Is Kosovo Dancing to a Russian Script?
THE INFORMATION FIREHOUSE: From Vucic's photos to Iranian distractions, Buzhala’s feed mimics the RAND "firehose" model: rapid, inconsistent, and designed to ensure the public never finds its footing.
What happened around the exhibition was not a sudden moral awakening. It was an information operation.
That is the conclusion our newsroom reaches after tracing the chronology of those days, reading the public posts that ignited the outrage, comparing them with the wider political climate in Kosovo, and placing them against the findings that BIRN Kosovo and Kallxo.com had just published1 on the Russian disinformation ecosystem operating in Kosovo. Those findings were not minor. BIRN Kosovo said its fifth documentary, released in February, presented evidence showing how manipulated narratives aimed at Albanian speaking audiences were being spread through translated and republished material originating in Serbian and Russian media, and argued that such campaigns adapt across languages and borders in ways that reinforce narratives aligned with Kremlin interests.
That matters, because once that report landed, the public arena in Kosovo did not move into a calm debate about sources, methods, or evidence. It moved into noise. It moved into personal insinuation, sudden patriotic theatre, emotional overreach, and an intense attempt to shift the centre of gravity away from the report itself and toward a new target. That target became the exhibition.
We do not say this lightly. We say it because chronology is stubborn.
First, Kosovo had already entered another period of institutional strain. The Constitutional Court had blocked the presidential decree that sought to disperse parliament2. The country was staring at the possibility of being dragged into yet another general election3, despite the fact that the electorate had already, twice within a year, signalled that it wanted Albin Kurti to govern, first in February 2025 and then again in December 20254. In other words, part of Kosovo’s opposition camp had a political problem. It had failed to defeat Kurti at the ballot box, and yet it still needed to weaken him before the next campaign formally began.
Second, BIRN Kosovo and Kallxo.com had just put into the open a deeply uncomfortable subject, namely the ways in which Russian and Serbian disinformation move through Kosovo’s information space, including through Albanian language channels. In the public discussion that followed the documentary5, Kreshnik Gashi argued that the effect of such disinformation is often not visible only in what people say they believe, but in how they react, mobilise, panic, and align. He warned against the comforting assumption that Russian disinformation does not really reach Albanian audiences. BIRN’s own summary of the project says the documentary traced manipulated narratives targeting Albanian speakers and showed how foreign interference seeks to shape public discourse in Kosovo.
Third, a public exhibition about Serbian massacres in Kosovo was opened in the centre of Prishtina6. That exhibition was imperfect. The panel on Dubrava, in particular, triggered legitimate anger because any language that even appears to blur the status of prisoners murdered under Serbian custody cuts into a live wound. But in a normal society, one panel would have been challenged, corrected, publicly debated, and if necessary replaced. The rest of the exhibition would have remained standing, because the larger message was indisputably true. Serbia carried out a campaign of mass atrocity in Kosovo7. The public has a right to be reminded of that. A younger generation, born after the war, has a particular right to see it in public space.
Instead, the entire exhibition was turned into a political theatre.
That is where the posts of Berat Buzhala become central to understanding the operation. In the screenshots8 we reviewed, he did not approach the matter as a narrow methodological dispute. He did not say, here is the error, here is the evidence, here is why it must be corrected. He immediately and repeatedly tried to bind Shkëlzen Gashi to Albin Kurti, portraying the exhibition not as a flawed act of memory work, but as an extension of Kurti’s circle. He called Gashi “Kurti’s friend”. He presented the exhibition as an echo of Serbian lies in the centre of Prishtina. He escalated from criticism into criminalising language, suggesting arrest, prison, and deliberate falsification. He broadened the target list and pulled in others around Gashi. He then folded the entire row into a larger political frame in which the exhibition became proof not of a flawed book or a disputed panel, but of a corrupt and dangerous power structure linked to Kurti.
That framing did not arise by accident. It solved several problems at once.
It took public attention away from the BIRN and Kallxo findings on the disinformation environment9. It transformed a debate about Russian and Serbian information penetration into a moral spectacle about one exhibition and one alleged circle of friends. It created a pre-emptive strike line against Kurti before a possible new election campaign. And it attacked a public reminder of Serbian atrocity in a form that Serbia itself could only have welcomed, because no serious Serbian strategic interest is served by allowing a months long public exhibition on genocide and massacres to travel freely across Kosovo’s public squares.
This is exactly the kind of operation scholars of information warfare warn about. RAND’s work10 on the Russian “firehose of falsehood” describes a model built on high volume, rapid repetition, many channels, and no commitment to consistency. It notes that propaganda of this kind works not simply because people believe every false claim, but because information overload, familiar themes, apparent expertise, and seemingly credible formats increase acceptance and muddy reality. RAND also notes that Russian style propaganda is not committed to consistency and will simply move to a new line if one line is exposed.
That is not a marginal insight here. It is the operating logic of what we watched unfolding in Prishtina this week.
Another day it is Faik Ispahiu12 in an old photograph with Vucic.
Then it is Jeta Xharra and Kreshnik Gashi by implication13.
Then it is “media in Belgrade”14.
Then it is “workers of Fatmir Sheholli”15.
Then it is the exhibition16.
Then it is Shkëlzen Gashi as criminal17.
Then it is Kurti by association18.
Then it is a wider atmosphere of patriotic emergency19.
Then, in parallel, entirely different topics are pushed into public view, from Iran to Israel to popular music and entertainment guests20.
None of this needs to be coherent. It only needs to be loud enough to break concentration.
Peter Pomerantsev has written that in information psychological war, the game is played in the “psychosphere”, where the point is not always to establish a stable counter truth, but to create a hall of mirrors in which people stop trusting their bearings. RAND’s work21 on reflexive control goes even further. It argues that belief in falsehood is often not the end goal at all. The goal is to manipulate how groups perceive one another, intensify “us versus them” reactions, and reduce the chances of common ground. In that framework, outsiders do not need to invent conflict from nothing. They exploit fractures already present, simplify identities into caricatures, and provoke reactions that serve paralysis.
That is exactly why the exhibition affair cannot be read in isolation. The opposition in Kosovo already had a need to harden anti Kurti sentiment before any formal campaign began. Media actors under pressure from new scrutiny over disinformation pathways already had a need to redirect attention. Serbian interests already had a need to suppress any visible public pedagogy about genocide. These three needs converged.
This is why the operation around the exhibition was so much broader than the Dubrava panel. If the concern had truly been limited to Dubrava, the demand would have been specific. Remove the panel. Correct the wording. Consult survivors. Reissue the text. Continue the exhibition. Instead, what we saw was maximalist destruction. The whole thing had to be discredited, politicised, moralised, and torn down.
That is not correction. That is neutralisation.
The Kallxo.com discussion helps explain why this method is so effective in Kosovo. Muhamet Hajrullahu described how the broader aim of Russian style disinformation is often not to turn Kosovars into pro Russians, but to damage trust in the West, in NATO, in institutions, and in one another, to create confusion, doubt, and exhaustion. He said the point was “to break belief”, to generate speculation and uncertainty. Kreshnik Gashi warned that Albanian language proxies can carry those narratives locally, and that the public often sees only the surface event, not the informational architecture underneath it. Those observations match international research closely. RAND’s analysis of reflexive control explicitly says such operations seek to alter perceptions and elicit reactions, not necessarily to convert people into sincere believers of a single falsehood.
Even the language of older Soviet defectors points in the same direction, though such material should always be handled with care. Yuri Bezmenov, a former Soviet defector often cited in debates22 on ideological subversion, described psychological warfare not mainly as classic espionage but as a slow process of changing how a society perceives reality, until an abundance of information no longer produces sensible conclusions in defence of that society’s own interests. His formulation is polemical and belongs to a different historical era, but the core warning is strikingly familiar, namely that once demoralisation takes hold, facts alone struggle to restore judgement.
One does not need to accept all of Bezmenov’s worldview to recognise the mechanism. Flood the arena. Blur distinctions. Personalise everything. Replace evidence with atmosphere. Turn scrutiny into suspicion. Turn criticism into treason. Turn context into outrage. That is how truth is not disproved, but disabled.
Seen in that light, Buzhala’s behaviour in those days becomes more legible. Before the exhibition served as a curtain, he was already engaged in trying to dilute the force of the Kallxo and BIRN findings23. Neither Jeta Xharra nor BIRN had named him in that reporting. Yet he moved quickly to attack the credibility of the ecosystem around them, to imply hidden Serbian links, to weaponise old photographs, to produce guilt by association, and to fold these accusations into a wider claim that those exposing disinformation were themselves suspect. The pattern is not evidentiary rebuttal. It is contamination by association.
This matters because Buzhala is not a fringe anonymous account. He is a media actor with reach. When such an actor does not answer a report with evidence, but with saturation, redirection, patriotism performance, and personalised smears, the result is not merely bad taste. It is a contribution to an information environment in which scrutiny itself becomes harder.
And then came the exhibition, ready made for conversion into a perfect public drama. It carried real mistakes. It touched real trauma. It provided morally combustible material. It allowed critics to stand on emotionally sacred ground while pursuing objectives much wider than the correction of one panel. It allowed those under pressure from one set of revelations to move the crowd toward another fire. It allowed political operators to taint Kurti by association without waiting for a campaign to officially begin. It allowed a public discussion about Russian and Serbian disinformation ecosystems to collapse into a fight over whether one author and one exhibition were spreading “Serbian lies”. It allowed the larger truth, namely that Serbia committed atrocities on a mass scale in Kosovo, to be crowded out by a smaller and politically more useful scandal.
This is why the episode must be called what it was. Not a spontaneous civic correction. Not a clean moral intervention. Not a sudden discovery of truth. It was an orchestrated act of informational warfare in a fragile democratic environment.
Its logic was simple.
First, move attention away from the fact that Kosovo’s opposition, unable to dislodge Kurti through normal political means, appears prepared to push the country toward another election despite two fresh public mandates in his favour.
Second, move attention away from the Kallxo and BIRN findings showing that Russian and Serbian disinformation ecosystems are active in Kosovo, particularly because those findings struck at the wider media and political architecture in which amplification, translation, copy paste habits, and narrative laundering have long been tolerated.
Third, strike at a public exhibition whose central message, despite its flaws, revived an inconvenient truth for Serbia and for those in Kosovo who soften, relativise, or strategically sidestep Serbian responsibility. In any normal polity, the mistakes would have been corrected and the exhibition would have continued. In a contaminated information space by the very Russian operations, the mistakes became the pretext to crush the whole frame.
The lesson is not only about one exhibition, one media figure, or one political season. It is about the vulnerability of Kosovo’s public sphere when structural trauma, weak media economics, polarised politics, and hostile external narratives all meet in the same week.
The most dangerous operations do not always invent new lies. Often they simply identify the most combustible truth available, wound it, politicise it, and make the public afraid to touch it again.
That is what happened here.
The exhibition did not create the crisis. The exhibition was used to bury another one.
BIRN and Internews Kosova Report Maps Influence of Russian Disinformation in Kosovo — Prishtina Insight.
Kosovo Court Blocks Presidential Decree to Dissolve Parliament
In a high-stakes constitutional test, Kosovo’s top court halted President Vjosa Osmani’s bid to dissolve parliament, effectively stalling a volatile dispute between the presidency and government. — Balkan Dispatch.
Lawmakers Face a Ticking Clock to Save the State
Vjosa Osmani’s premature decree to dissolve parliament failed a basic constitutional test, revealing a presidency more interested in tactical escalation than the patient work of governance. — Balkan Dispatch.
Landslide Vote Restores Political Stability in Kosovo
With over half the vote, Vetëvendosje ended a year long deadlock, empowering Kurti to govern alone and confront corruption, organised crime and Serbian pressure directly. — Balkan Dispatch.
How a Kosovo Exhibition Ignited a Battle Over Memory
An exhibition chronicling Kosovo war atrocities was shut down by local authorities, igniting a bitter public feud over historical memory, data accuracy, and state negligence. — Balkan Dispatch.
From the Ashes of Yugoslavia to the Independence of Kosovo
From Milosevic’s rise to the 2008 declaration, Kosovo’s path to statehood was forged through systemic repression, NATO intervention, and a desperate struggle to escape genocide. — Reportage.
Berat Buzhala’s Facebook Posts,
Russian Disinformation Proliferating Online in Kosovo, BIRN Report Warns
At the launch of a report on Russian and Serbian disinformation in Kosovo, speakers said the country’s media and institutions are struggling the respond to fake news, which is becoming increasingly hard to detect due to AI. — Balkan Insight.
The Russian “Firehose of Falsehood” Propaganda Model
Why It Might Work and Options to Counter It — RAND.
Berat Buzhala’s Facebook Post, targeting BIRN Producer, March 23, 2026.
Berat Buzhala’s Facebook Post, targeting Jeta Xharra and Kreshnik Gashi, March 23, 2026.
Berat Buzhala’s Facebook Post, March 22, 2026.
Berat Buzhala’s Facebook Post and Nacionale’s article on subversive claims related to Sheholli, March 23, 2026.
Berat Buzhala’s Facebook Post on exhibition of Serbian massacres in Kosovo, March 27, 2026.
Berat Buzhala’s Facebook Post, March 28, 2026.
Berat Buzhala’s Facebook Post, on Patriotism and Reistance, March 28, 2026.
Berat Buzhala’s Series of completely unrelated posts with Kosovo’s current affairs.
From Consensus to Conflict
Understanding Foreign Measures Targeting U.S. Elections
Key Findings
Foreign interference in U.S. politics has been a concern since the nation was founded.
Russian information efforts aim to elicit strong reactions and drive people to extreme positions to lower the odds they will reach a consensus—the bedrock of U.S. democracy.
New technologies have made Russia’s information efforts easier to implement than the propaganda campaigns that the Soviets conducted during the Cold War.
Studies about how to defend against these efforts have focused on different units of analysis: Some studies focus on the original content; others focus on how this content spreads within networks; and still others focus on protecting consumers.
To respond to foreign interference, we recommend (1) taking a holistic approach that anticipates which groups of Americans are likely to become targets and (2) designing evidence-based preventive practices to protect them.
Marek N. Posard, Marta Kepe, Hilary Reininger, James V. Marrone, Todd C. Helmus, Jordan R. Reimer — RAND Research.
39 years ago, a KGB defector chillingly predicted modern America
A disturbing interview given by a KGB defector in 1984 describes America of today and outlines four stages of mass brainwashing used by the KGB. — BIG THINK.
Berat Buzhala’s Posts targeting Jeta Xharra, BIRN, Kallxo.com and its staff.
