Ukraine: Russia spreading disinformation about its athletes | OneFootball

Ukraine denounced a Russian disinformation campaign this Thursday after the spread of fake news online about its Olympic team at the Winter Games and, in particular, about skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych, who was disqualified today.

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Various fake reports published online on different platforms, which garnered more than a million views, included accusations based on digitally manipulated articles about the skeleton racer, who refused to stop wearing a helmet featuring images of Ukrainian athletes killed in the conflict with Russia.

“The Russians launched a disinformation campaign to discredit Ukraine,” declared the Ukrainian Center for Combating Disinformation this Thursday.

“With this false information, Russia is trying to discredit Ukrainians and undermine international support for Ukraine,” Ukrainian Sports Minister Matvii Bidnyi told AFP.

An article from the Reuters agency was digitally manipulated, with the addition of false information claiming that Vladyslav Heraskevych’s brother was recruiting soldiers for the war and that a Hungarian athlete displayed a sticker reading “We are all fed up with Ukraine.”

AFP found that Russian-language profiles on the social network X were spreading similar messages.

As in Paris 2024

Among other false information circulating online are claims that the Ukrainian team was housed in a different location from the rest of the athletes due to their “toxic” behavior and that their doping tests were brought forward to allow the use of “psychoactive substances.”

A fake video, with a logo resembling that of the American news outlet E! News—dedicated to entertainment news—claims that rapper Snoop Dogg, who is covering the Games for another American broadcaster, NBC, refused to take a photo with the Ukrainian team because of the “Nazism” present in that country’s army.

All these messages are part of a campaign inspired by Russia and dubbed “Operation Overload,” which was used during the Paris 2024 Summer Olympic Games, said Pablo Maristany de las Casas, an analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

Some messages usurp the identity of well-known media outlets, such as Euronews, and others imitate Mossad (the Israeli intelligence agency) or the Italian Ministry of Health, he points out.

There were also false reports detected that the feminist group Femen vandalized the Colosseum and that Kyiv confiscated the passports of athletes’ families to prevent them from defecting.

“Coordinated campaign”

The Ukrainian Center for Combating Disinformation said it had identified a “coordinated” campaign of “completely fabricated” content that first appeared on Russian-language Telegram channels.

This false information “was amplified by a network of propaganda profiles,” according to the Center.

The Canadian broadcaster CBC published an analysis of a falsified video that includes false information about Ukrainian athletes, explaining that the piece uses the first 15 seconds of an authentic video shared on social media, which shows correspondent Adrienne Arsenault.

Then, “a version of Adrienne’s voice, generated by artificial intelligence, comes in,” explains Avneet Dhillon, fact-checking producer at CBC.

The fake Adrienne claims that the Ukrainian team settled “as far away as possible” from the others because their athletes had “extremely toxic” behavior at the Paris Olympic Games.

In the authentic video, there is no mention of Ukraine or Ukrainian athletes, CBC emphasized.

The press office of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) told AFP that the Ukrainian competitors are housed in the same locations as the other teams and that the video was “completely false,” constituting “a deliberate attempt at disinformation.”

The video began circulating in Russian on a Telegram channel called “Odessa for Victory” on February 5, according to Provereno Media, an information verification organization based in Estonia.

The posts, amplified by bots (digital robots), were viewed more than a million times and echoed by pro-Kremlin media.

An AFP fact-checker found that this falsified information was also circulating on Slovak-language profiles on Facebook.

*With content from AFP

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇧🇷 here.