Associated Incidents
«Olena Zelenska bought a Bugatti with aid money to Ukraine». This fake news, which has been making the rounds on the web in recent days and has been relaunched by thousands of users on social media, has all the perfect ingredients: there is «Ukrainian corruption», President Zelensky is involved, there is the money that the allies (the United States in the lead) allocate to Kiev to defend themselves.
Shared by an anonymous French online newspaper, the news was also reposted on Twitter by Jackson Hinkle, a pro-Trump (and pro-Russia) activist with over 2.6 million followers. Behind it there is a character well known to those who deal with online disinformation: John Mark Dougan, a former US marine who now lives in Russia.
Zelensky's Wife and the Bugatti
In early July, news broke that the Ukrainian president's wife had bought a luxury car, the Bugatti Tourbillon. The price? 4.5 million euros. The occasion was Zelensky and his partner's visit to France to celebrate the eightieth anniversary of D-Day, the Normandy landings in 1944. And the money would be from "American and British taxpayers".
A fake invoice (with huge spelling errors) also circulated, reporting the model and the name of the buyer: Olena Zelenska. The first lady, during her stay in Paris, would have tested the exclusive hypercar in preview at a private exhibition, two weeks before Bugatti presented the model on June 20. All this was accompanied by a video in which an alleged employee of the car company with a name and surname - Jacques Bertin - confirmed the visit of the Ukrainian president and his wife to a Parisian dealership on June 7. **Too bad the video was a **deepfakemade with artificial intelligence and that Bugatti immediately called it a “fake news”, also threatening legal action.
The first result on Google
Too late. The news had gone viral before it could even be denied, according to the classic channels of disinformation. First published on an anonymous French website - Vérité Cachée - with the title "Olena Zelenska has become the first owner of the brand new Bugatti Tourbillon". And then relaunched on pro-Kremlin Telegram channels with thousands of followers and on X, where the post by Trump supporter Hinkle was seen by over 6.5 million people, where he added that it was «American taxpayer dollars» that had paid for the supercar. In total, at least 12 million accounts were reached**.
The news was also perfectly indexed on Google: anyone who had searched for "Zelensky Bugatti" in the past few days would have come across, as the first search result, a link from MSN (Microsoft's news aggregator). From a fake story to a trending topic online, in a few hours. Relaunched by dozens of Russian media outlets.
A network run by John Dougan
According to research by BBC Verify and other fact-checking groups - Recorded Future, Clemson University, NewsGuard - Vérité Cachée is part of a network run by John Mark Dougan, a former US Marine who worked as a police officer in Florida and Maine in the 2000s. In 2016, the state of Florida issued an arrest warrant for him on 21 counts. The FBI, as Steven Brill, CEO of NewsGuard, wrote, has long had Dougan in its sights, accusing him of being a "Russian agent who specializes in producing some of the most elaborate Russian disinformation campaigns and reporting on them as if he were an independent American journalist." Dougan fled to Moscow, where he was granted political asylum. There, he began reporting from occupied Ukrainian territory and appearing in think tanks and on television.
NewsGuard, which has been monitoring online disinformation for years, said it had counted at least 170 websites likely linked to the Russian government. And according to the BBC, IP addresses and other evidence suggest that Dougan actually owns the websites that spread the fake news about Zelensky’s wife and Bugatti. Online pages disguised as news sites, with names that echo those of newspapers - such as The Houston Post, The Boston Times, DC Weekly, London Crier or Great British Geopolitics - that have already spread fake news in the past: from the FBI that allegedly spied on Trump's conversations to Macron's hidden homosexuality to Zelensky's purchase of a villa of King Charles at a bargain price.
«In 2016, a disinformation operation like this would probably have required an army of cyber trolls - McKenzie Sadeghi**, head of AI and foreign influence at *NewsGuard *, explained to Wired Us ](https://www.wired.com/story/ai-generated-russian-disinformation-zelensky-bugatti/). Today, thanks to generative AI, much of this appears to be done primarily by a single individual, John Mark Dougan».
According to BBC Verify, this time the goal was not only to discredit the Ukrainian presidential couple but was mainly aimed at British and US citizens: the former voted on July 4 (the fake news was spread on the eve of the vote), while in the United States the presidential elections will be held in November. The intent of the operation, not even too veiled, was to demonstrate that taxpayer funds destined for Kiev would actually be used for other reasons.