Early January, the video of a Ukrainian artist who took refuge in France sawing the Eiffel Tower appears on social networks. In its wake, hordes of fake accounts created by “bots” (software that execute automatic tasks), draw the attention of the French media to this pseudo-artist, in order to convince them that it is dangerous to host Ukrainians. Flushed out by the Antibot4Navalny collective, anonymous group of analysts who track Russian influence operations on the X network, this fake news was part of a new anti-Ukraine campaign orchestrated by Moscow, called “Operation Matryoshkas”. An example of the Kremlin’s new disinformation methods, intended to undermine European support for kyiv via social networks.
This new digital weapon reinforces the range of pro-Russian alternative media, such as Voice of Europe or Euromore, created after the EU banned RT or Sputnik from broadcasting on European soil in 2022. According to analysts, the bots this “Russian dolls” operation are the same as those used for the vast Doppelgänger offensive, revealed in 2022, which consists of cloning and usurping media and government websites to disseminate Kremlin ideology, then relayed on the networks social. These same accounts were used for the large-scale operation Portal Kombat, a nebula of fake media aimed at the European public, identified by Viginum, the French service combating foreign digital interference.
This wide range of means deployed by Russia in the service of disinformation worries the West. “The real risk is the repetition and systemic nature of these maneuvers,” an expert in the fight against this ‘digital poison’ tells us. Especially since we are witnessing a qualitative evolution. With the use of AI, automatic bots are becoming more sophisticated.”
“Extensions” in Doppelgänger
In fact, the methods used by Russia often manage to circumvent protection mechanisms. “There are still Doppelgänger operations,” explains Roman Osadchuk, researcher at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab. “But today, it’s not just copies of known websites: other techniques are implemented.” Example, the publication of photos of well-known personalities, such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Rihanna or even Vincent Cassel, accompanied by a (fictitious) anti-Ukraine position. The goal: to reach the widest possible audience.
Better, Russia recently published a half-AI-generated video, which included many elements of anti-Biden and anti-Ukraine propaganda. The short film, barely three minutes long, shows a senile “Old Joe” ready to cheat the scores of the American elections to prevent Donald Trump from winning, all in the form of a fake music video imitating those of the famous Russian music group Little Big. In total, the clip was relayed by 3.8 million bot tweets per day, by 12,300 fake accounts in 13 different languages, according to Antibot4Navalny. That is to say a scale “almost ten times larger than anything that has been evaluated before”.
In the making of this parody, a man was personally involved : Ilya Gambashidze, obscure Russian politician, founder of the companies Social Design Agency and Struktura, alongside Nikolaï Toupikine. Sanctioned by the American government and the European Union, these two men took up the methods of Yevgeny Prigojine, the sulphurous businessman who died in August 2023, whose “troll farms” flooded social networks with false information and rumors. In all these disinformation operations, whatever their form, the purpose remains the same : accentuate the internal fractures of societies, highlight the pro-Russian camp and deteriorate the image of President Zelensky and the Ukrainians in the rest of Europe.
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