Municipal council elections the Netherlands: March 18, 2026
The Justice for Prosperity Foundation (JfP) investigated foreign manipulation and disinformation targeting eight European elections between September 2025 and April 2026. In our report, we mapped the operations, domestic amplifiers and their effect for each country. This page focuses entirely on The Netherlands.
In the run-up to the Dutch municipal elections, Russian disinformation also reached the Dutch-speaking region via a new route. Earlier in this report, we mapped out how a fake news story was launched surrounding the German state elections.
On March 13, the Dutch website dissident.one picked up the fake Politico video about Chancellor Merz, after which the story spread further via the Telegram groups De Bataafse Leeuw, Gek Genoeg and Onafhankelijke Pers Nederland. On X, a post about 400,000 Palestinian refugees garnered more than three million views and nearly 500 retweets. Storm-1516 created the content and built the platform. Dutch and Belgian users did the rest. One of them wrote: “Politico says it too.”
What is launched in one country can thus spread to the next via existing networks at lightning speed and with an increasing semblance of credibility.
A permanent stream of disinformation
In addition to the above-mentioned campaign, a permanent disinformation infrastructure was also active during this period. Two Dutch-language websites are part of this: dutch.news-pravda.com and netherlands.news-pravda.com . As we noted earlier, these websites distribute (automated) pro-Russian content via many local news sites. This was also the case in the Netherlands. Both domains belong to the Pravda network , linked to TigerWeb.
TigerWeb is an IT company based in the Russian – annexed Crimea. The network has been linked to the Kremlin. Founder and owner Yevgeny Shevchenko is on the EU sanctions list. The global network of more than 200 websites largely shares the same IP address (178.21.15.XX), the same CMS architecture and an identical favicon hash. Website watchdog NewsGuard named Shevchenko “Disinformer of the Year 2025” . For example, the network produced 3.6 million articles in 2024 alone. In 2025, an average of 10,000 per day, intended to poison search engines and AI training data.
JfP analyzed 17,611 posts from the two Dutch-language Pravda websites, collected between January 1 and March 19, 2026. Frames were determined via keyword analysis. A post can contain multiple frames. Posts without a political narrative (43.7%) were not included.
Pro-Russian and anti-NATO framing dominates with 18%. For eleven weeks, across two domains, the same pattern occurred: pro-Putin, anti-NATO messaging. One in five posts legitimises the Russian war narrative. Anti-EU content follows at a distance with 8.3%. Forum for Democracy is mentioned in 288 posts, the PVV 31 times. FvD content is taken from the party’s Telegram channel. There is no evidence of direct Russian direction of the FvD.
The difference between the two parties is explainable. The PVV condemns the Russian invasion. The FvD describes the war as ‘not our war’ , argues that sanctions are counterproductive and portrays the West as the driving force behind the conflict. This framing structurally overlaps with Kremlin narratives. The Pravda network reinforces what is already there.
The ecosystem
The Pravda network also has distributors in the Dutch ecosystem. Telegram channels such as De Bataafse Leeuw, Gek Genoeg, de Waarheid op 1, Klokkenluiders voor de Vrijheid, WWG1WGA Totaal, Liefde Vrijheid & Waarheid, and Onafhankelijke Pers Nederland regularly share Pravda articles. Additionally, messages are shared on a small scale via X.
Conclusion
Compared to countries such as Germany, France, Moldova and Hungary, FIMI activity is less intensive. JfP has not been able to establish that the Netherlands was a major target in the disinformation war with Russia surrounding the elections. What reached the Netherlands was produced elsewhere and spread via existing networks on Telegram and X. The constant stream of Pravda content does, however, contribute to reinforcing existing polarisation. Vigilance remains necessary, however. The infrastructure is in place; scaling up can be done quickly.
A new phenomenon
The Pravda network does not necessarily produce new narratives but amplifies the reach and impact of existing messages by systematically reinforcing and redistributing them. How this mechanism works, and why JfP identifies it as a distinct phenomenon, is explained in the final chapter of this report.
Justice for Prosperity (JfP) is an independent research and detection platform based in Amsterdam that exposes and helps counter societal manipulation and subversive threats. We investigate how actors organise themselves online and offline, what networks, narratives, amplifiers and revenue models drive them, and how they put democratic processes and institutions, social cohesion and fundamental rights under pressure.
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