And NATO at that point declared something that they first called the Gerasimov doctrine, which is named after this Russian military, a general who they claimed made a speech that the fundamental nature of war has changed. You don't need to win military skirmishes to take over central and eastern Europe. All you need to do is control the media and the social media ecosystem because that's what controls elections. And if you simply get the right administration into power, they control the military.
So it's infinitely cheaper than conducting a military war to simply conduct an organized political influence operation over social media and legacy media. An industry had been created that spanned the Pentagon, the British Ministry of Defense in Brussels into a organized political warfare outfit, essentially infrastructure that was created initially stationed in Germany and in central and eastern Europe to create psychological buffer zones.
Basically to create the ability to have the military work with the social media companies to censor Russian propaganda or to censor domestic right wing populist groups in Europe who were rising in political power at the time because of the migrant crisis.