Strategic Dissonance

Russian-speaking minorities in the European Union consume media in both host-country majority languages and in Russian, yet the relationship between climate narratives across these linguistic environments has not been systematically examined. This article presents a comparative content analysis of climate-related material from two sources: the Elections24 database compiled by the European Fact-Checking Standards Network (EFCSN; N = 182), capturing fact-checked disinformation circulating in European majority languages, and a corpus of climate-related posts from Russian-language state-aligned Telegram channels (N = 71). The findings reveal structural inversion. In the European majority-language ecosystem, 73.6% of climate content rejected climate science, fabricated evidence, or attributed climate concern to elite conspiracy. In the Russian-language ecosystem, 84.5% of content accepted climate change as real and framed Russia as competently managing its consequences. The article introduces the concept of strategic dissonance to characterize this phenomenon. The findings carry implications for scholarship on foreign information manipulation in minority-language contexts.