What do stencils of French military coffins painted on walls in Paris, graffiti in Warsaw, Poland, calling for new elections in Ukraine, and stickers of the faces of “killed Ukrainian soldiers” stuck on buildings in Germany have in common?
According to the latest security report published by the social network Meta on Thursday, August 15, these different campaigns were all promoted online by the same network of fake Facebook accounts, as part of a campaign that attempted to “reducing support for kyiv while pretending to defend Ukraine's interests”for example by highlighting the losses of the Ukrainian army, or by calling for new elections. The company's security researchers believe that this campaign, which they compare to a “three-dimensional chess game”, had only very limited success.
The promotion by the same network of several “physical” operations of this kind, mainly in France, Poland, Germany or Moldova, however suggests that these actions were coordinated. “While we cannot confirm that these events were organized by the same people who promoted them online, some events used flyers containing QR codes linking to a Telegram channel. [commun] »also promoted by some fake Facebook pages, notes Meta.
Links to Star of David Stencils
The company considers that the Facebook page of a so-called “Ukrainian artistic collective”, which had claimed responsibility in June for the tags on the coffins of French soldiers in Ukraine, was an integral part of this network. As were other pages, this time in Romanian, which relayed videos of a Moldovan involved in the “Star of David stencils” case: these graffiti, which had caused a great deal of emotion when they appeared in November on the walls of buildings in the Paris region, are considered by French investigators to be the result of a Russian interference operation.
Who controlled this network of fake pages, which also aimed, in their publications, to reach the Ukrainian diaspora in Europe? Meta explains that he discovered digital traces linking this network to “individuals located in Russia”for one part “linked to many inauthentic campaigns carried out in the past”. Campaigns carried out on behalf of the Russian Internet Agency, Yevgeny Prigozhin's disinformation company, the Social Design Agency, which created the disinformation network “Doppelgänger”, or the pro-Russian propaganda media outlet NewsFront.
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Source: Lemonde
