On 30 October 2023, independent Russian news website The Insider reported on a campaign allegedly organized by the Kremlin to disseminate pro-Russian narratives in Ukraine. As part of the campaign, The Insider claimed, articles imitating webpages of legitimate Ukrainian news websites were published and promoted on X (formerly Twitter).
The articles were all structured around a similar line of argumentation, the publication wrote: “They all write that defeat in the war [for Ukraine] is close and inevitable, [that] Israel will pull back military and financial aid earmarked for Ukraine, [that] Ukrainians face a winter without heating, without pensions and salaries, and that authorities are sending thousands of soldiers to slaughter, in the absence of military equipment, in order to maintain power.”
Concretely, one article copied the layout and name of Ukrainian media outlet Obozrevatel, the only difference with the legitimate outlet being a change in the website’s domain name. The author of the fake Obozrevatel article, which was published on October 25, argued that Ukraine faces military defeat in the town of Avdiivka near Donetsk, as it earlier did in nearby Bakhmut and Soledar. For this reason, the fake Obozrevatel article argued, “the [Ukrainian] army is forced to move from offensive to defensive”.
One of the other fake articles, published on the same day by a website imitating that of Ukrainian media outlet RBC, claimed that “Ukraine was no longer of interest to NATO” due to armed conflict in the Middle East. The last of the articles quoted by The Insider, which was also published on October 25, claimed that a “fight for money and for the personal welfare of our rulers [president Zelensky and his advisors]” was taking place, due to which Western countries would allegedly “close the money tap, and everything [would] fall”.
According to the investigation by The Insider, the fake articles published in Ukrainian were accompanied by a series of articles with similar content, also promoted on X, which imitated legitimate European media publications through the creation of spoof websites.