Moscow, on the contrary, welcomed these statements: Kirill Dmitriev, the Kremlin's special envoy, described them as "iconic and historical." #Ukraine #Guerre #Zelensky (translated)
Donald Trump has announced an energy ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia that takes effect immediately, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has stated that he has no knowledge of this agreement and has requested guarantees and reciprocity from the Kremlin. #Ucrania #Rusia #Trump (translated)
The author warned that Russian ex-combatants could become a tool for the Kremlin in Europe by fuelling organised crime and carrying out terrorist attacks. They said Estonia was calling for an EU-wide entry ban and argued that European countries should act before the threat crossed their borders. The author said they had made the comments to POLITICO Europe. #Russia #Europe #Security #RU #EE #EU
The joyful reactions from the Kremlin to Donald Trump's statements, in which he called Ukrainian President Zelensky "hysterical" and suggested choosing another leader in Ukraine to allow peace negotiations with Russia, were accompanied by stinging comments from Russian officials regarding the state of Ukrainian politics. #Trump #Ucraina #Rusia (translated)
Trump was finally decisive: the bloody clown just wants war and must disappear as soon as possible. At the same time, the Vice Chairman of the Russian Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, known for his controversial comments and one of the main hawks of the Kremlin, wrote on his account on MAX, the Russian messaging network, that "Trump was finally decisive: the bloody clown just wants war and must disappear as soon as possible." #Ucrania #Zelenski #Rusia (translated)
He is hysterical and incapable of reasoning, and it is unlikely that he will be able to carry out any rational action. The spokesperson for the Kremlin, Dimitri Peskov, claims that Zelensky "is hysterical and incapable of reasoning and it is unlikely that he will be able to carry out any rational action." #Ucrania #Zelenski #Rusia (translated)
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky proposed a truce to Russia on attacks on energy facilities in exchange for Moscow to stop its offensives against Ukraine, while facing criticism from U.S. President Donald Trump and disqualifications from the Kremlin. #Ucrania #Zelenski #Rusia (translated)
Chancellor Merz conveyed through his spokesman that he is "outraged" by Schroeder's presence at the Kremlin for Putin's birthday. #GerhardSchroeder #VladimirPutin #SPD (translated)
Vladimir Potanin, the third richest person in Russia, stated that the country's economy could still decline, distancing himself from the Kremlin and criticizing a new tax on super profits that could harm investments. #Russie #Économie #VladimirPotanin (translated)
The author criticised the US president, saying that after speaking with Putin he had repeated several Kremlin disinformation claims. They argued that no serious US official with even basic knowledge of Ukraine and Russia would accept the points, which they described as nonsensical. #Politik #Desinformation #Ukraine #US #RU
Former Trump's special envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, claims that Putin's agreement regarding diesel delivery has hidden motives and that Ukraine must continue attacks on Russian refineries, highlighting the distrust of the Kremlin's intentions. #RăzboiUcraina #Putin #Combustibil (translated)
Operation Dark Clark – Russia built a real organisation around a false identity Most influence operations create fake people, fake websites or fake news stories. Operation Dark Clark appears to have gone considerably further: Russian operators built what looked like a functioning research organisation in Latin America, employed real people to produce genuine research and concealed from those employees who was ultimately directing their work. OpenAI disclosed the operation on 8 October after banning a cluster of accounts originating in Russia. The actors used ChatGPT while targeting countries across Latin America, principally to damage Ukraine’s reputation, manipulate domestic political debates and manage a self-described research organisation called the Social Research Center, or SRC. OpenAI assessed Dark Clark as Category Five on the six-level Breakout Scale, the first operation it has disrupted since beginning its influence-operation reporting to reach that level. A front organisation with real employees The SRC presented itself as a research platform studying subjects including Latin America’s relationship with India and the Indian diaspora. OpenAI found more than 60 articles on its website, most of them apparently original rather than plagiarised. Internal reports produced by the Russian operators discussed hiring, dismissals, salary scales, staffing and unfinished research projects, strongly suggesting that the operators controlled the organisation rather than merely collaborating with it. At the centre of the structure was “Mia Clark”, a fictitious identity reportedly used to manage social-media activity and communicate with staff. According to OpenAI, the available evidence indicates that employees working for SRC in Latin America were probably unaware that the organisation was being directed by Russian actors. They interviewed experts, conducted research and wrote papers in what appears to have been good faith. The deception therefore existed primarily at the organisational level: much of the work was real, but the identity and strategic purpose of the institution commissioning it were not. OpenAI This is one reason Dark Clark differs from the familiar model of a troll farm. A reader encountering an SRC paper might be looking at research genuinely written by a Latin American employee based on genuine interviews. The manipulation lies further upstream, in who built the institution, selected its direction and controlled its infrastructure. From forged emails to real events The operation also appears to have attempted something more ambitious than online persuasion: inducing real people to produce events that could later be turned into propaganda. In May 2026, according to the operators’ internal reports, they created an email address impersonating Lima’s regional education authorities and instructed schools to organise activities about Ukraine for a cultural-diversity event. The instructions included references to Stepan Bandera, whose historical legacy remains particularly contentious in Poland and parts of Eastern Europe. The operators claimed that some schools complied, replied to the false address and sent photographs of the events. OpenAI could not independently verify every claim contained in the operators’ reports. It did, however, find Peruvian reporting matching the story, followed by publications in Poland and an English-language outlet in Hungary. Some coverage included comments from a Polish MEP calling for people displaying what he described as anti-Polish attitudes to be declared persona non grata. OpenAI therefore concluded that the fabricated starting point appears to have entered genuine political debate across national borders. The mechanism is unusually effective because the final photographs need not themselves be fabricated. If people can be tricked into staging a real event on the basis of a forged instruction, the operation creates authentic visual evidence of something that was artificially initiated. The same method in Ecuador and Bolivia Dark Clark’s internal reports describe similar efforts elsewhere. In Ecuador, the operators claimed they used a fake education email to encourage schools to stage ceremonies involving President Daniel Noboa and Erik Prince, the former head of Blackwater. Ecuadorian media subsequently covered a matching controversy, and the country’s education minister issued a detailed denial. Other Ecuador-focused material included fabricated audio attributed to Ukraine’s consul and a false television report alleging that Noboa’s government was recruiting Ecuadorians to fight in Ukraine. Local fact-checker Lupa found that the supposed Teleamazonas report had never been broadcast, that images had been taken from Instagram, that the audio was AI-generated and that a company named in a supposed recruitment contract did not exist in Ecuador’s corporate registry. In Bolivia, an internal report described a fake audio recording supposedly made by an employee of state water company EPSAS during anti-government protests. It claimed that water supplies to La Paz would be cut and a state of emergency declared. The allegation produced a fact-check and an official denial. OpenAI says the operators explicitly described their objective as worsening the political crisis surrounding the demonstrations. Possible links to the post-Wagner influence machine Dark Clark did not emerge in a vacuum. The operators repeatedly asked ChatGPT about Politology and La Compania, names associated in previous investigations with the Russian influence apparatus that developed from structures once connected to Yevgeny Prigozhin. Forbidden Stories and its partners obtained 1,431 pages of internal documents describing a network known as “The Company”, which they reported had grown to almost 100 operatives and was conducting influence projects across roughly 30 Global South countries. Their investigation found that the organisation moved under the supervision of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, after Prigozhin’s death. Its documented budget for ten months of activity in 2024 was approximately €7.3 million. Two older Argentina campaigns claimed in Dark Clark’s internal reports — a false story about Javier Milei buying Cartier collars for his dogs and the staging of anti-Milei graffiti — had already been independently attributed by investigative journalists to Politology/La Compania. That is significant corroboration, but it is not enough to prove that every Dark Clark activity was run by the same organisational structure. AI was the back office, not the mastermind Perhaps the most important finding concerns artificial intelligence itself. In most documented cases, the Russians were not using ChatGPT to generate the propaganda seen by the public. Their principal use was administrative: drafting reports for an unknown superior, summarising operations, translating material and recording the supposed success of campaigns. Those reports also expose a weakness in the operators’ own measurement. OpenAI found instances in which they tried to claim credit for developments they had probably not caused, suggesting that they were not only attempting to manipulate Latin American audiences but also presenting an inflated picture of their effectiveness to whoever was supervising them. Dark Clark nevertheless broke further into the real world than any influence operation OpenAI had previously disrupted. Under the Brookings framework, Category Five means that an operation has escaped its original network and been amplified by high-profile individuals such as politicians. Dark Clark crossed that threshold because fabricated narratives appear to have provoked governmental denials, mainstream reporting and political comment in several countries. Its most important innovation was therefore not a particularly convincing deepfake. It was the construction of a partly genuine institution around a concealed foreign controller. The research could be real. The employees could be real. The interviews could be real. What was false was who they were ultimately working for. Sources OpenAI — Disrupting AI-enabled “false front” operations https://openai.com/index/disrupting-ai-enabled-false-front-operations/ Forbidden Stories — Propaganda Machine: Russia’s foreign influence strategy across three continents https://forbiddenstories.org/propaganda-machine-secret-documents-reveal-russias-foreign-influence-strategy-across-three-continents/ Forbidden Stories — Ghost Journalists, Cash and Kremlin Scripts: Argentina https://forbiddenstories.org/ghost-journalists-cash-and-kremlin-scripts-how-russian-operatives-tried-to-influence-argentinian-media/ openDemocracy — Russian influence operation in Bolivia https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/russia-bolivia-south-america-putin-evo-morales-wagner-prigozhin-covert-operations-propaganda-disinformation-foreign-interference/ Lupa Media — Fake Teleamazonas report about recruiting Ecuadorians for Ukraine https://lupa.com.ec/verificaciones/noboa-mercenarios-ucrania-ecuador/ Brookings Institution — The Breakout Scale https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-breakout-scale-measuring-the-impact-of-influence-operations/ Keywords: #DISINFORMED #Episode17 #OperationDarkClark #DarkClark #Russia #LatinAmerica #RussianInfluence #RussianDisinformation #Disinformation #InformationWarfare #InfluenceOperations #ForeignInterference #FIMI #FalseFront #FrontOrganisation #FakeInstitution #SocialResearchCenter #SRC #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #GenerativeAI #ChatGPT #OpenAI #NarrativeManipulation #SourceLaundering #InstitutionalManipulation #ForgedDocuments #FakeAudio #PoliticalInfluence #CovertInfluence #Peru #Ecuador #Bolivia #Argentina #Ukraine #Politology #LaCompania #TheCompany #SVR #WagnerLegacy #PropagandaMachine #GlobalSouth #BreakoutScale #OSINT #MediaManipulation #WRLD
The Kremlin stated on Saturday that Vladimir Putin "received with understanding" the American proposals "regarding de-escalation measures" in Ukraine during a phone call with his American counterpart, which led to the agreement on diesel exports, without providing further details. #Trump #Zelenski #Rusia (translated)
Kaja Kallas warned that the suspension of American sanctions on Russian diesel provides the Kremlin with extra revenue to continue the war in Ukraine, as the European Union refuses to relax pressure on Russia. #RăzboiUcraina #SancțiuniRusia #KajaKallas (translated)
"President Trump joins many actors who believe that Ukraine needs authentic, peace-oriented leadership, not the belligerent policies of Zelensky... Iconic and historic," said Kirill Dmitriev, the Kremlin's special envoy for economic cooperation, in a message posted on platform X. #Trump #Putin #Ucraina (translated)
The return of Russian General Sergei Surovikin in the context of the war in Ukraine is viewed with skepticism by experts, who believe that his experience in Syria will not successfully replicate in Ukraine and that his loyalty to the Kremlin remains questionable. #RăzboiÎnUcraina #SergheiSurovikin #Kremlin (translated)
"President Trump joins the many actors who believe that Ukraine needs a direction truly oriented towards peace, rather than Zelensky's warlike policy… Iconic and historic," said Kirill Dmitriev, Kremlin special envoy for economic cooperation, in a message on X. #Ukraine #Trump #Poutine (translated)
The author wrote that US agencies had uncovered Russians plotting against the United States, including a Kremlin-backed spy network that had tried to hire a hitman to assassinate a specific person on US soil. They added that just days later, President Trump announced an oil deal with Putin. #Russia #SpyNetwork #USPolitics #US #RU
During the discussion on the state of the global energy sector, the Russian side confirmed its readiness to supply the American and global markets with oil and oil products. I am convinced that this will have a positive impact on the entire global economy. The website kremlin.ru immediately published a statement from Vladimir Putin himself, which is quite rare: "During the discussion on the state of the global energy sector, the Russian side confirmed its readiness to supply the American and global markets with oil and oil products. I am convinced that this will have a positive impact on the entire global economy." #Trump #Putin #Ukrajina (translated)
