San Francisco Frontiers - Ukraine says Russia behind fake posts targeting Winter Olympics team

The fake posts, which racked up over a million views across multiple platforms, included a claim about Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych, banned from competing Thursday for wearing a helmet with images of athletes killed in the war.

"Russians have rolled out an information campaign to discredit Ukraine," Kyiv's centre for countering disinformation said Thursday.

"With such fakes, Russia is trying to discredit Ukrainians and undermine international support for Ukraine," Ukraine's sports minister Matviy Bidny told AFP.

One post digitally manipulated a text story by Reuters news agency about Heraskevych. It added false claims that his brother recruited soldiers for the war and a Hungarian athlete wore a sticker saying "we're all fed up with U(kraine)".

AFP saw Russian-language accounts on X make similar claims.

Other false stories online included claims that Ukrainian team members had been housed separately due to "toxic" behaviour; that doping controls had been eased for them to take "psychoactive substances"; and that 52 of their translators had absconded.

A fake video with a logo similar to US E! News entertainment television claimed rapper Snoop Dogg -- who is covering the games for US network NBC -- had refused a photo with the Ukraine team because of the country's army's "Nazism".

The posts are part of a Russian-aligned campaign called Operation Overload that was also active during the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics, said Pablo Maristany de las Casas, an analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue think tank.

Some posts impersonate media such as Euronews while others imitate the Israeli espionage agency Mossad and even the Italian health ministry, he said.

The campaign aims to discredit not just Ukrainian athletes but also refugees, he said, with a message that "Ukrainians are sowing chaos".

- 'Propaganda network' -

Other false claims included that the Ukrainian feminist collective Femen had vandalised the Colosseum, and that Ukraine had taken away the passports of athletes' family members to stop them defecting.

Ukraine's Center for Countering Disinformation said it had identified a "coordinated" campaign of "completely falsified" stories that had first appeared on Russian-language Telegram channels.

These were then "amplified by a network of propaganda accounts", it added.

Canadian broadcaster CBC released its own fact check of a fake news video about Ukrainian athletes. The fake report had used the first 15 seconds of a genuine video from its social media, featuring CBC chief correspondent Adrienne Arsenault, it said.

Then an "AI-generated version of Adrienne's voice takes over", said CBC fact-check producer Avneet Dhillon.

The reporter appears to say the Ukrainian team has been accommodated "as far away as possible" from others because the athletes were "extremely toxic" at the Paris Olympics.

The real video did not mention Ukraine or Ukrainian athletes, CBC said.

The International Olympic Committee's press team told AFP the Ukrainians were in the same facilities as other teams. It called the video "absolutely false and an attempt at deliberate misrepresentation".

This video began circulating on a Russian-language Telegram channel called "Odessa for Victory" on February 5, said Provereno Media, a fact-checking organisation based in Estonia.

The posts, amplified by bots, have been viewed over one million times, it added -- and the story has been picked up by pro-Kremlin media citing it as coming from CBC.

An AFP fact-checker saw also this claim circulating on Slovak-language accounts on Facebook.

burs-es-am/nla/jj

Y.Gomez--SFF