At the end of January President Donald Trump decided to halt USAID funding to Ukraine that impacted on projects including those focused on war crime monitoring, veteran rehabilitation, work on the media and internally displaced person (IDP) assistance, as Kyiv Post reported.
Within days the Bot Blocker project – @antibot4navalny – identified several articles, ostensibly posted by legitimate European websites including Germany’s Der Spiegel and France’s Le Parisien, that were actually posted by the Russian “Doppelgänger” bot network.
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Posted as “opinion pieces” they applauded Trump’s decision and urged European capitals to follow suit, saying that they would face “catastrophe” as the financial burden of supporting Kyiv would now fall entirely on them.
Doppelgänger is a vast network of fake websites and social media bots that spread disinformation favorable to Moscow or hostile to Ukraine. Many of the bots are hosted by sanctioned Russian entities owned by Rostec and run by a Moscow based military psyops entity – unit 54777 – belonging to Russia’s main military intelligence directorate (GRU).
A follow-up report by Insider / Bot Blocker on Monday highlighted the release of a video, also produced by Doppelgänger using artificial intelligence that is intended to be produced by the exiled Russian rap band “Little Big.”
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The music video features AI-generated versions of the band’s lead singer Ilya Prusikin along with Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, Olaf Scholz, Ursula von der Leyen, and Emmanuel Macron.
Using the refrain “Russian boomerang,” the “politicians” say that sanctions on Russia forced on Europe by the US have boomeranged on Europe and resulted in higher petrol and gas prices, a deterioration in industrial output, and devaluation in currency.
Text running alongside the music and images includes slogans in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Turkish, and Greek such as:
According to Bot Blocker Doppelgänger bots are actively pushing the video, and have appeared to drop “everything else for it.”
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