The French government he denounced on Tuesday an extensive Russian disinformation campaign to undermine Europe’s support for Ukraine: it began in September 2022 and, in addition to France, also involves other countries. French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna has published a long declaration in this regard in which he says that the campaign «was attended by state entities or entities affiliated to the Russian state» and that the active involvement of Russian embassies and cultural centers in the amplification of this campaign, including through their institutional accounts on social networks, « it is a further manifestation of the hybrid strategy that Russia is implementing to undermine the conditions of democratic debate», that is, a war made up of tanks and counter-information.
The one expressed by the French government is a very firm and unprecedented position, writes The worldeven if the decision to proceed legally has not yet been made since a comparison with the other countries involved is first necessary.
In September 2022, after some investigations by the German press and the European NGOs DisinfoLab and Qurium, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, Meta, had intervened to try to block what it considered “the largest and most complex Russian disinformation operation since start of the war in Ukraine, with an unusual level of sophistication and power». Facebook had announced that it had deleted more than 1,600 accounts and 700 pages. DisinfoLab had nicknamed this disinformation operation “Doppelgänger”, which in German means “double” and which is also the name of the double evil in many Germanic legends. The new and recent campaign denounced by France demonstrates that “Doppelgänger” is still active and has indeed extended its operations.
Il relationship French on the evolution of “Doppelgänger” was prepared by a state agency created in 2021 against foreign threats and interference in public debate: it is called VIGINUM and depends on the Secretary General of Defense and National Security. VIGINUM explains that the disinformation campaign is structured around four main points: the dissemination of pro-Russian content related to the war in Ukraine; the creation of French-language news sites that share controversial content, exploiting national news; the creation of false accounts on social networks, especially on Facebook and Twitter, to transmit the contents of the sites managed within this same campaign; and the usurpation of the identity of various sites (of newspapers, but also of the government) through the typosquatting technique which consists in directing users who by mistake make a mistake in typing the URL address to other sites with a very similar name and identical graphics (for example who writes gooogle.com instead of google.com), or in making users believe they are on the sites of a newspaper they know, and which instead are not.
The investigation says that there are also four main themes of the disinformation campaign: the alleged ineffectiveness of the sanctions against Russia, which would mainly affect European states and their citizens; the alleged Russophobia of Western states; the barbarism of the Ukrainian armed forces, as well as the neo-Nazi ideology that is said to predominate among Ukrainian leaders; the negative effects that welcoming Ukrainian refugees would have for European states.
The campaign is structured around the creation of own media, such as for example Reliable Recent News created on March 10, 2022. It publishes daily articles in several languages and videos in which alleged French, German, Polish or American citizens are interviewed about the war in Ukraine and criticize Western support for the Ukrainian government. The site presents itself as a “non-commercial information portal with editorial offices in Germany, Italy, Spain and Serbia”, but the identity of its “journalists” is never made explicit.
The French agency then identified the registration, between June 2022 and May 2023, of 355 domains which, through the practice of typosquatting, “replicate” pages of the French media but also of the media of nine other European countries. The four French sites involved are 20 Minutes, The world, The Parisian e Le Figaro.
Fake Le Monde article
The site more replicated is that of The Parisian, with at least 49 fake articles that were widely shared on social media. The domain “leparisien.ltd” was created in early February. Among the published headlines: «Joe Biden is a terrorist: new evidence», «War in Europe is no longer necessary. US Secretary of State talks about new borders for Ukraine», «No conscience, only business: the truth about Zelensky’s shell-buying machinations», «The French are starving. But that’s not enough for the United States: they’re asking France to give more money for the war in Ukraine».
The contents correspond to the titles: “Today the authorities are spending huge sums of money to support Ukraine, to the detriment of its own citizens”, reads for example. The article on an alleged “massive exodus” of Ukrainians “to escape military slavery and imminent death at the front” has been shared hundreds of times, including by Yves Pozzo di Borgo, an influential ex-senator with conspiracy tendencies followed by nearly 100 thousand people. In this article signed “Le Parisien with AFP”, it is said that «the appalling losses suffered by the Ukrainian army have shown the citizens of Ukraine how little their chances are to return alive from the front».
In recent weeks, the identity of the website of the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs has also been usurped. Visually, the page resembles that of the ministry: there are the logo and links to the official social media accounts. But the information it contains, namely the introduction of a 1.5 percent tax on every monetary transaction made to finance military support to Ukraine, is totally false.
The false page of the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs
Similar practices have involved the German Interior Ministry, the major German media, but those of other countries such as Italy, the United Kingdom, Ukraine and Israel are also cited. In all cases the modality is always the same: identical graphics with a false article that takes a position in favor of Russia or against Ukraine.
As part of this operation, many fake social media accounts were created. The report speaks, among other things, of at least fifteen Facebook pages to spread the testimonies of some alleged German workers recently fired from important industrial sites, such as that of Ford. Ukraine is almost never mentioned in these posts, but it is suggested that the German government, manipulated by the United States, has abandoned these people to their fate, preferring to invest funds in “conflicts” never explicitly named.
The French government agency’s investigation said that Russian or Russian-speaking individuals and several Russian companies, some of which collaborate directly with the government, participated in this campaign. But it is said that the Russian embassy in France and other Russian embassies around the world are also involved, as well as some cultural institutions which, from their official accounts, have disseminated the articles created within the fake sites.
From the French General Secretariat of Defense and National Security they let it be known that it is “a well-designed operation, carried out by people who have thought a lot about what they were doing”. The campaigns “seem to have the secondary objective of making people believe that there is popular support for Russia within the European Union”, and “the people who finance these operations seem to think it’s worth it”.
In France, the network of fake Facebook pages have also served to relaunch the positions on the war in Ukraine of some exponents of the extreme right: that of Florian Philippot, for example, former right-hand man of Marine Le Pen, leader of Rassemblement National. Last May the site Reliable Recent News he then published an interview with MEP Thierry Mariani, of Ressemblement National, known for his closeness to Vladimir Putin’s Russia that Mariani himself shared on Twitter. Contacted by The worldMariani explained that he was called by a young French-speaking Russian journalist he knew and asked him to support a newborn media.
However, the people behind “Doppelgänger” don’t seem willing to stop. Minutes after the French Foreign Ministry’s press release denouncing the disinformation operation was published, a new set of false documents was released, some of which were attributed to the Interior Ministry. For example, they contain a warning against “new types of scams” committed by migrants and refugees, often from Ukraine.
False French Interior Ministry documents released by ‘Doppelgänger’ accounts