VILNIUS, Lithuania — Top Lithuanian military and diplomatic officials touted their nation’s “whole-of-society” approach to fighting a torrent of misinformation and disinformation attacks.

“We now treat ‘cognitive warfare’ as a real domain of conflict as real as land, sea, air, space, and cyber,” Lithuanian Minister of National Defense Robertas Kaunas told attendees at GlobalFact, the annual conference on fact-checking and misinformation that is being held in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius this year.

“The enemy’s goal is no longer to plant one lie,” he said June 17. “It is to freeze our decisions to cause panic and anger, and to break the truth that holds the free society together.”

The Lithuanian Radio and Television Commission has blocked more than 1,000 internet domains and 8,000 IP addresses for violating European Union sanctions against Russia, Lithuanian Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Vidmantas Verbickas told attendees.

“Authoritarian regimes keep looking for the weak spots of an open society,” Verbickas said. “They exploit the algorithms of social media platforms and create large botnets to manipulate and control public discourse. They are leveraging AI tools to create and distribute disinformation online. We cannot afford to allow our adversaries to transform the digital space into a tool of narrative control.”

Lithuanian Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Vidmantas Verbickas speaking at the GlobalFact conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, on June 17, 2026. (Delfi/Josvydas Elinskas)

Artificial intelligence has made this faster and cheaper, Kaunas said, “so the answer is cognitive resilience — keeping a clear head under pressure and recovering fast after attack without losing faith in each other and in our state.”

Kaunas said that recent examples of disinformation from Russia included allegations that Russian drones that fell on Lithuanian territory were actually sent by Ukraine, and that the major Lithuanian city of Klaipeda actually belongs to Russia. Such claims were boosted by fake accounts based in Asia and Africa that “flooded the discussion with all the Kremlin’s lines,” Kaunas said.

The Klaipeda claims prompted an investigation by the Lithuanian prosecutor general’s office, Delfi, the country’s leading news media platform, reported.

Such attacks amount to a “weaponization of critical thinking” because they push people to question everything, and thus believe nothing, Ieva Gajauskaitė, a senior official with the Lithuanian Defense Ministry, said during a GlobalFact panel.

Ieva Gajauskaitė, a senior official with the Lithuanian Defense Ministry, speaking at the GlobalFact conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, on June 17, 2026. (Delfi/Josvydas Elinskas)

To better prepare its own citizens, Lithuania has produced textbooks on national defense and resistance for students, focusing on the common patterns of misinformation and disinformation seen from Russia, Belarus and China, panelists told the conference.

A consumer-oriented European Union regulation called the Digital Services Act will hopefully prove to be another useful tool, said Marius Vaščega, head of the European Commission representation to Lithuania.

“A strong, resilient society is not a soft addition to the national defense — it is a core part of it,” Kaunas said. “Lithuanians refuse to let Russia shape how we think.”

The Lithuanian officials warned attendees that the information war isn’t stopping at their own country’s borders.

“What is tried against Lithuania today may reach any country tomorrow,” Kaunas said.