In a direct response to Russia’s propaganda efforts against Ukraine, the U.S. Congress passed a bill in July to make the state-funded Voice of America a more direct mouthpiece for U.S. foreign policy, shifting away from its mission of providing uncensored local news in places where it’s hard to find. “We are trying to counter Russian propaganda—and that of our adversaries throughout the world—with one hand behind our back,” said Ed Royce, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, as he urged President Barack Obama to support the legislation.

Closer to the front line in the information war with Russia, European states are considering an even more direct approach: a Russian-language news channel to counter the Kremlin’s domestic networks. Latvia has championed this project within the European Union, largely because ethnic Russians make up more than a quarter of its population and get most of their news from Kremlin-backed TV. The Latvian government’s worst nightmare? An ethnic-Russian uprising like the one in eastern Ukraine, fueled by Kremlin propaganda. “What happens now is that these channels somehow resonate with people’s feelings and emotions and exploit it,” says Viktors Makarovs, an adviser to the Latvian Foreign Ministry. “Our population has been influenced by this.”

But even Latvian policymakers seem to realize the futility of trying to outspin the Kremlin, as critics have cautioned Voice of America against doing if it strays too far. “The easy way would be to create a media financed by the E.U. that would be a Brussels mouthpiece,” says Makarovs. “Which would be the stupidest thing to do.”

At best such a channel would get ­shouted down by the Kremlin’s loyal chorus of media outlets, including RT, and at worst it would degrade the standards of Western broadcast journalism, eventually making it hard to distinguish between legitimate journalism and RT-like state-sponsored spin. No one understood that better than Nemtsov. Last summer, about eight months before he was assassinated, he appeared on a Ukrainian talk show where one of the guests proposed combatting the likes of RT with an array of Western counter propaganda.

Nemtsov objected. “This would be a road to nowhere, a road to dictatorship,” he said. “You can’t do what Putin does, calling journalists to the Kremlin and giving them orders.” For now, the West seems likely to stick to its journalistic ­traditions—and trust the viewers to ­decide.