This report returns to the recent history of the covid pandemic, rising populism and foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) by Russia and China to explore how the crisis it produced shaped the contestation between strategic disinformation campaigns and EU’s security apparatuses. The report does so from a novel vantage point. It mobilises critical theoretical conceptual vocabulary to make the complex issue of external challenges for liberal democracies that result from strategic disinformation campaigns better intelligible. Such reflexive understanding, it proposes, is a necessary condition for competent and sensitive public policy.