First broadcast on obscure accounts on the social network X, a video labeled BBC and mentioning a purported study by the French organization Reporters sans frontières (RSF) on the Nazi tendencies of Ukrainian military personnel was then picked up by the Russian authorities themselves before being amplified by pro-Kremlin influencers. In a recent statement, RSF exposes the underbelly of a scheme to launder false information to justify Vladimir Putin’s war narrative.
« A lie can travel around the world while the truth puts on its shoes ». Russia has fully appropriated this quote often attributed to the American writer Mark Twain, as the officials of the French NGO Reporters sans Frontières like to remind us.".
Fake relay not the BBC of a fake RSF study
The facts, for their part verified: a video featuring all the standards of the British public broadcaster BBC and presenting RSF as the author of a “study” that allegedly listed a thousand Ukrainian soldiers with sympathies for Nazism, and whose content was viewed more than 400,000 times, mainly on X, as well as several Telegram channels. After investigation, of course, the BBC never produced this video, nor was RSF the originator of any study on this subject. Moreover, RSF’s director of advocacy and assistance Antoine Bernard, whose image was also usurped in the video, did not call on other media outlets to cover this elaborate story.
« The Russian authorities act like a purveyor of false information, using the notoriety of certain Western organizations (here the BBC and RSF) to lend credence to their war propaganda, and allow misinformation to run rampant to manipulate public opinion. Like a criminal organization, they apply the same methods to the field of information as the traffickers to give value to illegal income: disinformation is produced, laundered, and then injected back into the public discourse to be reused and perceived as a credible reality. »This is unacceptable," denounces Arnaud Froger, Head of the RSF investigative bureau, without a hint of anger.
According to the survey conducted by the NGO in collaboration with Bloom Social Analytics, a French startup specializing in the detection of influence operations, the video appears for the first time on the X network on August 24 at 1 p.m. It was posted by the so-called “Patricia”, who presents herself as a beautiful woman with a nice figure, like a “translator residing in France.“ Her account, which appears to be successful, publishes in English, German, French, and Russian, with an average of about forty posts per day since its creation in February 2024. Except that. The survey quickly shows that the profile photo of the beautiful Patricia also appears on a Russian site featuring images of blonde women ”to make avatars.” There is little doubt that the name of this account seems to have been automatically generated by X.
A rather seductive X troll picked up by the Kremlin's relay channels
As for our new “friend Patricia,” according to Grok – the artificial intelligence tool developed by Elon Musk and in direct connection to X – “she expresses very strong opinions, often in support of Russia and Vladimir Putin, while severely criticizing Ukraine and its supporters in Europe.” To put it simply and in a childish incredulity: a troll.
Starting from this particularly active fake account aimed at Kremlin propaganda in several languages, as usual, the false information begins to circulate, first quietly. Later that same day, it is picked up by Chay Bowes, an Irish entrepreneur known for his pseudo-journalistic antics, but above all for being one of the Western influence relays of Russia, where he is also very well received. Used to Moscow invitations, he had improvised as spokesperson before the United Nations Security Council in June 2023, a tribune in which he accused NATO of conducting a “proxy war” in Ukraine. The next day, “Aussie Cossack”, the real identity of Simeon Boikov, another propaganda entrepreneur benefiting from the Kremlin’s communication, echoes this false information and helps spread it on Telegram by sharing the video with his 83,000 subscribers. The same Simeon, known for having taken refuge at the Russian consulate in Sydney to avoid legal proceedings, after severely assaulting a pro-Ukrainian demonstrator. Since then, the entrepreneur has been carrying a Russian passport.
All networks combined, the inertia complicit of online platforms
Comfortably housed on Telegram, let’s recall that as a messaging service that generates the most traffic in Russia, the fake news is then officially, and of course innocently, taken up by the Russian authorities. First by the spokesperson of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Maria Zakharova, during her press conference on August 28, then by the Russian embassies in Chile and Bulgaria, to finally become gospel on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website.
The accusation against the French and European organization RSF being now cleared and normalized by the sacred official channel, the disinformation maneuver takes the path of a much more important relay, by well-known actors in the Russian information space, notably on Telegram. On September 4, Ruslan Ostachko, presenter on Channel One (NDLR: the country’s first propaganda channel), also a member of “Team Putin” – the team supporting Putin’s re-election in March 2024 – reposted the video on his Telegram account. Thus, as if by magic, the same day, the video reached a high level of audience reach with more than 156,000 views, after being picked up by military blogger Sergei Kolyasnikov.
In France, fake news is being spread by Brainless Partisans, an anonymous pro-Kremlin X account already well known to intelligence services for spreading a false video attributed to the US daily USA Today, claiming that the “Church of Satan” had thanked the organizers of the Paris Olympics.
Despite complaints from Reporters Without Borders and more than a dozen reports, the X network has not yet responded to their requests to moderate the posts that contributed to the spread of this false information. Although most of the reports are currently being reviewed by those we know, one of them «is not likely to be removed,» under the legal framework of the Digital Services Act of the European Union, the company has already cut ties with Musk’s friend.
And yet, even though all the elements justifying the removal of these false and usurping the identity of the RSF organization were provided directly by the organization itself, through the established procedure.
On the day these lines were published in GEOpolitics.fr, all the online networks involved, questioned about these facts, did not follow our proposals for responses.
The pro-Kremlin Irish entrepreneur Chay Bowes, cited in this article and who was one of the first to relay this video, has since removed his post after having a discussion with RSF.
Contacted by email and Telegram, Maria Zakharova herself did not provide any response to GEOpolitics.fr
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