“No guarantee for April”: the quiet first phase of the campaign against France’s candidates

Torture prisons, a drug empire and dementia: France’s pro-Ukraine candidates each got their own Russian fake

France elects a president in April 2027, and three of the candidates most clearly in favour of supporting Ukraine have already been targeted by fake stories. Centre-left MEP Raphaël Glucksmann, former prime minister Gabriel Attal and the centrist Édouard Philippe each appeared in fabricated reports over the summer and autumn.

A fake story published on 29 August by VT Foreign Policy, a self-described alternative outlet that carries pro-Kremlin content, claimed Glucksmann had helped set up torture prisons in Georgia and later in Ukraine. Its only source was the Foundation to Battle Injustice, a front founded by Yevgeny Prigozhin that the EU has sanctioned. Fake reports styled as BFM TV news claimed Philippe suffers from dementia. Others claimed Attal had inherited a drug empire from his father. In October, a site posing as the environmental outlet Reporterre claimed Glucksmann had spent over 2 million euros on private jets, the Gnida Project found.

VIGINUM, the French agency that tracks foreign digital interference, attributed the summer fakes about Philippe and Glucksmann to Storm-1516, a Russian operation linked to military intelligence that builds whole fake websites. The agency has detected hundreds of operations targeting the election. It also described them as mediocre and lacking visibility.

Amélie Jaques-Apke, who studies foreign influence at Sciences Po’s CEVIPOF research centre, told the Kyiv Independent that the chief goal is to erode trust in French institutions. Damaging individual candidates is the visible tactic, she said: “The more durable objective is to make whatever result emerges look illegitimate.” How much the fakes have moved French voters is hard to gauge, the Kyiv Independent notes. The risk, she said, comes with amplification: a fake that few people saw gains an audience when Russian officials or state media repeat it, when pro-Russian figures in the West share it, or when a politician denounces it loudly enough to spread it further. The operations are also changing, she said, with generative AI producing more convincing fakes and divisive content being monetised. Their limited impact so far, she concluded, is no guarantee for April.

Senior Democrats say a classified briefing showed Russia targeting their candidates before the midterms

The United States voted for Congress on 3 November. Two weeks earlier, Senator Mark Warner and Representative Jim Himes, the senior Democrats on the two intelligence committees, said a classified briefing they had requested showed Russia running an online influence campaign against Democratic candidates, as it did in 2016, 2020 and 2024. Warner pointed to AI-generated fake ads against James Talarico in Texas and Jon Ossoff in Georgia. Himes said there was no reason to believe China had stopped its “extremely targeted” efforts, and no evidence that any country could alter the result.

Some of the content reached far from the United States. On 28 October a train crash in Urda, Spain, killed at least 69 people. Within days, pro-Russian accounts claimed that hackers linked to the Democratic Party had attacked Spain’s rail signalling system, presenting the crash as a terrorist attack, with fake videos and altered front pages posing as Bellingcat and Libération. EFE Verifica identified the campaign from the work of the Antibot4Navalny collective and said some accounts matched the behaviour of the Russian Matryoshka network. Other false posts said Israeli companies had hacked the trains’ safety systems, for which Maldita found no evidence, and relatives of possible victims received text messages posing as the Guardia Civil that falsely told them their loved ones had been identified among the dead.

On Election Day, unverified claims spread within hours. One said an FBI raid on a Houston warehouse had found more than 20,000 fraudulent ballots cast for Democrats. The FBI said: “No election-related operation occurred.” Harris County clerk Teneshia Hudspeth called the posts false. In Fulton County, Georgia, voters received texts about polling place changes that the county had not sent; election watchdogs said it was unclear who sent them. AP reported no verified case of malfeasance before polls closed.

Russian channels and the AfD seize on a riot at a Ukrainian draft site

Ukraine’s draft is a sore point at home. RFE/RL describes a widely disliked practice known as “busification”, in which officials detain men on the street and drive them to recruitment centres, and Reuters notes that the draft has been marred by reports of abuse and corruption, often amplified by Russian outlets, and that conscription officers and centres have been attacked. On 2 November that anger surfaced in Petropavlivska Borshchahivka, a suburb of Kyiv, after posts claimed that conscripts were being held and tortured in the basement of a house used by the National Guard. About 100 people gathered, broke down the gate and clashed with police.

The National Guard said the house was a temporary stop for newly mobilised men and for soldiers who had left their units without permission. Four of them were taken to hospital with injuries. The interior minister called the torture claims false. Journalists allowed inside saw bruises on several men, who told them they had not been beaten. The State Bureau of Investigation is now examining how the men were treated, and both ombudsmen said anyone who broke the law, in the crowd or in uniform, should be held to account.

The next day, Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation published a timeline of the posts that brought the crowd to the house: a first call to gather on Threads at 11:34, then from 14:00 361 Facebook posts with identical wording, and later 110 Russian channels repeating a “concentration camp” claim. The centre called this a pre-planned campaign with outside interference. The count shows coordinated spreading, not who was behind it. The Security Service says the unrest was arranged to free one serviceman from the building. A woman who arrived posing as a medic has been detained.

On 3 November, AfD co-leader Alice Weidel reposted a video alleging a 14-year-old had been held in a “torture chamber” at the house and asked the German government to raise it with President Zelensky, who was visiting Berlin that day. The National Guard said the boy had fallen off a tree onto the grounds during the riot and was released.

Ukraine’s air raid app sent fake nuclear and chemical alerts after a hack. Hours later, Russia’s emergency app sent a fake nuclear alert too.

Late on 1 November, Ukraine’s official Air Alert app and sirens across the country warned of nuclear and chemical attacks and street fighting. The app was built by the Ministry of Digital Transformation with the security company Ajax Systems. One message, written in Russian, said a nuclear alert was about to sound across Ukraine and that an Oreshnik missile was on its way. Regional governors said there was no threat and told people not to click a link in the message. The Air Force said the system had been hacked. The developers switched off push notifications, and the false alerts were cleared about an hour later.

Early the next morning, the app of Russia’s emergencies ministry sent messages claiming that nuclear warheads had been launched at every Russian region, telling people to stock food for three weeks and hide in basements. Rostov media reported that the ministry’s regional channels on the state messenger MAX were also compromised. The ministry said it was fixing the vulnerability, and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said government agencies face constant cyberattacks. ATESH, a pro-Ukrainian partisan movement, said it carried out the attack; there is no independent confirmation.

No one has claimed the attack on the Ukrainian app, and Ukrainian officials have not said who they believe was behind it.