News Media Influence on Kremlin Propaganda

How Russia Sells Illusion: The Disinformation Architecture of Imperial Grandeur If you glance at Kremlin media, you might see Russia portrayed as a resurgent superpower: advanced technology, military prowess, global respect. But behind this façade lies a meticulously engineered disinformation machinery designed to reshape perceptions—and comfort a regime that fears its own weaknesses. For years, Moscow has deployed propaganda not merely as a tool of influence, but as an act of self-legitimization. It sells the narrative: Russia is always strong; its setbacks are betrayals; its enemies are doomed. The goal is not just to scare internal critics, but to persuade others—ourselves in the West—that resistance is futile. One vivid example is Russia’s creation of War on Fakes, a so-called fact-checking project. Ostensibly, it debunks false news, but in reality it amplifies Kremlin narratives under the guise of neutrality. In fact, many “fact checks” there simply repackage Kremlin talking points and dismiss unfavorable reporting as “biased.” Another striking case: the Doppelgänger campaign. Behind the scenes, Russian actors created fake media websites mimicking established Western outlets—Fox News, Le Parisien, Der Spiegel—to publish pro-Kremlin content in English, French, German, and beyond. These clones lend “legitimacy” to lies, waiting for Western media to pick them up. Add to that internal leaks from a “troll factory” operation: documents show how propagandists openly admit producing fake news and coordinating influence campaigns targeting European elections. They use memes, bots, and AI-assisted content to drown out opposition voices. These aren’t random acts of deception. They are pillars of disinformation strategy. A 2017 U.S. State Department report identified five pillars of Russia’s disinformation ecosystem—state media, trolls and bots, “patriotic” bloggers, proxy media, and distortion of facts. But why does Russia invest so heavily in illusions? Because real power is fragile. Russia lacks technological dominance, economic dynamism, demographic advantage, and soft power. What it can control is narrative. By claiming “greatness,” it inoculates its citizens against doubt. By broadcasting strength, it pressures neighbors. By creating doubt, it erodes alliances. In fact, in the war in Ukraine, disinformation is as much a front line as artillery. In Kharkiv, during the Russian 2024 offensive, civilians received mass messages via Telegram and SMS — falsely warning of imminent encirclement with maps and safe routes. Panic spread. The messages bore the logo of Ukraine’s State Emergencies Service. It was psychological warfare, deliberately misleading to fracture morale. To my fellow journalists, analysts, and policymakers in the West: don’t underestimate the symbolic dimension. Russia doesn’t need to win every battle—just enough minds. When disinformation succeeds, it distorts our choices.

🥖 Just out : joint work by Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) and CheckFirst on the dissemination of content from Russia’s Pravda network in Wikipedia source links, X Community Notes, and conversations generated by popular #AI chatbots. The problem : 🔹content pollution of Wikipedia by Pravda sources 🔹 impact on LLMs utilizing Wikipedia -one of the web’s freest & most popular resources- to train generative AI algorithms 🔹Prompting popular AI chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini has shown that content posted by Pravda news portals had found its way into the generated responses. About the Pravda network / Portal Kombat : 🔹the Pravda network is an inauthentic network of hundreds of news aggregators that has spread pro-Kremlin content since 2014. 🔹The DFRLab previously found that the Pravda network had targeted more than 8️⃣0️⃣ regions and countries globally and heavily relied on machine translation. 🔹In addition, #Checkfirst reported that a Russian Wikipedia knock-off, dubbed the “Encyclopedia Runiversalis,” heavily promoted pro-Kremlin narratives targeting domestic Russian and global audiences. What’s new ? 🔹 Posting activity featuring hyperlinks to Pravda network domains has grown exponentially since February 24, 2022 : Pravda network domains are often cited as sources and their claims are reposted 🔹A large language model (LLM) analysis shows that Wikipedia contributors steadily sourced claims using Pravda news sites, enabling the laundering of content and potentially circumventing restrictions placed upon sanctioned Russian news sources such as RT, Sputnik and others. 🔹on March 6, 2025, a publication by NewsGuard Technologies found that popular AI tools had incorporated millions of records emanating from Pravda network news sites. Methodology : 🔹1,907 hyperlinks analysis across 1,672 pages, in 44 languages, directing to 162 of the Pravda-affiliated websites. 👏🏼 Amaury L. Valentin C. 🗞️ full report: https://lnkd.in/ePyzP6Td

🚨 🇷🇺 - New Recorded Future Insikt Group report! This research from Clément Briens and Brian Liston found that the Russia-aligned covert influence network CopyCop (Storm-1516) dramatically expanded its operations in 2025. Please read and share with your networks! CopyCop has created more than 300 new inauthentic websites this year alone, targeting the United States, France, Canada, Armenia, and Moldova, alongside new content in Turkish, Ukrainian, and Swahili. These sites impersonate local media outlets, political parties, and fact-checking organizations, and are used to launder AI-generated narratives designed to erode public trust and weaken support for Ukraine. While the technical sophistication of CopyCop’s operations has only marginally improved, the strategic intent is clear: to undermine democratic processes, destabilize elections, and fracture Western unity. Recent activity has included fabricated corruption scandals in France and Armenia, false stories about Ukrainian weapons sales to Mexican cartels aimed at US audiences, and attacks on Moldova’s upcoming parliamentary elections. CopyCop also leverages deepfakes, fake whistleblower interviews, and impersonations of legitimate media brands such as France Télévisions to increase credibility and reach. Perhaps most concerning, CopyCop has moved toward self-hosted, uncensored large language models based on Meta’s Llama-3 architecture to generate influence content at scale. This points to a deliberate Russian effort not just to flood the information environment with disinformation, but also to poison the data pipelines feeding generative AI systems. If successful, this could normalize and embed Kremlin narratives into the very infrastructure of information discovery, shaping how citizens and institutions alike perceive reality. The implications for national and international security are profound. CopyCop represents an ongoing GRU-aligned campaign to corrode democratic institutions, manipulate public opinion, and weaken NATO and EU cohesion. Countering it requires more than reactive takedowns — it demands sustained exposure of inauthentic infrastructure, closer coordination between governments, media, and civil society, and proactive safeguards within the AI ecosystem to prevent disinformation from becoming part of its training corpus. Russia’s information war is not slowing down. It is evolving, scaling, and embedding itself deeper into the global information environment — and defending against it will be as much about resilience and transparency as it is about technical mitigation. Blog: https://lnkd.in/e8nF32k7

„The Insider has obtained hacked correspondence from officers of Russia's foreign intelligence agency (SVR) responsible for “information warfare” with the West. The leaked documents, intended for various government agencies, reveal the Kremlin's strategy: spreading disinformation on sensitive Western topics, posting falsehoods while posing as radical Ukrainian and European political forces (both real and specially created), appealing to emotions — primarily fear — over rationality, and utilizing new internet platforms instead of outdated ones like RT and Sputnik. The “leitmotif of our cognitive campaign in the [Western] countries is proposed to be the instilling of the strongest emotion in the human psyche — fear,” the document states. “It is precisely the fear for the future, uncertainty about tomorrow, the inability to make long-term plans, the unclear fate of children and future generations. The cultivation of these triggers floods an individual's subconscious with panic and terror.” Curiously, 2023 saw its fair share of Russian-sponsored provocations seemingly aligned with Operation Kylo all across Europe. Research by a European media consortium revealed that a roving troupe of Russian hirelings kept turning up at protests in major cities such as Paris, Brussels, Madrid, and The Hague denouncing Western arms shipments to Ukraine. The men, the consortium concluded, had likely been hired by Russian special services. One was even found to be a student from St. Petersburg, who, as if taking literal instruction from Kolesov’s playbook, went searching online for volunteers who would be photographed for 80 to 100 euros. The images were meant to be used on social media to telegraph that anti-Ukraine protests were a mass phenomenon in Europe. Other stunts have followed. In October, not long after Hamas’s attack on Israel, hundreds of Stars of David were spray-painted on the walls of Jewish institutions all over Paris, images of which went viral online. The culprits were actually a Russian-speaking couple from Moldova who were caught in the act and explained they had been recruited to do this false-flag operation via the Telegram messenger. More recently, three men placed coffins in front of the Eiffel Tower with French flags and the phrase “French soldiers of Ukraine'' scrawled on them — a reference to French President Emmanuel Macron’s suggestion that French troops might one day be deployed to safeguard the port city of Odesa. The men are reported to have received up to 400 euros for the campaign. A “truly final version” of the project (…) clarifies that a core objective will be “mass protest actions in NATO countries, followed by the dissemination of content in the enemy’s media field. We have the necessary capabilities to attract a special contingent permanently residing abroad for such events,” perhaps referring to SVR “illegals,” or spies stationed in the West without diplomatic cover.“ https://lnkd.in/ePTS9zzG

🇧🇬 🇷🇺 🔍 A recent research exposes how Kremlin-aligned networks targeted Bulgaria's April 2026 elections A detailed investigation by Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab)'s Sopo Gelava reveals a coordinated, multilingual information operation designed to undermine Bulgaria's democratic process - not by hacking votes, but by poisoning the information environment before a single ballot was cast. The core tactic: Frame the EU's legitimate counter-disinformation tools as "censorship" - and pre-seed the "Romanian scenario" narrative to suggest any post-election scrutiny of a Radev victory would be Brussels-manufactured election theft. 🔹 1,112 messages analyzed across Bulgarian, Russian, English, French, German, and Italian between April 1–19, spanning web, Facebook, Telegram, and X. 🔹 RT's "Battle for Bulgaria" series was the primary trigger, republished across 416+ websites via the Big News Network (BNN) laundering cluster, circumventing EU sanctions on RT. 🔹 French far-right politician Florian Philippot's single tweet amplified the narrative to over 10,250 reposts/shares within 24 hours - a classic tactic of laundering Kremlin messaging through Western voices. 🔹 Domestic Bulgarian outlets - including Pogled Info, Glasove, and Epicenter.bg - redistributed sanctioned Russian content, acting as a backdoor for banned material into the EU information space. 🔹 The disinformation infrastructure included Node of Time, Pravda Network, InfoDefense, and Rybar-linked Telegram channels. 🔹 A referendum campaign pushing a "Bulgarian Lev" anti-Euro narrative ran in parallel, with Z-branded Telegram channels and diaspora Facebook groups in the UK serving as amplifiers. Bulgaria's April 19 elections - the country's seventh snap vote in five years - resulted in a win for Rumen Radev, a Moscow-favored candidate who opposed EU sanctions on Russia and military aid to Ukraine. These operations didn't just spread disinformation. They pre-emptively delegitimized the tools designed to counter it. This is the Kremlin playbook in action: not just narrative warfare, but institutional corrosion. 📄 Full report: https://lnkd.in/db4FA7Kj

Bloomberg’s recent investigation into the Russian disinformation network known as Storm-1516 offers an important insight into how information operations have evolved. Modern influence campaigns no longer rely primarily on state television channels, troll farms or easily identifiable propaganda outlets. Instead, they operate as distributed ecosystems that combine generative AI, fabricated news brands, fake experts and coordinated amplification across multiple platforms. According to Bloomberg, Storm-1516 has produced more than 150 fabricated videos designed to influence political debates, undermine trust in institutions and reinforce narratives aligned with Kremlin interests. The operation reportedly combines AI-generated content, impersonation techniques, fake whistleblowers and coordinated distribution mechanisms that allow false narratives to spread quickly and appear authentic. The technology itself is only part of the story. More significant is the industrialisation of disinformation, where the cost of producing convincing content continues to fall while the speed and scale of distribution continue to increase. A fabricated video no longer needs to persuade an entire population to achieve its objective. Creating enough uncertainty, outrage or confusion to trigger amplification by authentic users, media outlets, influencers or political actors can be sufficient. Once that happens, the original source often becomes secondary. These campaigns are rarely designed to change deeply held beliefs directly. Their objective is more often to erode trust, deepen existing divisions, increase polarisation and create uncertainty around what is true. Elections, support for Ukraine, migration, energy policy, military exercises and incidents involving critical infrastructure have all become targets. Storm-1516 is only one example of a much broader trend. Information operations increasingly complement cyber activities, economic coercion, sabotage, diplomatic signalling and other forms of hybrid influence. The challenge is therefore not simply identifying individual pieces of false content but understanding how different tools and methods reinforce one another. Addressing this challenge requires more than content moderation. Media literacy, trusted institutions, rapid attribution, intelligence sharing and stronger cooperation between governments, researchers, technology companies and civil society all play an important role. The information environment has become a contested domain, and resilience increasingly depends on how quickly societies can identify, understand and respond to attempts to manipulate public perception. Bloomberg: https://lnkd.in/dqvFbfJk #Disinformation #HybridThreats #CyberSecurity #EuropeanSecurity

Les opérations d'influence à l'étranger, c'est un peu comme les opérations clandestines des services de renseignement : tout le monde le fait, mais l'important, c'est de ne pas se faire attraper. La justice américaine met en cause des salariés du media russe RT dans une opération d'influence sur l'opinion publique US, via la création de contenus vidéos largement diffusés sur les RS et destinés à la fois à véhiculer les messages du Kremlin et à polariser (encore un peu plus) le débat politique aux États-Unis. La mécanique opérationnelle de cette opération, qui utilisait in fine une vraie société américaine de production de contenus, consistait surtout à masquer l'origine des fonds via des sociétés ecrans en Turquie ou dans des pays du Golfe. On parle tout de même de 10 millions de dollars d'investissement sur quelques mois (depuis novembre 2023). Cette affaire doit nous interpeller en France et en Europe sur l'origine des financements de nombre de chaînes YouTube, de comptes Twitter, Facebook ou TikTok qui relaient en masse la désinformation russe depuis des années. La vraie désinformation coûte cher, suivons l'argent. Extrait de l'article sur le site du DOJ : "According to the court documents, RT, formerly known as Russia Today, is a state-controlled media outlet funded and directed by the Government of Russia. Over at least the past year, RT and its employees, including Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva, deployed nearly $10 million to covertly finance and direct a Tennessee-based online content creation company (U.S. Company-1). In turn, U.S. Company-1 published English-language videos on multiple social media channels, including TikTok, Instagram, X, and YouTube. Since publicly launching in or about November 2023, U.S. Company-1 has posted nearly 2,000 videos that have garnered more than 16 million views on YouTube alone. Many of the videos posted by U.S. Company-1 contain commentary on events and issues in the U.S., such as immigration, inflation, and other topics related to domestic and foreign policy. While the views expressed in the videos are not uniform, most are directed to the publicly stated goals of the Government of Russia and RT — to amplify domestic divisions in the United States." https://lnkd.in/ejfwHAXr

"These Right-Wing Pundits Were Allegedly Funded By Russia—What To Know About DOJ Indictment"-- "The U.S. Department of Justice filed an indictment Wednesday, accusing the Kremlin of pouring millions into a media company linked to prominent online right-wing commentators as part of an influence operation pushing pro-Russia propaganda and disinformation on social media. The DOJ’s indictment does not name the 'Tennessee-based online content creation company' that received the Russian funding, but the description matches Tenet Media, which describes itself as a 'network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political and cultural issues.' Tenet’s website lists six prominent right-wing social media personalities—Timothy Pool, Benny Johnson, Dave Rubin, Lauren Southern, Taylor Hansen and Matt Christiansen—as part of its talent roster." by Siladitya Ray for Forbes #media #law #socialmedia