin’s disinformation succeeded in creating gridlock and exposing cracks within the alliance.