The EU’s Rapid Alert System, created to tackle ‘Russian meddling’, hasn’t sounded a single alarm in the six months of its existence, a report has found.
In a piece on the struggles of the ambitious project, the New York Times cited an inside joke popular in Brussels before the European Parliament election in May about the Rapid Alert System: “It’s not rapid. There are no alerts. And there’s no system.”
The Rapid Alert System was established in early 2019 as a digital network for EU countries to share intelligence and file warnings about Moscow’s alleged nefarious activities as the EU leaders picked up on the useful American trend of blaming Russia for their problems.
“The R.A.S. is at risk of becoming defunct,” the NYT quotes a Czech government report as saying. “If we want more than to spend resources on maintaining a platform to occasionally share studies by NGOs or invitations to conferences, we need to rethink our strategy.”
The NYT and top ‘Russian disinformation’ experts that it quotes frame it as a legitimate system, well-equipped to expose sinister Kremlin efforts, despite its otherwise stunning inability to alert anyone to Moscow’s attacks on European elections, which the same experts claim happen all the time. While they blame the mechanism’s silence on the lack of support from member states, in reality, what it seeks to detect has been much more evident in the realm of internal political finger-pointing and point-scoring than in the realm of proven fact. There is a drastic shortage of factual evidence to go with claims of Russia’s “malign activities,” and even a Czech expert quoted in the NYT piece admits people aren’t all that excited by the “Potemkin village” that is the Rapid Alert System: “People in the know, they don’t take it seriously.”