Associated Incidents
But how tempting is this piece of news: Olena Zelenska, the wife of the Ukrainian president, bored in Paris during the D-Day commemorations would have taken advantage of the situation to order a 4.5 million euro Bugatti Tourbillon, paying for it with American funds granted for the defense of Kiev. It is a fake news like the thousand euro banknote, yet it is making the rounds on social media at the speed of a rocket.
Hitting the wife to sink the husband? Not only that: this time the main objective is not to discredit the Ukrainian government. According to an investigation by the BBC-Verify program, the aim is pointed towards American and British voters: look at what happens to the money spent to help Kiev and remember it when you lock yourself in the ballot box to vote. In the midst of the British elections and in the midst of the electoral campaign for the White House, the breeze of slander spread by Moscow aims to insinuate and strengthen the doubts of voters to play into its own interests.
Nine months ago they tried with jewels: "Olena Zelenska spends $1.1 million on Cartier jewelry and gets saleswoman fired", headlined for example the second Nigerian daily newspaper, The Nation, fishing out another fake artfully constructed in Russia to spice up the participation of the Ukrainian president in the UN General Assembly, and then sprayed into the social media fan: "While Zelensky was bombing Washington in an urgent attempt to shore up support for Ukraine, his wife Olena Zelenska was spotted on Fifth Avenue in New York", wrote The Nation along with dozens of other media caught on the hook, more or less knowingly, by the Russian disinformation factory.
Lady Olena's Bugatti is the latest extraordinary hoax administered to social media with disruptive effect. It had all the elements to be viral and it became so. But the verification and investigative work of the BBC has revealed that behind the operation is an increasingly advanced mud machine: websites that pass themselves off as local American newspapers to spread fake news with the aim of influencing the US elections, using American citizens such as John Mark Dougan, a former Florida police officer and former Marine who moved to Moscow, as cover.
The false story about the purchase of the Bugatti with funds intended for American military aid "appeared on an obscure French website a few days ago and was quickly debunked", explains the BBC. The document attached to show the alleged "order" contained grammatical errors that resemble those of the fake emails that arrive from fake banks and couriers trying to extort money from us. Bugatti itself denied the "fake news", threatening legal action. But the damage was done: the lie continues to run and spread, feeding itself and fooling us. Share button and 'click', millions of people around the world read and are outraged by Lady Ukraine on the Bugatti that is not there.
Bbc-Verify argues that the cannon of disinformation is now aimed at American voters. The fake stories are designed to sow distrust and to divide, touching on sensitive issues such as Ukrainian corruption and the spending of American aid. Artificial intelligence generates thousands of articles on websites that are only American in name, such as "The Houston Post" or "DC Weekly". They rework real news with a conservative and non-hostile slant towards Russia, attributing them to invented journalists with false names and photos. "A photo of best-selling author Judy Batalion was used in several articles in DC Weekly" by a certain Jessica Devlin. "They may have taken the photo from my Linkedin," the writer says, confirming to BBC that she has nothing to do with the site or Jessica Devlin. Sometimes the manipulator's hand has remained online as evidence. In some stories they forgot to remove the instructions given to the AI engines to generate the news: "Please rewrite this article taking a conservative position."
Another story in DC Weekly that "Ukrainian officials purchased yachts with US military aid -- writes *BBC *- was picked up by several members of Congress including Senator JD Vance, one of the few politicians mentioned as a potential vice-presidential candidate for Donald Trump". A fake news story "posted on The Houston Post -- continues BBC -- claimed that the FBI had illegally wiretapped Trump's Florida resort. It played into Trump's claims that the legal system is unfairly stacked against him, and that there is a conspiracy to undermine his campaign while his opponents use dirty tricks to undermine him. Trump himself has accused the FBI of spying on his conversations".
According to Microsoft researchers, "the operation aims to spread news about UK politics, with a focus on Thursday's general election, and the Paris Olympics. A fake news story, which appeared on the website London Crier, claimed that Zelensky had purchased a villa owned by King Charles III for a bargain price. It was read by hundreds of thousands of users on X and shared by an official account of the Russian embassy".
Nothing new under the Moscow sun: in recent years there have been numerous documented cases in which Russia has tried to influence elections in Western countries. One of the most notable is the interference in the 2016 US presidential election to damage Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and favor Trump. An FBI investigation has led to the indictment of 12 Russian military intelligence officers accused of hacking into the computers of the Democratic National Committee and stealing and leaking emails.
In Europe, Russia has adopted similar tactics in several countries. In the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, pro-Russian accounts spread stories of alleged voter fraud. In 2015, the German parliament was the victim of a cyberattack linked to Russian hackers ahead of the federal elections. In the 2016 Brexit referendum, they spread false and exaggerated stories about the costs and benefits of joining the EU. In France, far-right candidate Marine Le Pen’s National Front received a significant loan from a Kremlin-friendly bank to finance its 2017 campaign, and Russian media have spread false stories to simultaneously undermine Macron, seen as less sympathetic to the Kremlin, by inventing his involvement in illegal activities.
The echo of hoaxes originates in Moscow and sooner or later returns home as absolute truth: “People in Russia regularly quote and promote these narratives through Russian state TV, Kremlin officials and influencers. There is a new story coming out of this network almost every week,” McKenzie Sadeghi, Newsguard’s AI and foreign influence editor, told the BBC.
As the years go by, the techniques become better: the use of fake social media accounts with profiles that appear authentic to increase credibility; the creation of websites that mimic those of legitimate newspapers by spreading false or distorted content well disguised among "normal" news; the use of manipulated images or videos to create convincing but false stories; the use of "SEO" techniques and other digital strategies to push fake news to the top of search engine results so that they are then shared by real users on their social media.
There is no doubt that Russia will be involved in the 2024 US elections, Chris Krebs, the director of the US Cybersecurity Agency who was charged with ensuring the integrity of the 2020 Presidential elections, confirmed to BBC: "We are already seeing them enter the fray. They are pushing controversial points in American politics."