fake Russian news sites have been taken down

Online, an article by 20 minutes seems to accuse Ukraine of blocking wheat exports. Another of Guardian claims the Boutcha massacre, still in Ukraine, was staged. A video evokes the rise in cremation prices in Germany. However, everything is false. At least 17 media were cloned using the same method: copy the domain name and apply a different extension to it. 20minutes.fr, for example, became 20minuts.com. The Meta company has just dismantled this network.

The NGO EU DisinfoLab investigated this vast misinformation campaign. “There is a first narrative that we called ‘winter is coming’. It’s really a narrative that focuses on the fact that winter is coming, that there will be no more gas, soon no more milk, more food, and therefore it is absolutely necessary to stop the sanctions […]. The second part is a very anti-Ukrainian narrative that says Ukraine is a corrupt Nazi state“, specifies Alexandre Alaphilippe, executive director of the NGO.