While the international expert community is busy discussing what the “deep fakes” of the future will look like, employees at the infamous St. Petersburg troll factory still stick to old-fashioned tricks, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

Last month the troll factory’s Russian language media arm, the news agency RIA FAN, presented an audio recording of what it claimed was the voice of an American military officer; however, the person’s accent and general command of English made commentators question the recording’s authenticity.

RIA FAN alleges that it recorded a conversation with an American officer from whose telephone number the agency’s employees had received SMS messages containing warnings against interfering in American political life, including the recent midterm elections, as described by Polygraph.

Aric Toler, a disinformation investigator working for Bellingcat, was among those who found the recording unconvincing – and even amusing.

As ambitious as pro-Kremlin disinformation clearly is, it too can be clumsy when its practitioners are so eager to push their agenda that they opt for primitive and easily detectable techniques.

Among such examples are cases when sequences and screenshots from computer games have been used in videos, then claimed by the Russian authorities and the media they control to show combat scenes in Syria. The voice of a speaker has been distorted by putting a pot on his head. And Russian state TV has even been accused of adding a smile onto North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s facial expression.

“Nobody Asked Thou Occupation”, a protest sign says in an image. If you just have a quick look, it is hard to see where and when this photo was taken, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

So it was a convenient way for the pro-Kremlin propagandists to illustrate articles about Norwegians allegedly protesting against a recent NATO exercise. The image illustrated stories in Georgian and Russian outlets in November.

But if you zoom in and pay attention to the tiny advertisement in the background, you will see three words in Polish: złoto, srebro, brylanty: Gold, silver, diamonds.

Myth Detector’s fact-checking and a Google reverse image search show that the same photograph was in fact taken in Poland already in 2016.

From the point of view of the disinformation campaigner, the picture has one advantage: it includes the keyword occupation. The pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign seems to be obsessed with claims about occupational forces. It repeats messages that not just Syria, Ukraine, Georgia, Czech Republic or all the Eastern European countries but all of Europe is under either US, NATO or German occupation. At the same time, it appears that Ukraine is also occupied by the EU. See the links to set the record straight.

Clinton, thesis and Lucifer

And talking about far-fetched disinformation lines: the old campaign against Hillary Clinton surfaced in Georgia once again, when one outlet scooped that Clinton dedicated her thesis to Lucifer! When you have stopped laughing, check the facts here.

Ukraine on the frontline

This week, pro-Kremlin outlets have been accusing Ukraine of being a failed Nazi state that’s preparing for a military solution in Donbas whilst being simultaneously the impotent puppet of the US and EU. According to Russian media, all of this is happening because Ukraine is just a victim of the geopolitical and economic interests of the United States.

The unavoidable military escalation between Ukraine and Russia is an often spread narrative by the pro-Kremlin outlets but this week they have been more focused on the false claims that the US “splatters blood on Ukraine”. The main idea behind is to show Ukraine has little to say on its own future and foreign policy. Reality-check: Ukraine is a sovereign state recognized by all the UN members, with a legitimate government.

Of course this doesn’t bother pro-Kremlin media as they tend to describe Ukraine as a failed state. This time they have pointed out real problems with supply of hot water and heating  and made it look like the entire country has cold shivers whilst standing on the brink of social unrest.

But enough about politics: isn’t it true that in reality an average Ukrainian is a nice person? Well, not according to Russian media which indicates that people in Ukraine call Russians “non-humans” and are eager to kill them – and ready to announce Adolf Hitler a national hero. If you look at our database, it seems that in reality it is only in the pro-Kremlin disinformation that Hitler is still a main protagonist.

Sunday 11 November was a tricky day for the pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign, on two fronts, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

In Ukraine, the Russia-backed separatists held illegitimate elections that were not recognised by the international community.

At the same time in Paris, world leaders gathered to commemorate the World War I centenary. Later at the Paris Peace Forum, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko discussed the unlawful elections with the French and German leaders – without Russia’s President, a signal of non-recognition of the so-called Donbas “elections”.

The solution, in Russia’s disinformation style: attack the opponent.

TV channel Rossiya 1 made bold false claims aiming to show how the Ukrainian President was ignored, dismissed and isolated by the other leaders in Paris. It showed misleading footage to falsely state that US President Donald Trump refused to shake Poroshenko’s hand – even the US President does not have hands several meters long, which was in fact the distance between the two presidents, as clearly shown in this image.

The heavyweight megaphones of pro-Kremlin disinformation were located on the ground in Donbas, Ukraine during the same day. Seeking to legitimatise the non-recognised elections, so called “international election observers” were praising the separatists as election organisers.

“The Western countries today are dictatorships. A dictatorship of liberalism, of the military bloc of NATO; and this is our main threat today. There is pure democracy here in Donbas”, stated the person who was introduced as a ”Finnish political scientist”. His German colleague followed up: “Donbas elections comply with all the international standards.”

Interestingly enough, both of these “observers” have been found guilty and sentenced by the courts in their home countries. The Finnish was given a suspended sentence for harassing and slandering a Finnish journalist, whilst the German politician was sentenced in June to seven months and one week on parole – because of manipulating the 2016 local elections in the German State of Niedersachsen, according to Deutsche Welle.

The German-language disinformation about the Donbas “elections” reached at least 110,000 impressions on Twitter. Was it really all uninformed users who walked into the trap of pro-Kremlin disinformation? We took a closer look at the 50 most active Twitter accounts sharing disinformation around the “elections” on Twitter.

Turns out the respective group of 50 had a pretty busy weekend on Twitter – a digital detox may be advisable. On Sunday alone, they tweeted almost 5500 times altogether – average of 110 daily tweets per user. Globally, digital consumers spend 2:15 hours per day on social media. For the highly-engaged German tweeters, this would mean they posted about 51 times per hour on Sunday! This strongly suggests automation was at play.

Elections in general were in fact a target for the disinformation campaign last week, with the aim to distract the audience from Russia’s attempts to influence several foreign elections. We heard that it was the UK secret services, not Russia, that interfered with the US presidential elections (actually there is vast amount of evidence on Russia’s operation to interfere with the US elections) and that it was the US that organised Brexit in order to destroy the EU. We also heard that the US intelligence service has admitted there were no signs of foreign interference in the US mid-term elections – in reality the US statement said there was no compromising of US election infrastructure, but also clearly warned that foreign actors, Russia in particular, continue to try to influence voter perceptions through actions intended to sow discord.

Finally, the Russian-language media quickly picked up the alarming false message that 20 thousand armed migrants have gathered at the border of Croatia, getting ready to break into the EU. See the facts here – and we recommend too that the propagandists have a careful look at the EU map: Croatia is, in fact, an EU country.

Wheels were turning last week in the St. Petersburg troll factory. Its very own news agency, RIA FAN, published a statement by Kremlin-linked publicist Nikolai Starikov, who suggested that Russia might withdraw from the 1867 treaty with the United States on transferring the ownership of Alaska, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

According to Mr. Starikov, Russia is ready to refund the United States the $7.2 million it paid for Alaska and bring the region back into the Russian fold. This, in Mr. Starikov’s opinion, should be in response to Washington’s plans to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF).

In a published statement that combines two disinformation favourites of provocation and “whataboutism”, Mr. Starikov sets out the supposed legal grounds for such a step. According to him, the Alaska Treaty of Cession was signed in a different geopolitical reality. And while the treaty provides for the transfer of the territory, it does not specify for how long, as the traditional Russian diplomatic formula “for eternal time” is missing.

Mr. Starikov who is also the commercial director of the “Pervyi kanal” TV station branch in St. Petersburg, has in the past been involved in spreading large quantities of false and misleading information, all in line with the Kremlin’s disinformation narratives on issues such as Ukraine, the migration crisis and terror attacks in Europe. Mr. Starikov has not shied away from conspiracy theories either. Entries on his personal blog suggest that the Bilderberg group made Emmanuel Macron the President of France and that global elites are destroying the world financial systemvia the leakage of the Panama Papers.

Insinuating that Alaskans would be better off under Moscow’s control has also been a part of the Kremlin’s disinformation campaign in the past.

A journalistic research project by the independent Russian news outlet RBC showed last year that the RIA FAN news agency is a creation of the troll factory in St. Petersburg and shared its first address with the trolls before moving to separate premises. Owned by businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, who has earned the nickname “Putin’s chef”, RIA FAN has been instrumental in spreading disinformation and disrupting the public information sphere both in Russia and abroad.

Since its illegal annexation in 2014, Russian authorities have tried hard to restore Crimea’s image as a holiday hotspot — including by faking tourism statistics, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

Russian media and pro-Russian media in Ukraine recently reported that the annexed peninsula has welcomed more than six million visitors this year, a figure trumpeted as a record in the peninsula’s post-Soviet history.

The figure, which covers the first nine months of 2018, was provided by Vadim Volchenko, the tourism minister of Crimea’s Kremlin-appointed government. Volchenko added that it represented a 29-percent increase from last year.

Ukraina.ru, TASS, Moskovsky Komsomolets, the FAN news agency, Rossiiskaya Gazeta, Kryminform, TRK Krym, Kafanews, and RIA Krym all published the happy news along with photos of beaches teeming with holidaymakers.

Closer scrutiny, however, reveals a rather different picture.

While tourists are indeed slowly returning to Crimea after the annexation sent its tourism industry into a nosedive, the peninsula is still a long way from being the popular holiday destination it once was.

According to a report released by Krymstat, Crimea’s official statistics agency, only 481,600 tourists visited Crimea in the first half of 2018.

Krymstat said this represents an increase of 11.3 percent compared to the same period last year, a far cry from the 29 percent boasted by Volchenko – who didn’t clarify the source of his figures for either 2017 and 2018.

Another interesting discrepancy lies in the nationality of the tourists who chose to vacation in the annexed peninsula this year.

Volchenko claimed 16 percent of them came from mainland Ukraine, which he described as a 17-percent increase since last year, and used the opportunity to stress that “we still remain one people.”

Before the annexation, roughly two-thirds of tourists in Crimea were Ukrainian.

Krymstat’s report, however, says 94.5 percent of the tourists this year were Russian citizens.

This is not the first time Russian officials and media manipulate Crimea’s tourism figures. StopFake compiled this review of last year’s alleged tourist boom in Crimea.

What is worse? To spread lies or to prevent others from telling the truth? The organisation controlled by the Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, popularly known as “Putin’s cook”, does both, according to new reports published by the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta and like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

Mr Prigozhin’s business activities stretch from providing catering services in Russia’s schools and armed forces to running the infamous St. Petersburg “troll factory”, a news agency targeting, among others, Russian and American audiences, as well as the Wagner Group – a private military company which has been involved in combat in Syria and eastern Ukraine.

On top of these already well-described enterprises, Novaya Gazeta has now published information about an additional branch of Mr Prigozhin’s activities: attacks on Kremlin-critical Russian bloggers and opposition activists, carried out by a specialised group of thugs. According to Novaya Gazeta, the team was also specialised in using poison in its attacks, in which cases a team member, who had been trained as a professional pharmacist, played a key role.

Novaya Gazeta’s article with the headline “The Cook Likes It Hot” has become possible thanks to the testimony of a whistle blower, Valery Amelchenko, who has worked in a unit of Mr Prigozhin’s “security service”.

Punished for Putin Caricature

One of the victims Novaya Gazeta managed to identify is a Russian blogger named Anton Grischenko.

Appearing online under the alias Huipster, Mr Grischenko ran a popular video blog on Youtube, in which he mainly discussed problems in his home town of Sochi in the south of Russia.

According to Mr Amelchenko’s testimony, the team travelled to Sochi and attacked the young man following his publication of a caricature of President Vladimir Putin on his Twitter account; the caricature had originally been published in Le Monde. Immediately after the attack, which the victim survived, he deleted all his social media accounts.

Killed For Regime Criticism

Combining the whistle blower’s testimony with additional investigations, Novaya Gazeta also makes the strong case that a regime critical blogger, Sergey Tikhonov, a local of Pskov in north-western Russia writing under the alias Skobars, was killed from poisoning by the team on 29 June 2016.

Novaya Gazeta’s information sheds new light onto the case of Mr Tikhonov’s death. His friends and relatives had until now been convinced that he died from a heart attack in the street not far from his home.

Poisoned For Wife’s Investigations

Another poison attack, which Novaya Gazeta attributes to the group, has already been subject to publicity since the victim, Sergey Mokhov, is the husband of Liubov Sobol, a well-known lawyer in the Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny’s anti-corruption team.

According Novaya Gazeta’s whistleblower, it was a member of Prigozhin’s security team who on 25 November 2016 stabbed a needle and a syringe with an unidentified substance into the thigh of Mr Mokhov, who survived the attack but suffered convulsions and temporary loss of the ability to feel his body.

According to Novaya Gazeta’s source, the aim of the attack was “to scare” Mr Mokhov’s wife, whose anti-corruption investigations at the time of the attack were focused precisely on contracts between the Russian authorities and Yevgenyi Prigozhin’s businesses.

The Source

Novaya Gazeta has corroborated Mr Amelchenko’s testimony with numerous other sources and has found it to be trustworthy.

According to the whistleblower, the group has been operating not only in Russia but has also carried out a murder in eastern Ukraine, experimented with poisonous substances on captive humans in Syria – and apparently also had activities in the EU. The whistleblower has mentioned work carried by Prigozhin team on Spain’s Canary Islands. However, Novaya Gazeta notes that this part of the testimony is not yet elaborate enough for the newspaper to be able to verify it.

Mr Amelchenko disappeared on 2 October, following a number of meetings with Novaya Gazeta’s journalist, in what looked like a violent attack and after having complained about being followed. He was missing until he resurfaced accompanied by his lawyer on 25 October, four days after Novaya Gazeta’s publication.

The Revenge

Novaya Gazeta’s reporting has not gone unnoticed in Russia.

Even before the story was published, a funeral wreath with the name of the journalist who authored the article, Denis Korotkov, was sent to Novaya Gazeta, and a severed goat’s head was left in a gift basket outside the newspaper’s offices, as reported by Meduza.

After the publication, nine live sheep, some dressed in blue vests reading “Press, Novaya Gazeta,” were left in cages in front of Novaya Gazeta’s newsroom, as reported by RFE/RL.

Novaya Gazeta also published an article comparing the intimidations against Novaya Gazeta and its journalists to the recent case in Finland, where a judge punished criminals with prison and fines for harassing and slandering journalist Jessikka Aro. However, as Novaya Gazeta noted, “those who ordered, organised and carried out intimidations of [journalist Denis] Korotkov can feel completely safe, contrary to their ‘colleagues’ in Finland.”

Novaya Gazeta has seen five of its journalists murdered for their investigations since 2001, the best-known case being that of Anna Politkovskaya.

When NATO’s large Trident Juncture 2018 exercise concluded this week, pro-Kremlin disinformation was unsurprisingly swift to react. Two weeks ago we highlighted three different ways in which pro-Kremlin disinformation seeks to undermine public trust in the EU and NATO. This week we look at how Russia’s disinformation reacted to this exercise, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

Disinformation aimed to create an image of NATO and the West as an enemy – an aggressive military superpower that has for years been conspiring to dismantle Russia. We heard that the US has prepared for a war against Russia since the year 2000, and that this particular NATO exercise was a move from theory to practice – see here instead for some information on the attempts by the EU, NATO, and the West to build cooperation with Russia throughout the years after the Soviet Union collapsed.

The earlier disinformation on Western desires to invade new territories in the Arctic was developed further with claims stating that Trident Juncture’s aim is to prevent Russia from utilising the Northeast passage. Read the facts here.

Russophobia – again

Pushing contradictory messages is one of the core features of pro-Kremlin disinformation. So the picture of the West as a military aggressor also turned into an image of an out of date alliance crippled by internal divisions. Disinformation was spread about Germany being reluctant to stand shoulder to shoulder with the rest of NATO, and that Norway risked losing its independence and disappearing altogether because of choosing to host this exercise.

Shaping the image of the West as an enemy culminated in open mockery. We saw – again – disinformation-oriented outlets pushing messages like “severe weather screws up Russophobic exercise”, and how “NATO soldiers again maim in an exercise against Russia”. (Last year we saw claims that “Bulks of NATO supermen get injured on the Russian border”).

As well as ridiculing, a typical disinformation pattern is to threaten. So we heard on Russian TV direct threats of how “Russia has to create funeral teams and bury all the NATO soldiers”.

How effective is challenging disinformation?

On November 3^rd, the Russian UK Embassy pushed out some bogus figures to highlight alleged NATO aggression at Russian borders. The tweet scored 720 shares and comments – hardly a reason to celebrate for the Embassy’s social media team, however: Two thirds of the mentions were debunks.

Only one third consisted of uncritical retweets of disinformation. What’s more, debunk messages scored a total of 1.6 million Twitter impressions, whereas the disinformation message arrived at 630,000.

The defeat of the disinformation was largely thanks to NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu, who pushed back by serving plain facts on Twitter, but also driven by many individual users, who put the Russian Embassy on the spot.

This week, it was also time for some good old historical conspiracies. In the attempt to overshadow Russia’s responsibility in the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, the Russian TV keeps on exploiting every opportunity to accuse the others doing the same. Frequently these disinformation efforts seem to backfire, and so did they this time as well. A commentator announced that poisonings have been a speciality of the British special services for the past several centuries. His “evidence” was that already in the 16th century, British doctors poisoned Ivan the Terrible and his son, Ivan. See the facts here.

Somehow it seems that the Russian realist artists were better informed already in the 19^thcentury than today’s Russian TV commentators. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to have a look at Ilya Repin’s painting Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan to learn that no British doctors are portrayed in the picture.

Although Russian internet trolls actively seek to manipulate audiences at home, a new study shows that their influence campaigns are much more effective in the United States than in Russia, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

The U.S. news website Daily Beast examined some of the nine million tweets associated with 3,841 different accounts that Twitter’s investigators link to the Internet Research Agency (IRA), Russia’s most famous troll factory.

The IRA has been indicted by U.S. prosecutors for its attempts to interfere in U.S. politics, including in the 2016 presidential election campaign.

Details of the tweets were released by Twitter in October.

According to the Daily Beast, the data show that over a period of four years, tweets posted by IRA-linked accounts in Russian or any language other than English earned an average of 1.73 retweets, likes, or replies.

English-language tweets, by contract, received an average of 15.25 engagements over the same period – almost nine times more.

Surprisingly, despite the revelations that Russia used social media in its bid to influence the 2016 U.S. election, IRA-linked tweets in English performed even better after the vote.

The tweets had the biggest pick-up in the United States. Tweets targeting U.S. audiences were designed to appeal to all sides of the American political spectrum, and many of the accounts posed as American citizens.

Accounts posing as African-Americans, in particular, have surged in popularity since the victory of Donald Trump.

This includes #Blexit, a movement that urges black voters to reject the Democratic party and that has been heavily promoted by Twitter accounts known for previously spreading pro-Kremlin disinformation.

The Daily Beast’s analysis also reveals that Russian trolls sought to drive traffic to blogs and websites linked with the IRA, such as Russia’s Federal News Agency (FAN) or the English-language website ReportSecret.

With only several days to the US midterm elections and European Parliament elections in May 2019, cyber security threats, misinformation, and influencing public opinion is a major concern, an Internet security expert told New Europe.

“The big danger is botnet networks,” Andrey Yarnykh, head of strategic projects at Kaspersky Lab, told New Europe on the sidelines of a terrorism and electronic media conference in Limassol, Cyprus, on November 1.

“They crack a network of private computers, controlled as a group by cyber criminals and sometimes real users don’t know that their computers are used for placement of news, fake news accounts,” Yarnykh said adding that botnet networks are used to produce denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, making a machine or network resource unavailable to its legitimate users by creating a flood of incoming messages, connection requests or malformed packets.

“It is possible to stop computers, which are used for calculating the number of voters, if they are connected to the Internet, or just influencing the public opinion,” he said.

Asked if is possible for hackers to disrupt the election process, Yarnykh said, “Of course it’s possible. We see that the hackers are interested in everything, in every direction and attack the government structures, the state structures and try to steal information, sometimes to distort it. There are risks and danger of influence of cyber criminality on Internet sites, on services connected to the Internet,” he said.

He noted, however, that it is unlikely that hackers could disrupt the actual election process on the day of the election. “As a rule the electoral systems are well protected and they are not connected to the Internet. They have their own infrastructure and the outside influence in election process is difficult…I mean the technical means. From the point of view of disinformation and fake news, it’s possible, it’s easier.”

“What we see is a lot of content is being generated by robots and also the writing of viruses. This is not the work of individual work, but the result of automatisation of virus writers, using the same instruments in the information area. So, it’s possible to create fake accounts and fake followers,” he said, adding that people who try to influence elections can be both individuals and organisations.

While Yatnykh said is it possible to use Artificial Intelligence to create new threats to election security and for hackers to use AI to target campaigns, he noted that Artificial Intelligence is only at the initial stage of development. “We’re at the start of using Artificial Intelligence to introduce it in the process. So in the future everything is possible.”

Yarnykh urged people “to be very accurate and attentive in the Internet. “Don’t go to strange websites,” he said, adding “Upgrade operating systems and important software programmes and use antivirus protection as an element of basic protection.”

Britain has charged two Russian military intelligence officers with poisoning former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, but only a fraction of Russians pin the blame on their country’s secret services, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

A poll by Russia’s independent Levada Centre shows that 28 percent of Russians believe the Skripals were in fact poisoned by British intelligence services, with only 3 percent saying the attack was carried out by Russian intelligence services.

Another 56 percent of respondents said “it could have been anyone,” and 13 percent were unable to answer the question.

Sergei Skripal was found unconscious on a bench in the British city of Salisbury in March along with his daughter Yulia.

Skripal moved to Britain in 2010 after being released by Russia in the biggest spy swap since the end of the Cold War. He had been serving a 13-year prison sentence for spying for Britain.

In September, British prosecutors charged two Russian men with the attempted murder of Skripal and his daughter using Novichok, a military-grade nerve agent.

Prime Minister Theresa May said the pair, believed to be officers in Russia’s GRU military intelligence service, had “almost certainly” acted with approval from “a senior level of the Russian state.”

Traces of Novichok were found in a London hotel room they stayed in before traveling to Salisbury.

Moscow has denied involvement and dismissed the case as an act of provocation against Russia.

The head of Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, Sergei Naryshkin, has accused Britain and the United States of being behind the poisoning.

And as demonstrated by the Levada poll, this narrative appears to have gained traction in Russia.

Russian media and officials have put forward a multitude of different narratives about the Skripal case, a well-honed disinformation tactic designed to confuse audiences.

Here you can find EUvsDisinfo’s timeline of the Russian disinformation campaign.

RFE/RL has also published a list of Russia’s “hodgepodge of theories, evasions, and refutations” on the case.