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By Eva Maitland and Madeline Roache - NewsGuard
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As the war in Ukraine approaches the three-year anniversary of the Russian invasion that launched the conflict, NewsGuard has now identified and debunked 302 false claims relating to the war, nearly all of them originating as Russian propaganda.
These 302 claims appear in NewsGuard's Misinformation Fingerprints proprietary database of viral false narratives that NewsGuard analysts have identified and debunked. NewsGuard analysts have identified 551 websites spreading these false claims.
Both the content and tactics behind the Russian efforts have evolved since the February 24, 2022, invasion, in both subtle and stark ways.
• As the war has gone on, Russian disinformation operatives have increasingly turned to artificial intelligence (AI), which has served as a force multiplier for Russian propagandists, both in the scale and persuasiveness of their campaigns. NewsGuard debunked 112 false claims in the first year of the war, one of which was AI, 71 in the second, five of which were AI, and 119 in the third, 16 of which were AI. AI has also facilitated the creation of fake news sites posing as credible media. Leading Russian propagandist John Mark Dougan has acknowledged to NewsGuard that he uses AI as a force multiplier.
• In the early months of the war, Russian propaganda often focused on alleged claims about the prevalence of Nazism in Ukraine, along with denials that Russia targeted civilian targets. More recently, Russia has pushed baseless false claims about Ukrainian corruption, Zelensky's supposedly declining domestic political support, and wasteful spending of Western dollars, with many of these accusations created and spread by Dougan. According to comments made by Russian television presenter Vladimir Solovyov on Russian state TV, one of these false claims—that Zelensky has only a four percent approval rating—may have come from a phone conversation Russian President Vladimir Putin had with U.S. President Donald Trump. Solovyov said, "Many of the narratives being voiced [by Trump] largely materialized after their [Putin and Trump's] conversation."
• Russia's propaganda efforts are often funded, unknowingly, by major American and global brands whose advertisements are fed onto Russian disinformation sites automatically as part of the programmatic advertising ecosystem through which ads will appear on low-quality websites if brands don't take steps to prevent it.
AI in action: How artificial intelligence supercharges pro-Kremlin propaganda
In 2022, NewsGuard debunked just one AI-generated falsehood emanating from Russia. In the second year of the war, NewsGuard debunked five AI-generated false claims, and there were 16 in the third. Indeed, as AI tools became more readily available, the easy access to AI image, audio, video and text generators has enabled Russia and its allies to reach more people, in more languages, with more convincing false claims.
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For example, the first deepfake used by Russia and identified by NewsGuard—in March 2022, three weeks after Russia's invasion—is a blurry and pixelated video. It shows Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky standing behind a presidential podium, urging Ukrainians to surrender. Zelensky's head wobbled above an unnaturally still body. In contrast, a November 2023 video showing Zelensky on Ukrainian TV channel TSN supposedly asking Ukrainian soldiers to abandon their posts reflects a clear leap in technology. The newer deepfake's only giveaway was the occasional disconnect between the movements of Zelensky's mouth and the words spoken.
AI has also helped pro-Kremlin sources impersonate credible Western media—including the BBC, CNN, and Bloomberg News—to spread false claims. Since the war began, NewsGuard has debunked 44 false narratives that relied on posing as credible media, with 24 appearing in the last year. AI technology was used to tamper with authentic video news reports, create fabricated magazine and newspaper covers, and generate video news reports appearing to be well-known news brands.
For example, in early February 2025, a fake E! News video segment with an AI-generated voiceover falsely claimed that USAID (United States Agency for International Development) paid millions of dollars for Hollywood celebrities to visit Kyiv. This fake video—no USAID or other U.S. taxpayer money was spent on these trips—appeared to be so credible that it amassed 31 million views after it was shared by high-profile figures including X owner Elon Musk and Donald Trump Jr.
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The effort appears to be the biggest success yet for Matryoshka, a well-documented Russian government-affiliated influence operation named after the Russian nesting doll that has previously targeted the Paris Olympics and U.S. elections.
The clip was one of 20 false videos, shared with NewsGuard by antibot4navalny, an anonymous volunteer group tracking Russian influence operations, about USAID released by Matryoshka in February 2025 apparently seeking to exploit the Trump administration's dismantling of the agency to spread anti-Ukraine sentiment. Matryoshka also has imitated outlets including The Wall Street Journal and Fox News to spread false claims that USAID spent billions on a pro-Ukraine PR campaign on YouTube and that the agency bribed the Eurovision song contest for Ukraine to win in 2022.
Shifting Sands: From Nazi accusations to elaborate corruption claims
As the war enters its fourth year, Russian disinformation campaigns have shifted their focus. At first, narratives typically denied well-documented Russian attacks on civilians and echoed the Russian government's justifications for the full-scale invasion, including the need to "denazify" Ukraine and the supposed existential threat posed to Russia by NATO, including false claims of U.S. bioweapons labs in Ukraine.
In the first year of the war, NewsGuard debunked seven false narratives seeking to portray Ukrainian society as dominated by Nazi ideology, in the second six such myths, and in the third, just three.
Over the years, more false claims of NATO soldiers fighting in Ukraine and government corruption and fewer false claims that Ukraine is run by Nazis.
Similarly, false claims denying widely documented Russian attacks on civilians also declined as international attention shifted away from the war. Nine such false narratives were debunked in the first year, two in the second year, and two in the third.
Meanwhile, the theme that Russia is fighting NATO soldiers on the ground in Ukraine has persisted, in what appears to be an effort by the Kremlin to portray Western governments as lying about the extent of their involvement in the war, and to suggest that Russia is fighting a much larger enemy.
NewsGuard has debunked 32 such Russian false narratives, including a January 2024 claim that it killed dozens of French fighters in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv and a February 2025 claim that Russia killed a Danish military pilot. NewsGuard debunked 10 such claims in the first year of war, eight in the second, and 14 in the third, indicating that portraying the war as a physical battle with the West remains a priority for Russian campaigns.
However, as Western aid has become increasingly crucial to Ukraine, and amid growing opposition to continued Western support for Ukraine in some quarters, the biggest shift in disinformation focus has been in portraying Ukrainian officials as squandering Western aid funds, which are approximately $83 billion, according to German think tank the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. Out of 21 corruption-related narratives, NewsGuard debunked two corruption claims in the first year of the war, six in the second year, and 13 in the third year.
A total of 14 of NewsGuard's corruption-related narratives directly accuse Zelensky and first lady Olena Zelenska of spending $725 million of Western aid on luxury purchases, including mansions, yachts, and sports cars. Collectively, these claims have gained more than 66.4 million views on X, and include $75 million on two luxury yachts, $15 million on Hitler's Mercedes, and $92 million on a luxury ski resort in the French Alps. Zelensky was also accused of buying musician Sting's villa in Italy and King Charles' estate in England. The claim that Ukraine's first lady, Olena Zelenska, purchased a Bugatti Tourbillon sports car for $4.6 million, was the most viral, drawing 19.5 million views on X.
Homegrown, foreign-trained: the American propagandist behind 14 false claims about Zelensky
The driving force behind these false corruption claims that have amassed so many millions of views appears to be John Mark Dougan, a Florida deputy sheriff turned Kremlin propagandist.
Dougan is part of a Russian influence operation dubbed by Microsoft as Storm-1516. It appears to be an offshoot of the Internet Research Agency, a disbanded Russian troll farm.
NewsGuard has debunked 37 false narratives linked to Dougan and Storm-1516 targeting Ukraine, the U.S. 2024 election, the 2024 Paris Olympics, and the German 2025 election. Out of these narratives, 19 target Ukraine, with 14 specifically accusing Zelensky and his wife of using aid to buy real estate properties, luxury goods and sports cars. These 14 narratives have gained more than 66.4 million views.
A chart showing the growth in false claims by Russian disinformation group Storm-1516, and the countries the narratives target.
Dougan's campaigns use fabricated footage, fake documents, fictional phone conversations, and false images, often posting them on phony local news sites—a long way from his first attempts tracked by NewsGuard in August 2023, when real people posed in videos as whistleblowers or journalists.
The Storm-1516 campaign started by publishing approximately one such false narrative a month. By 2024, the group was publishing at least two false narratives a month. And in the third year of the war, NewsGuard debunked 31 Dougan-linked myths, 14 of which targeted Ukraine.
For example, a false narrative in February 2025 used fabricated documents and a video with an AI-generated voiceover to claim that Zelensky had bought the Eagle's Nest, a German mansion once owned by Adolf Hitler, for 14.2 million euros. The false narrative first originated on a German-language site called "Aktuell-Nachricht" ("Current News"), part of a Russian disinformation network of 102 AI-generated websites created in the run-up to the February 2025 German elections. (Read NewsGuard's report on the campaign here.)
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NewsGuard has identified 273 phony news sites of this type with links to Dougan, spreading disinformation that is then repeated by the leading Western chatbots, which NewsGuard has found have a limited ability to distinguish truth from fiction. In a conversation with NewsGuard, Dougan acknowledged that he initially relied on Western AI models to generate content and claimed he has since developed his own "censorship free" AI server.
'We can actually change worldwide AI'
Indeed, The Washington Post, citing European intelligence documents, reported that some of Dougan's payments from the GRU, Russia's military intelligence service, came after he encountered difficulties using Western AI systems and sought funding for his own AI generator independent of Western technology.
His efforts to secure financial backing from Russia for AI content generation have continued. On January 27, 2025, Dougan appeared at a roundtable discussion in Moscow called "The Role of the Media in the Fight against Strategic Disinformation," during which he said, "My one server in my home is writing almost 90,000 articles every month...It's not a tool to be scared of, it's a tool to be leveraged." Citing a NewsGuard audit that found that the top 10 generative AI models repeated Dougan's Russian disinformation narratives 32 percent of the time, Dougan added, "By pushing these Russian narratives from the Russian perspective, we can actually change worldwide AI."
Russian disinformation made possible by an ad from...unwitting Western brands
A chart showing how many websites that publish Russian disinformation carry programmatic advertisements and which ad tech platforms serve them.
NewsGuard has found that programmatic advertising (the automated buying and placing of ads using algorithms and data to target specific audiences) has continued to fund sites that spread disinformation about the war. Brands don't intend to fund Russian disinformation, but they often do when they fail to take steps to prevent these placements.
NewsGuard has identified and has been tracking 551 news and information websites spreading false narratives about the war. Of these, 87 continue to run programmatic advertising from major ad providers, including Google, MGID, and Criteo. Google, which is the largest online ad platform, feeds ads to 51 sites that spread Russian disinformation.
For example, Google delivers ads to the U.S.-based websites Tsarizm.com (NewsGuard Trust Score: 25/100) and ArmedForces.press (17.5/100); VTForeignPolicy.com (22.5/100), a pro-Russia commentary site that does has been linked by U.S. authorities to Russia's security apparatus; and six websites of the anonymously owned, multilingual network Avia.pro (7.5/100). Brands identified in advertisements on sites alongside false narratives in February 2025 alone include Amazon, Adobe, Citibank, The Ritz-Carlton, and Ford.
Programmatic advertising often creates odd bedfellows. In one case, NewsGuard identified an ad by the UN refugee agency UNHCR asking for funds to support Ukrainian families placed via the Google ad platform on Russian disinformation site VTForeignPolicy.com. (Disclosure: NewsGuard offers inclusion and exclusion lists and other brand-safety services that add a filter to the programmatic ad-buying process.)
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This advertising support for sites advancing Russian disinformation appears to violate the policies of major ad tech platforms and the European Commission's Code of Practice on Disinformation. The code, which was revised in June 2022, calls on digital platforms and ad-tech company signatories to prevent advertising from being delivered to publishers that "systematically provide harmful disinformation."
In response to an email from NewsGuard seeking comment on MGID's monetization of sites spreading Russian disinformation, a spokesperson at MGID said that it is "fully committed to ensuring that our advertising network complies with our content policies." MGID added, "Our guidelines strictly prohibit the monetization of websites that spread misinformation or misleading content. We continuously monitor our network to enforce these policies, and if any violations are identified, we take immediate action."
Google responded to NewsGuard's inquiry requesting the full lists of sites using Google's ad technology. NewsGuard provides full exclusion lists only to licensees, so declined the request. Criteo and Revcontent did not respond to NewsGuard's request for comment.
While the vast majority of false claims about the war serve Russian interests, NewsGuard found two pro-Ukraine false narratives, both of which circulated in the first year of the war. One used an old photograph to falsely claim that Zelensky was fighting on the front lines in 2022. The other used footage from a video game to falsely claim that it showed a heroic Ukrainian fighter pilot, known as the Ghost of Kyiv, shooting down Russian fighter jets. Ukraine's air force later admitted the Ghost of Kyiv was a myth.
Mascha Wolf and McKenzie Sadeghi contributed reporting
Editing by Dina Contini and Eric Effron
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