“We should take more seriously the imminent importance of providing education to various stakeholders on practical aspects of information resilience, strategic communication and cyber security”, emphasised ICDS Chief Executive Dmitri Teperik, who also leads the Estonian-Ukrainian co-operation development programme “Resilient Ukraine” 2018-2020.
Teperik delivered his speech on “Closing communication gap for strengthening Ukraine’s national resilience” to about 50 international experts who participated at the round-table „Ukraine’s place in the European architecture“, held in Kharkiv, Ukraine 21-22 February 2019.
During the event, participants from Ukraine, Lithuania, Estonia, Georgia, Germany and Belgium discussed actual course of Ukraine’s European integration and analysed main challenges and threats before the presidential and parliamentary elections in Ukraine in 2019.
Highlighting current challenges to Ukraine in the field of information security, Teperik proposed several positive experiences in countering hybrid threats.
- We need to improve and expand horizontal internal communication between authorities, civil society, independent media and experts community. Additionally, it is essential to intensify and diversify communication to foreign partners, both within EU and outside it.
- For more effective counteractions, we should create clear rules for distinguishing hostile from harmful and systematize our response to disinformation. It would support measuring the impact of disinformation as well as assessing effectiveness of own counteractions.
- In order to become more methodical and evidence-driven in social media exploitation, we should apply interdisciplinary approach to countering online disinformation campaigns. This requires strengthening of state and civic capacity for (social) media awareness.
- Discovering and exposing diverse networks of pro-Russian agents of influence will greatly contribute to disclosing their interconnectivity, material rewards and harmfulness of their actions against democratic societies.
The International round-table was organised by the European Expert Association (Kharkiv, Ukraine) and Institute of World Policy (Kyiv, Ukraine).