Former NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images Ex-NATO chief: Russia to launch ‘major’ effort to meddle in European election Anders Fogh Rasmussen wants candidates to sign pledge agreeing to counter foreign interference.

MUNICH — Russia will use unprecedented means to disrupt the upcoming European Parliament election, former NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen warned on Friday.

“There is no doubt that Russia will be a major malign actor,” Rasmussen told POLITICO in an interview on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.

At the same time, it is “important to realize that other malign actors might have learned lessons from the Russian playbook, including China or Iran,” he said.

Rasmussen now runs a private consultancy and in 2016 became an adviser to Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko — a role suspended in the run-up to the country's presidential election in late March.

The former NATO chief and ex-Danish prime minister said that efforts to meddle in the campaign will involve creating unrest by amplifying existing political divisions.

“It’s not an ideological war from Russia, it’s not a left-wing or right-wing oriented campaign, but the campaign aims at undermining trust and confidence and initiates chaos and instability,” said Rasmussen.

Rasmussen added that there will be efforts to spread disinformation by using "deep fakes" — doctored videos or audio recordings that make a person seem to say or do something that they never said or did.

But some European national governments are ill-equipped to counter those efforts, Rasmussen said.

“We have 27 countries participating in that election and they are not equally well-prepared … to avoid and prevent foreign meddling.”

Naming and shaming

Over the weekend, Rasmussen will launch an open call by 14 current and former political leaders — including former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, former Mexican President Felipe Calderón and former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves — for those running in the European election to sign a pledge in which they promise to adhere to certain principles to counter foreign meddling.

This, he said, will include pledging not to use stolen data, not to spread doctored audio or video material, to disclose the use of bots in campaigns, to train staff in cybersecurity, and to make campaign financing public.

The idea behind the open call is to raise awareness among candidates and to "name and shame" those who don't follow the rules.

“Politically, it would be quite suspicious if a political party or candidate would not subscribe to those common-sense principles,” Rasmussen said.

His “Transatlantic Commission on Election Integrity” initiative, which is funded by governments and corporations such as tech giant Microsoft, is also working on a toolkit that would allow media companies as well as social media platforms to identify "deep fakes."

To develop the necessary technology, the group has partnered with London-based AI company Faculty, formerly known as ASI Data Science, Rasmussen said.

The idea, he said, is to allow different actors to better understand what's authentic and what's likely a fake, and to boost transparency.

“If two days before a general election, a 'deep fake' video is broadcasted, then you [as a media company] can ... say to the viewer that there is a very high probability that this is ‘deep fake,’ so people are aware of it,” he said.