2024-01-26 15:59:11
In October 2023, hundreds of Stars of David were spray-painted in Paris and the region. Considered in principle as an anti-Semitic act, currently, the police’s privileged lead is that of a broad attempt to destabilize France by Russia, involving a vast network of fake news propagation sites. An investigation by Radio France published this Friday (26) shows the connections between actions in the Paris region and the Kremlin.
According to the Radio France investigation, it all started with the warning of a witness who saw, in the early hours of October 27, 2023, in the 10th arrondissement of Paris, a “woman and a man dressed in black, with hoods on their heads like if they were standing guard near her house. The woman had spray painted several stars. The resident called the police and the two individuals were detained. Also according to the witness, a third person took photos of the graffiti.
The couple, of Moldovan nationality, were placed in police custody. The man and woman had arrived hours earlier at Beauvais airport, on the outskirts of Paris, from Chisinau, the capital of Moldova.
Upon discovering that they were in an irregular situation, the police placed the couple in a detention center and ordered their expulsion. The ten or so stars they spray painted were quickly erased. At the time, the operation went unnoticed.
But three nights later, a second team painted new Stars of David, this time without being stopped. Subsequently, around 250 graffiti were found in three districts of Paris (14th, 15th and 18th) and in several nearby cities (Saint-Ouen, Saint-Denis, Issy-les-Moulineaux, Fontenay-aux-Roses and Vanves).
The case caused great commotion in the media and on social networks, which stated that the drawings were anti-Semitic demonstrations, registered in France and around the world, a few days after the start of Israel’s ground offensive in Gaza, following Hamas attacks on the territory. Israeli.
Shortly afterwards, however, the police revealed that several elements of the investigation did not correspond to an anti-Semitic act.
“It is an atypical operation compared to other anti-Semitic acts,” Paris Public Security Secretary Laurent Nuñez confided to BFMTV.
The operation seemed very well organized. Later, the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office discovered that there were close links between the first and second team of taggers.
In surveillance camera videos recorded on the second night, a man and a woman appear accompanied by a third person. “We think that this third person was the same person who accompanied the first couple”, explained a spokesperson for the Public Ministry, to the France Info website, referring to the photographer.
According to a source close to the case, confirming information published by the newspaper Libération, the second team managed to escape to Brussels by bus. People in the second group also arrived in France via Beauvais airport from Moldova and, like the first group, stayed in a hotel in the 9th district of Paris.
The investigation leads the police to Anatoli Prizenko, a 50-year-old Russian-speaking Moldovan who claimed to have masterminded the act, but said he intended to “support the Jews.”
But an investigation by France Inter showed that, on his social networks, Prizenko has a pro-Russian position, as does the man who was part of the first team of taggers, arrested in Paris, Alexandre Cocii.
Russian digital interference
The new element of the investigation came on November 9, when the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported Russian digital interference. 1,095 fake accounts were identified on platform Everything indicated, therefore, that the owners of these fake accounts were informed, or even complicit, in the graffiti operation.
The Virginum agency, which monitors foreign interference on the French Internet, believes that the actions are part of a much larger digital information manipulation campaign, which it called RRN. The three letters were chosen in reference to the RRN.world website.
Widely promoted by fake accounts that published the Stars of David, the site presents itself as a media outlet whose pro-Russian content criticizes Western support for Ukraine, accusing the Ukrainian regime of being neo-Nazi.
This website was first registered in Russia in March 2022 under the name Reliable Russian News, before changing the name the following year to Reliable Recent News. He posts in multiple languages and has his own Facebook, X, and Telegram accounts.
In its report published in June 2023, Viginum also identifies 353 websites affiliated with RRN, whose addresses were promoted by these same fake social media accounts. Among them, we find websites that present themselves as reliable sources of information, such as “True Maps”, which lists the children killed in Donbass, and “Court Ukraine”, which denounces the crimes allegedly committed by the Ukrainian Army.
Other sites have French names and share the same type of information, with a pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian line. When looking for who was hiding behind them, Viginum identified a Russian company, IP Team, whose name had already appeared in an investigation by the French magazine Marianne, published in June 2022. French YouTubers were even approached to broadcast Russian propaganda and MEPs from far-right were interviewed by these sites.
According to Viginum, these sites use machine translation software, but they also have real French-speaking editors, some of whom work within the European Union.
The RRN also creates fake accounts on social networks and publishes links to websites that steal the identity of well-known media outlets or public institutions to legitimize their speeches. In France, newspapers like The Parisian, Le Figaro, The world e Release were victims, in addition to the German Ministry of the Interior and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Meta’s help getting to the Kremlin
In December 2022, the American group Meta (owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) reveals that two Russian companies Struktura and ASP (Social Design Agency in English) spent US$105,000 on targeted advertising to promote their content.
Struktura was officially created in 2009 to sell IT tools. It has more than 500 “experts” in five Russian cities, including Moscow and Saint Petersburg. According to an analysis of his now-deleted website, his clients included the Russian Interior Ministry, the Moscow government and the Russian National Assembly.
ASP was created in 2017 in Moscow. It is a company specialized in video editing, translation and website creation. On its website, still online, we find a large part of Struktura’s customers, including Russian government institutions. These two companies were added to the list of entities sanctioned by the European Union in July 2023, along with their director, Ilya Gambachidze, former advisor to the vice-president of the Russian Parliament.
Some of the content produced by RRN was promoted by the Russian diplomatic network outside the country, mainly by the Russian embassy in France.
She shared a link to the “War On Fakes” website on March 6, 2022, right at the start of the invasion of Ukraine. “This account continues to operate and produce disinformation every day”, observes Alexandre Alaphilippe, director of Disinfo.eu, a Brussels association that fights against the manipulation of information. “It’s persistent and resilient,” he adds.
The true scale of the disinformation operation is still difficult to measure. In December 2023, a network of fake accounts was also dismantled by TikTok. Thousands of the profiles were again from Russia. According to the BBC and the think tank The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), which broke the case, posted videos were viewed by tens of millions of people.
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