Madrid, Oct 19 (EFE).- An online disinformation campaign with millions of views on X is trying to dissuade international fighters from joining the Ukrainian army through messages in several languages which emphasize Russia’s cruelty to foreigners acting under Kyiv’s orders, among other risks.
“They are sending foreigners on the most dangerous missions. It’s a deadly trap!”, say several of the publications shared as part of the campaign, the Antibot4Navalny collective told EFEVerifica, EFE’s fact-checking service.
Antibot4Navalny is a group of anonymous researchers and activists investigating Russian disinformation which works with international media, such as dissident Russian site Agentsevo and Danish channel TV2, which has also reported on Russian disinformation campaigns.
The dozens of publications analyzed by EFE Verifica repeat very similar statements at the same time, or within minutes of each other, and are shared by different accounts in different languages, which hints at a coordinated manipulation campaign.
Some of the messages in Spanish include references to Colombia, the origin of many of the international fighters fighting on behalf of Ukraine.
Antibot4Navalny explains that those X profiles had already been used in other pro-Russian disinformation campaigns, such as the so-called Doppelgänger and Matryoshka (a reference to Russian dolls).
These initiatives have imitated prestigious international media to spread falsehoods, a technique that has also been used in this campaign, with viral content that includes a lot of visual material and identical infographics in different languages.
They cite data on alleged casualties on the Ukrainian front according to foreign nationalities or invitations to fight for Israel in Gaza and Lebanon, because it is a less dangerous and better paid campaign.
As has been observed in other pro-Russian operations, it is a sophisticated campaign that combines impersonations of international media with QR codes that link to the media companies’ actual websites and other well-known webpages.
It is that blurring of reality and fiction – a classic Russian disinformation technique – that has allowed the campaign to be so successful. EFE
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