RUTA held a featured panel border violence and disinformation during the third RUTA Annual Conference 2026

Onto the second featured panel of the first day! : “Beyond Troll Farms and Border Violence: Defying Disinformation and Dehumanization.”

Alongside its colonial aggression against Ukraine, Russia has been tightening its grip on Africa through a combination of military and hybrid tactics. As Philip Obaji’s journalism has exposed, Russian paramilitaries have left a trail of atrocities across the continent—brutalizing local communities in ways that destabilize African states and deliberately exacerbate migration toward a Europe that often does not welcome them. Deploying troll farms and influence networks, Russian disinformation campaigns sow division globally and actively incite racial hatred.

These dynamics are also evident at the European Union’s borders: from the English Channel, where people on the move are pushed back into the sea, to the EU’s Eastern border, where Polish and Belarusian border guards force people into the freezing forests of the borderlands. Exploiting the historical traumas and deep-seated fears left by Russian-Soviet and Nazi-German occupations, Russia and Belarus portray migrants as “existential threats,” while the EU—and particularly Poland—frames them as a “weapon of hybrid warfare”. Meanwhile, Russia and Belarus continue to threaten sovereign nations with renewed occupation and carry out sabotage operations across Europe.

Amid these specters of violence, urgent questions arise: How can we more effectively resist disinformation and foreign interference at a time of escalating imperial violence and anxiety?

Speakers:

* Samer Arkawi – Syrian researcher, migration scholar, activist, and filmmaker based in Slovenia.
* Natalia Judzińska – Assistant Professor at the Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences.
* Philip Obaji – Journalist reporting on massacres, rape, torture, and other abuses committed by Russian paramilitaries in Central and West Africa.
* Ruslan Trad – Bulgarian journalist, security analyst, and author based in Sofia.

Moderator:

* Tereza Hendl – Philosopher working on issues of global health justice (University of Augsburg).

The RUTA Conference 2026 was organized with the support of our partners: Uzhhorod National University and the Department of Archaeology, Ethnology and Cultural Studies; the International Renaissance Foundation; the Heinrich Böll Foundation Ukraine; Razom for Ukraine; Goethe-Institut Ukraine; the Ukrainian Studies Fund; Danyliw Foundation; Danyliw Research Seminar; and, the University of Zurich.