France uncovers massive Russian disinformation campaign

Dubbed 'Portal Kombat'

France has revealed a broad Russian disinformation effort aimed at undermining Western support for Ukraine, the country's online interference detection agency has announced.

The Viginum agency said the "structured and coordinated" campaign mainly targets Europe and the USA through a network of 193 websites spreading pro-Russia disinformation.

The agency, which France established in 2021 to identify external mis- and disinformation, investigated the network - dubbed "Portal Kombat" - between September and December last year. It found the websites were spreading pro-Russia disinformation, targeting countries that support Ukraine.

There are three "ecosystems" of websites in the network. The first all share 'pravda' (Russian for "truth") in their URLs, with only minor differences depending on the region they target. For example, pravda.en.com for English-speaking countries and pravda.fr.com for francophones.

The Pravda sites were largely established in June last year, and were found to have "identical technical characteristics: a common IP address hosted on a server located in Russia."

Another ecosystem mostly targets Russian-speaking audiences in Ukraine, with some targeting specific locales like Kherson or Mariupol.

Several of the sites, such as the Ukraine-masquerading topnews.uz.ua, were created several years ago and have only recently become active.

Between June and September 2023 the sites collectively published more than 150,000 pro-Russia articles, typically translations of Russian content. One, a channel on the French version of Telegram, was publishing up to nine articles an hour.

Viginum said, "Although this network of at least 193 sites initially covered news from Russian and Ukrainian localities, it changed the day after Russia invaded Ukraine and started to target occupied Ukrainian territories, then several Western countries supporting Ukraine and its population.

"The main objective seems to be to cover the Russo-Ukrainian conflict by presenting positively ‘the special military operation' and denigrating Ukraine and its leaders. Very ideologically oriented, this content repeatedly presents inaccurate or misleading narratives."

A French diplomatic source has said that the main aim of the content is to justify and build support for Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, with "narratives that are clearly untrue or misleading."

Traffic to the sites is currently low; Viginum said average traffic to the five Pravda sites was 31,000 visitors in November last year. However, the agency warned they are ready to be activated "aggressively" as part of a large-scale disinformation campaign.