A strange YouTube channel appeared in August. Called "International Stringer Media," it claims to "work with stringers [freelance journalists] all over the world," but has only 200 subscribers and its profile photo is AI-generated. Most significantly, the vast majority of the videos published, around 20 or so, are in French. They are mainly interviews with political figures or experts interviewed on geopolitics, particularly the war in Ukraine. The person conducting the interviews never appears on screen, but most of these videos feature people interviewed by videoconference who support the Russian regime.

Almost all these videos are then picked up by the pro-Russian, French-language site Stratpol. The site's manager, former military officer Xavier Moreau, also presents a TV program for Russian media RT. The articles that repost the videos stand out from the rest of the content published on the site. Some of the wording is disconcerting – a reference to MEP Gilbert Collard, for example, is presented as being "according to French politics" – and many sentence formulations suggest that the text has either been taken from a translation or generated automatically.

Some of the interviews have also been shared by several Russian-speaking Telegram channels identified as regularly disseminating Russian propaganda. Le Monde has learned that at least one of the interviewees was not approached from France but from Russia. She was contacted – in English – by Arsen Papyan, a Russian-Armenian entrepreneur who, on his Telegram channel, claims to be an adviser to the Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament. When contacted, the Stratpol website claimed not to know who ran the "International Stringer Media" channel, stating that the articles featuring these interviews had been submitted via a form available on its website. When contacted by email, Papyan did not respond to Le Monde's questions.

There is a common thread running through the Russian digital influence campaigns that NGOs, the authorities and Le Monde have been observing for other a year: Their use of numerous subcontractors, which creates genuine ambiguity about who is behind the operations. Meta attributed the "Doppelgänger" network, an extensive array of fake news sites and non-genuine accounts amplifying pro-Russian content in Europe, the USA, and Israel, to two Russian companies, Social Design Agency and Structura. These companies have subsequently been sanctioned by the European Union. The fake Facebook and Twitter accounts used by Doppelgänger could come from wider networks, which lease or sell these dummy accounts to the highest bidder, some of which are used in cryptocurrency scams, for instance.

You have 50% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.