Russia steps up disinformation campaigns against France ahead of Paris elections and Olympics

According to French officials and cybersecurity experts in Europe and the United States, these disinformation campaigns, orchestrated from Russia, have reached a record level due to the legislative elections and the Paris Olympics.

More than a dozen reports over the past year have pointed to an intensification of Russian efforts to undermine France, particularly the upcoming Games, and President Emmanuel Macron, who is one of Ukraine's most vocal supporters in Europe.

Russian anti-French disinformation campaigns began online early last summer, but first became tangible in October 2023, when more than 1,000 Russian-linked bots relayed photos of Stars of David spray-painted in Paris and its suburbs.

A French intelligence report says the Russian FSB intelligence agency ordered the defacement, and subsequent vandalism, of a memorial dedicated to those who helped save Jews from the Holocaust.

Photos of each event were amplified on social media by fake accounts linked to the Russian disinformation site RRN, cybersecurity experts say. Russia denies any such campaign. The French intelligence report said RRN was part of a larger operation orchestrated by Sergei Kiriyenko, a senior Kremlin official.

“You have to think of it as an ecosystem,” said a French military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to reveal details about the Russian effort. “It’s a hybrid strategy.”

The graffiti and vandalism are not directly related to the Russian war in Ukraine, but they have provoked a strong reaction from the French political class, with denunciations in parliament and in public debate. Anti-Semitic attacks are on the rise in France, and the war in Gaza has proven divisive.

The Stars of David could be interpreted as support for Israel or as opposition. The effect was to sow division and unease. French Jews in particular found themselves unwittingly thrust into the political fray, even though they represent only a small part of the French population, numbering only 500,000.

In March, just after Macron raised the possibility of deploying the French military to Ukraine, a fake recruitment campaign was launched for the French military in Ukraine, generating a series of messages on Russian and French-language Telegram channels that were picked up in Russian and Belarusian media, according to another French government report seen by The Associated Press. On June 1, coffins appeared in front of the Eiffel Tower, reading “French Soldiers in Ukraine.”

The large-scale disinformation efforts are finding little traction in France, but the Russian public may be the real target, officials said, showing that Russia's war in Ukraine is, as Putin has said, really a war with the West.

Among the broader goals, the French military official said, is a long-term and sustained effort to sow social discord, erode trust in the media and democratic governments, weaken NATO and undermine Western support for Ukraine. Denigrating the Olympics, from which most Russian athletes are barred, is a bonus, according to French officials who have been monitoring increasingly strident messages warning of impending unrest ahead of the Games.

On June 9, the National Rally (RND) defeated Emmanuel Macron’s party in the European elections. The party has a history of close ties to Russia: one of its leading figures, Marine Le Pen, has cultivated ties with Putin for many years and supported Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014. And its leading candidate for prime minister, Jordan Bardella, has said he is opposed to sending long-range weapons to kyiv.

Among the more than 4,400 messages collected since mid-November by antibot4navalny, a collective that analyzes the behavior of Russian bots, those targeting audiences in France and Germany predominated. The number of weekly messages ranged from 100 to 200, except for the week of May 5, when it dropped to near zero, according to the data. That week, coincidentally, was a public holiday in Russia.

Many of the messages redirect either to RRN or to sites that appear identical to those of major French media outlets, but whose domain and content have changed. At least two of the most recent mirror sites are registered in Wallis and Futuna, a French territory in the Pacific located 10 time zones from Paris. A click at the top of the fake page redirects to the real news sites themselves to give the impression of authenticity. Other messages redirect to original sites controlled by the campaign itself, dubbed Doppelganger.

The redirects shifted to the European elections and continued after Macron called snap parliamentary elections just three weeks before the deadline. Three-quarters of the posts in the week before the first round of the June 30 parliamentary elections that were aimed at a French audience were either critical of Macron or supportive of the National Rally, according to data shared with The Associated Press.

An article on a fake website claiming to come from the news magazine Le Point and the French press agency AFP, criticizing Macron.

“Our leaders have no idea how ordinary French people live, but are ready to destroy France in the name of helping Ukraine,” the newspaper headlined on June 25.

Another site falsely claimed to belong to Macron’s party, offering to pay €100 to vote for him — and linking to the party’s real website. And yet another inadvertently left a generator AI prompt asking for a rewrite of an article “taking a conservative stance against the liberal policies of the Macron administration,” according to findings last week by Insikt Group, the threat research division of cybersecurity consultancy Recorded Future.

“They automatically take the text, send it to the AI ​​and ask it to introduce biases or inclinations into the article and rewrite it,” said Clement Briens, an analyst for Recorded Future.

Briens said the site's built-in measurement tools are likely intended to prove that the campaigns were money well spent for “whoever is making the payments for these operations.”

The French government’s cybersecurity watchdog, Viginum, has published several reports since June 2023 pointing to Russian efforts to sow division in France and elsewhere. It was around this time that pro-Kremlin Telegram feeds began promoting “Olympics has Fallen” — a fake Netflix movie complete with an AI-generated voice that sounded like Tom Cruise that criticized the International Olympic Committee, according to Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center.

Microsoft said the campaign, dubbed Storm-1679, is stoking fears of violence at the Games and last fall released digitally generated photos that referenced, among other things, attacks on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics.

The latest initiative, which began just after the first round of elections on June 30, combines fears of Olympic-related violence with the risk of protests after the decisive second round, antibot4navalny found. Viginum released a new report on Tuesday detailing the risks ahead for the Games — not in terms of violence but of disinformation.

“Digital information manipulation campaigns have become a real instrument of destabilization of democracies,” Viginum said. “This global event will give incalculable informational visibility to malicious foreign actors.” The word Russia does not appear anywhere.

Baptiste Robert, a French cybersecurity expert who ran unsuccessfully in the legislative elections as an unaffiliated centrist, called on his government – ​​and especially lawmakers – to prepare for the digital threats ahead.

“This is a global policy of Russia: they really want to push people to the extremes,” he said before the first round of voting. “It's working perfectly right now.”