Musk, Medvedev and the Long War on Europe
Dmitry Medvedev joining Elon Musk in a call for the abolition of the EU captures fifteen years of Kremlin information warfare since Ukraine’s EU Maidan, and encapsulates the story of Trojan Horses
A screenshot doing the rounds on X shows a short, chilling exchange which explains everything you need to know about Trump, Russia, Brexit and the tumultuous politics of our era
Elon Musk (@elonmusk): “The EU should be abolished and sovereignty returned to individual countries, so that governments can better represent their people.”
Dmitry Medvedev (@MedvedevRussiaE): “Exactly”
On one level it’s just another spicy Musk hot take. On another, it is a perfect encapsulation of the Trump–Brexit–Russia story of the last decade and a half: a former Russian president publicly endorsing the breakup of the European Union, and the billionaire owner of a key global communications platform echoing the old “take back control” slogan in 2025.
From Crimea to Cambridge Analytica
The trajectory starts in 2014, when Russia seized Crimea and launched its covert war in the Donbas. Ukraine was the laboratory for a new kind of “hybrid war”: tanks and “little green men” on the ground, backed by troll farms, bot networks and state media pushing narratives of a fake “Novorossiya” across social platforms.
Within two years the same techniques were redirected at Western democracies. The St Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency built thousands of fake American personas, pages and groups designed to inflame racial tensions and boost Donald Trump in the 2016 US election. In the UK, the Brexit referendum was fought in an information environment heavily influenced by opaque data operations, micro-targeted Facebook ads and a surge of pro-Kremlin messaging from bots and state outlets, all pushing the idea that Brussels was an illegitimate overlord and that sovereignty had to be “taken back”.
In parallel, the Kremlin cultivated and sometimes financed European far-right and ultra-conservative forces, from loans to Marine Le Pen’s National Front to covert support for parties that wanted to weaken EU sanctions and fracture the union from within. The strategic goal was consistent: undermine the EU and NATO, loosen the transatlantic alliance, and isolate Ukraine.
“Abolish the EU”
Viewed against that history, Musk’s line about “abolishing” the EU is more than a libertarian thought experiment. It condenses the political slogans of Trumpism and Brexit into one sentence: the nation-state as the only legitimate unit of sovereignty; supranational institutions as inherently undemocratic; the EU as something done to people, not by them.
Medvedev’s one-word response – “Exactly” – makes plain how neatly this dovetails with Moscow’s long-term ambitions. As former president and now deputy chair of Russia’s Security Council, he has become one of the regime’s most aggressive public voices, regularly threatening Europe with escalation and calling for a remade world order. When he endorses the abolition of the EU, he is not being rhetorical; he is restating a core Kremlin objective that has underpinned years of covert finance, disinformation and interference.
The screenshot collapses those agendas into a single image: a leading Russian official cheerleading the destruction of the EU, and a tech mogul with his hand on the levers of global speech amplifying the same idea.
From hacking platforms to owning them
In the first phase of this story, Russia had to hack or game Western platforms it did not own. Troll farms, botnets, data brokers and friendly media outlets all worked to manipulate Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google’s search rankings. Political campaigns hired firms that blurred the line between legitimate persuasion and psychological operations.
The second phase is more disturbing. Instead of merely exploiting open platforms, authoritarian-aligned narratives increasingly travel through platforms whose owners are themselves geopolitical actors.
Musk is not just another loud account on X. He owns X. He also controls Starlink, the satellite network that has become critical to Ukraine’s civilian communications and military operations. His decisions about where Starlink functions, and on what terms, have already affected events on the battlefield and triggered alarm among Western officials who suddenly find the security of an allied state dependent on the whims of a single billionaire.
When such a figure publicly calls for abolishing the EU – and is applauded by a senior Russian official – it marks a shift from covert interference to something closer to open ideological partnership. The tools that were once hacked from the outside are now, in part, steered from within.
The same war, a new front
The Musk–Medvedev exchange can be read as the latest move in a long campaign with three overlapping fronts:
Territory: Crimea, Donbas and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Democracy: Brexit, Trump 2016, and the rise of far-right European parties nurtured and amplified by Russian influence.
Infrastructure of attention: social media platforms, data-harvesting operations, and now privately owned satellite constellations and global networks.
What began as a battle over Ukraine’s territorial integrity has become a struggle over who controls the architecture of public discourse itself. The Kremlin’s goal remains the same – to break Western unity and the institutions that constrain Russian power – but the battlefield has shifted from secret troll farms to the visible timelines and private boardrooms of Big Tech.
In that sense, the Musk–Medvedev screenshot is more than a viral curiosity. It is a tiny, revealing window onto a fifteen-year story: the convergence of authoritarian state power with unaccountable tech monopolies. The war that started in Ukraine’s streets and fields is now as much about who owns the platforms that decide what the rest of the world sees and believes.