Over the last three years of its war in Ukraine, Russia has expanded, developed, and tailored an influence campaign targeting much of the world, spreading its content in Wikipedia articles and in popular artificial intelligence (AI) tools. As election campaigns in Romania and Moldova took place, or as political discussions between US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy unfolded, a network of inauthentic pro-Russian portals ramped up its activity, laundering content from sanctioned news outlets and aligning global information sources with the Kremlin narrative machine.
A Russian network gone global
The Pravda network is a collection of fraudulent news portals targeting more than eighty countries and regions throughout the world, launched by Russia in 2014. In 2024, the French disinformation watchdog Viginum reported on the operation, identifying the malicious activity of a Crimea-based IT business, findings that the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) later confirmed, which showed direct Russian involvement with the network.
Voice of Ukraine 