Russian Deepfake Network Targets Olympians

- The "Matryoshka" campaign is part of a larger, persistent Russian disinformation effort known as "Doppelgänger," which has been active since at least May 2022. This broader operation creates networks of fake websites that mimic legitimate news outlets like *The Guardian* and *Der Spiegel* to spread pro-Kremlin narratives. Between August 2023 and March 2024, political ads linked to Doppelgänger reached over 38 million accounts in France and Germany alone. - The U.S. and UK have sanctioned two Russian IT companies, Structura National Technologies and the Social Design Agency (SDA), for their role in the Doppelgänger campaign. The U.S. Treasury asserts these firms carry out the influence operations at the direction of the Russian Presidential Administration. Key individuals sanctioned include Ilya Andreevich Gambashidze, the founder of SDA, and Nikolai Aleksandrovich Tupikin, the CEO of Structura. - One specific deepfake targeted International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Kirsty Coventry. The video used a real clip from a Euronews press conference before an AI-cloned voice made false statements that Ukrainian athletes came to Milan for "crazy political PR" and were "aggressive" and "irritating." BBC Verify has analyzed at least 43 examples of such fake news targeting the 2026 Winter Olympics. - Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych was a primary target of the campaign after he was disqualified for planning to wear a helmet depicting Ukrainian athletes killed by Russian forces. The network spread numerous fabrications, including a fake *Reuters* report claiming Ukrainian authorities would pressure the IOC by publishing members' personal data, and a fabricated *Charlie Hebdo* cover portraying Heraskevych as a Nazi. - The operational tactics of these networks are layered. "Seeder" accounts first introduce the disinformation, which is then amplified by "quoter" accounts to reach a global audience. The "Matryoshka" tactic specifically involves overwhelming journalists and fact-checkers by spamming them with fake news and challenging them to verify it, a method designed to divert resources and muddy the information environment. - While the reach of these campaigns can be extensive, multiple analyses, including from Meta, have noted that their success in generating authentic engagement is often limited. The primary goals appear to be undermining trust in democratic institutions, polarizing public opinion, and creating a pretext for Russian state media to pick up and legitimize the false narratives for a domestic audience. - The Doppelgänger network, which encompasses Matryoshka, has been classified by Meta as an advanced persistent threat (APT). It operates a network on X (formerly Twitter) with hundreds of thousands of inauthentic bot accounts that can post in a coordinated manner at a rate of more than one tweet per second on some days.