A supposed news website named BrutInfo has been impersonating the French media outlet Brut as well as several journalists from Le Monde, since at least October 1. Registered on September 28 with the Lithuanian hosting provider Hostinger and now unavailable, the domain notably featured an article claiming that Emmanuel Macron was building a gigantic presidential bunker costing more than €148 million.
The article was accompanied by a video with a voice-over that appeared to have been generated by artificial intelligence, along with an alleged interview with a person supposedly working on the construction of the fake bunker, also AI-generated. This video was shared by a few users on social media. Le Monde was able to identify at least one post on the social network X (formerly Twitter) that generated over 800,000 views.
All evidence points to the involvement of a previously identified group, referred to by experts under the code name "Storm-1516." Linked to Russian actors, Storm-1516 has published massive amounts of fake content in support of the Kremlin, generally targeting Western countries, including France and the United States. Several fake news websites have already been attributed to the group, typically containing a handful of articles either copied from real media or generated by artificial intelligence, and designed to lend credibility to the fake platform.
One or more articles containing false information intended to discredit Ukraine or its supporters have been circulated. Storm-1516 also publishes articles in real international media outlets, usually on websites with low editorial standards that accept paid external contributions.
The group also produces videos, using both artificial intelligence and paid actors presented as experts or whistleblowers. These individuals, often hiding their faces, recite prewritten scripts. As highlighted by the collective Gnida Project (which, according to the media outlet Intelligence Online, is suspected of laundering information from US intelligence), the speaker in the video about the supposed presidential bunker had already appeared in previous videos produced by the group.
Pro-Kremlin influencers
Viginum, France's state agency against disinformation, has detailed how the distribution of the group's content on social media is often entrusted to paid accounts or to carefully selected influencers. For a long time, the far-right, pro-Putin, Australian influencer Simeon Boikov, also known as "Aussie Cossack," published a lot of content attributed to Storm-1516.
He has had Russian nationality since at least 2023 and has received funding from Pravfond, a legal aid fund for Russians and the country's "allies," which has repeatedly been used to pay the legal fees of Russian spies arrested abroad. Former US police officer John Dougan, who is exiled in Russia and linked to dozens of fake English-language news sites, also played a key role in publishing or amplifying content intended to destabilize Ukraine and its allies.
Storm-1516's campaigns have generally struggled to reach audiences beyond online conspiracy communities or groups already sympathetic to Kremlin narratives. Nevertheless, this strategy is part of Russia's broader disinformation strategy: constantly publishing content of varying quality, usually by outsourcing at every level.