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A sign on a construction fence in front of the Eiffel Tower features the five rings of the Olympic Games and the Paralympic Games logo, which will be held in France this summer.
CNN
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Pro-Russian propagandists are stepping up efforts to smear next month's Summer Olympics in Paris and undermine Western support for Ukraine through a series of bold online and offline actions, civil society experts and Western officials told CNN.
According to sources, the stunts included using artificial intelligence to imitate the voice of actor Tom Cruise to narrate a fake documentary attacking the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and placing a coffin with an inscription recalling the Ukraine war near the Eiffel Tower.
Experts who track Russian disinformation told CNN that the operation appears to be part of a desperate effort by Russian operatives to tarnish the Olympics and thwart Ukraine's attempts to attack Russian territory with Western-made weapons. The IOC has imposed restrictions on Russian athletes' participation in the Paris Olympics because of Russia's war in Ukraine.
Gavin Wild, a former Russia expert on the National Security Council, said the recent propaganda surge is a mix of desperation and opportunism. “For the tech-savvy propagandists operating in Russia, the alternative they're trying to avoid isn't irrelevance, it's a one-way trip to the front line,” Wild told CNN.
Russian operatives tried to give the documentary legitimacy by using a fake Cruz voice, a Netflix logo and even a fake New York Times review, said Microsoft analysts, who published a report on the operation on Sunday. The propaganda video, published last year on the social media platform Telegram, “was our first glimpse of a larger campaign” by the same Russian propagandists to smear the Paris Olympics, Microsoft said.
According to Microsoft, Russian propagandists have also spread fake news stories about Parisians buying property insurance due to fears of terrorism surrounding the Olympics, as well as fake press releases claiming the CIA and French intelligence services were warning of terrorism.
CNN has reached out to the Russian Embassy in Washington, DC for comment.
Not all of the recent gambits have taken place online.
On Saturday, French police found five coffins near the Eiffel Tower, draped with the French flag and bearing the words “French Soldiers of Ukraine.” A French military official told CNN they suspect Russia of involvement in the ambush. French police are questioning three men in connection to the incident.
The Russian government was infuriated when French President Emmanuel Macron refused to rule out sending French troops to Ukraine.
Pro-Russian social media accounts have also recently shared a doctored video of State Department spokesman Matthew Miller commenting on Ukraine's possible use of U.S.-made weapons in Russia. The video appears to be a compilation of two press conferences in which Miller is seen wearing different ties.
It is unclear who produced the video, and U.S. officials and private experts have not publicly identified its origins.
“While this video is clearly fake, it is a step in the direction of what counter-disinformation researchers have warned about: the use of AI-manipulated media to bolster foreign disinformation operations,” the State Department said in a statement to CNN.
The Russian embassy in South Africa shared a version of the video on its X account, according to screenshots taken by a BBC reporter.
Hany Farid, a professor and digital forensic expert at the University of California, Berkeley, said the video showed signs of being manipulated using AI.
Farid said that the video was run through several deepfake detection systems, which found that the audio in the video was created using AI, and that the State Department spokesperson's lip movements in the video had been altered using lip-syncing AI software.
“Even if fake videos are not believed by everyone, the constant proliferation of deepfake videos has led to a general skepticism of everything we see online,” Farid said.
But Lee Foster, another information operations expert, expressed skepticism that the images in the video were created using AI.
“From an analytical standpoint, it doesn't make sense to use AI to manipulate the mouth movements so that they're basically identical to the original,” Foster told CNN, “but whether AI would manipulate the audio in a video is an open question.”
Russian animosity toward the IOC has been brewing for years: The IOC banned Russian athletes from flying the Russian flag in official competitions in Paris, citing Moscow's threat of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Russian athletes have faced similar restrictions in past Olympics due to Russian doping allegations.
The US Department of Justice says Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU, was behind a devastating cyber attack on computers used during the opening ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea.
Paris Olympic officials are bracing for a similar threat next month.
“The GRU reserved some of its most serious cyber attacks for France and the Olympics, and carried them out at a time when the geopolitical situation was less tense,” said John Hultquist, principal analyst at Google-owned cybersecurity firm Mandiant.
The Paris Olympics “will be a very attractive target for these actors,” Hultquist added, “and any attacks they launch will be aimed at undermining France's prestige and the unity that is at the heart of the Olympic Games.”
