How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict

Nina Jankowicz — a disinformation fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Centre and former adviser to the Ukrainian government on strategic communications — brings a practitioner's eye to a question that most Western analysis handles inadequately: why have the countries most exposed to Russian disinformation been the most effective at countering it, and what can Western Europe and the United States learn from them? Her account takes her from Poland to Lithuania, Georgia, and Ukraine, examining what works and what demonstrably does not.

The book's central argument is provocative and well-evidenced: that the West has been losing the information war not because of Russian sophistication, but because of Western complacency, bureaucratic inertia, and a failure to take the threat seriously before it became a crisis. The countries that have built genuine resilience — Finland, the Baltic states — did so through sustained, unglamorous investment in media literacy, civil society, and institutional credibility long before any specific campaign began. For practitioners designing resilience programmes or advising governments on counter-disinformation strategy, Jankowicz provides the most practically useful comparative analysis available. Sobering, specific, and essential.