France’s Viginum agency, which was set up in 2021 to detect digital interference from foreign entities aimed at influencing public opinion, says Russia is paving the way for a new wave of online manipulation in the run-up to the European elections and other crucial votes this year.
The agency says the online network, which it has named “Portal Kombat”, includes at least 193 sites disseminating pro-Russian propaganda defending the Russian invasion of Ukraine and criticising the government in Kyiv.
The UN’s communications secretary general, Melissa Fleming, told the conference that “disinformation [is] being used to create not just the fog of war, but more suspicion, and more hatred” and was undermining peacekeeping forces.
Věra Jourová, the EU’s vice president for values and transparency, with responsibility for media and disinformation portfolios, said: “Every day we see the Kremlin’s action to spread propaganda and interfere in democracies.
Viginum says the propaganda campaign involves three “ecosystems”, one of which uses the website name pravda followed by the country code top-level domains (fr, de, pl, es, com), set up in June 2023 and found to have “identical technical characteristics: a common IP address hosted on a server located in Russia”.
“Furthermore, these sites broadcast content with similar pro-Kremlin narratives, particularly about the supposed legitimacy of ‘the special military operation’, denigrating Ukraine and its leaders, or criticising ‘the collective West’,” it says.
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