The Viginum service, a French body that combats foreign digital interference, announced on Monday (12) that it had discovered a network of Russian pages created to spread disinformation and Kremlin propaganda in Europe and the United States.
(RFI) Called “Portal Kombat”, the network is “structured and coordinated” and includes 193 web pages with very similar information, according to the state body, which investigated the portals between September and December 2023. The pages disseminate “pro-Russian content aimed at an international audience”, especially in countries that support Ukraine, the institution said.
According to the French newspaper Le Monde, the Russian pages are also intended to fuel the spread of fake news on social networks. At the end of last year, an account on X (formerly Twitter), belonging to an alleged journalist called Jules Vincent, published a long written and audio message accusing Ukraine of selling land to the son of billionaire George Soros for the disposal of toxic waste. But, according to the publication, Jules Vincent does not exist, and in the days that followed the message was shared by a series of websites, which are part of this network.
Pro-Russia propaganda
Several of the portals have the word “pravda” (“truth” in Russian) as their domain name and have different callsigns depending on the language. The page intended to be read in Spain, for example, is called pravda-es.com. For English-speaking countries, it is pravda-en.com.
Between June 23 and September 19, these pages published more than 15,000 articles, mainly based on statements, media or publications by Russian or pro-Russian personalities, Viginum pointed out. Another 180 pages, digitally linked to the Pravda network, disseminate similar content in Russian, the French agency discovered.
“Portal Kombat is the small tip of an iceberg of disinformation, linked to the expansion of digital sites and the explosion of social networks,” said an official French source.
Invasion of Ukraine
The aim of “Portal Kombat” is to justify the Russian invasion of Ukraine, said a French diplomatic source. “Very ideologically oriented, these contents expose narratives that are clearly inaccurate or misleading,” he warned.
“The articles disseminated mainly serve to cover up the conflict in Ukraine, on the one hand presenting the Russian invasion in a positive light to Western populations, and on the other hand defaming Ukraine and its leaders, regularly presented as ‘corrupt’, ‘Nazi’ or ‘incompetent’,” says the Viginum report.
Complex ecosystem
According to the report, the audience for these sites appears to be very limited: “according to the SimilarWeb tool, the average traffic on the portals of the Pravda ecosystem during the month of November 2023 was around 31,000 visits. The site aimed at France is also the least visited, a pattern reminiscent of the difficulty of other sites identified in pro-Russia propaganda campaigns in Europe that struggle to gain real visibility.
However, the “Portal Kombat” network is yet another example of the complex ecosystem that today serves to disseminate pro-Russia narratives among both Russian-speaking and European populations. Certain sources amplified by the sites of this network are themselves information media probably created to repeat narratives favorable to Russia, thus constituting a tangle of sites that obscures the identity of the actors operating in fake news and influence campaigns.
A military source warned that there is a possibility that the “Portal Kombat” pages will be boosted again in the future.
(With Le Monde and AFP) *** Translated by DEFCONPress FYI Team ***