It was an early morning, 12 days and three cities into our summer study abroad, yet my very tired students were at our hostel door, on time and dressed nicely, as warned.

Our group, from a regional state university, had snagged an invitation to the Resilient Europe conference at Prague’s 17th century Czernin Palace.

Once there, the students perked up, dazzled by being in the same room as the Czech minister of foreign affairs and 150 other government and non-governmental experts from the European Union and NATO. They were clearly the only college students in the room.

Later, one student showed me his notes. At the top, he’d written simply “Russia = Bad.” I laughed, but it wasn’t untrue.

One after another, government officials from the Czech Republic, Latvia, Ukraine, Moldova, Lithuania and Estonia described relentless Russian election interference. Russian digital misinformation had provoked a 2021 migrant crisis in Europe, which has only worsened since the Russian invasion of Ukraine a year later.

The point of the conference was for participating democracies to learn strategies from one another, because “the information arena is a crucial battlefield,” one........

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