Russian Information Warfare Campaign: Kremlin Poisons AI and Rewrites Wikipedia

The Russ­ian infor­ma­tion war­fare cam­paign has expand­ed to sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly con­t­a­m­i­nate AI lan­guage mod­els and Wikipedia entries with pro-Krem­lin nar­ra­tives across the globe. On 18 April 2025, the Atlantic Coun­cil report­ed that Rus­sia has sig­nif­i­cant­ly devel­oped its influ­ence oper­a­tions tar­get­ing infor­ma­tion ecosys­tems world­wide. The arti­cle begins:

Over the last three years of its war in Ukraine, Rus­sia has expand­ed, devel­oped, and tai­lored an influ­ence cam­paign tar­get­ing much of the world, spread­ing its con­tent in Wikipedia arti­cles and in pop­u­lar arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) tools. As elec­tion cam­paigns in Roma­nia and Moldo­va took place, or as polit­i­cal dis­cus­sions between US Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump and Ukrain­ian Pres­i­dent Volodymyr Zelen­skyy unfold­ed, a net­work of inau­then­tic pro-Russ­ian por­tals ramped up its activ­i­ty, laun­der­ing con­tent from sanc­tioned news out­lets and align­ing glob­al infor­ma­tion sources with the Krem­lin nar­ra­tive machine. A Russ­ian net­work gone glob­al The Prav­da net­work is a col­lec­tion of fraud­u­lent news por­tals tar­get­ing more than eighty coun­tries and regions through­out the world, launched by Rus­sia in 2014. In 2024, the French dis­in­for­ma­tion watch­dog Vig­inum report­ed on the oper­a­tion, iden­ti­fy­ing the mali­cious activ­i­ty of a Crimea-based IT busi­ness, find­ings that the Atlantic Coun­cil’s Dig­i­tal Foren­sic Research Lab (DFR­Lab) lat­er con­firmed, which showed direct Russ­ian involve­ment with the network.

Read more: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/exposing-pravda-how-pro-kremlin-forces-are-poisoning-ai-models-and-rewriting-wikipedia/

Key Points

• The Prav­da net­work func­tions as an infor­ma­tion laun­dro­mat, ampli­fy­ing Russ­ian nar­ra­tives across more than 80 coun­tries and regions worldwide.
• Dur­ing the 2024 “super-elec­tion year,” the net­work tar­get­ed NATO and world lead­ers with tai­lored dis­in­for­ma­tion websites.
• By pos­ing as author­i­ta­tive sources, Russ­ian infor­ma­tion war­fare cam­paign ele­ments are infil­trat­ing AI train­ing data and Wikipedia articles.
• DFR­Lab and Check­First have released inter­ac­tive tools expos­ing how dif­fer­ent coun­tries are tar­get­ed by this sophis­ti­cat­ed operation.

Russian Information Warfare Campaign Exploits Wikipedia and AI

Russia’s infor­ma­tion war­fare cam­paign has inten­si­fied its exploita­tion of Wikipedia, where Krem­lin-linked out­lets are sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly cit­ed to legit­imize dis­in­for­ma­tion and influ­ence pub­lic per­cep­tion, as demon­strat­ed by a recent inves­ti­ga­tion into Wikipedia’s vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty to state-backed manip­u­la­tion. Despite efforts to build a state-con­trolled Wikipedia alter­na­tive, these attempts have failed to gain trac­tion, under­scor­ing the platform’s endur­ing author­i­ty. Pro-Krem­lin actors have also used Wikipedia’s open-edit­ing mod­el to fuel divi­sions between Europe and the US dur­ing the Ukraine con­flict, a tac­tic that exter­nal ana­lysts have con­firmed is part of a broad­er cam­paign to manip­u­late nar­ra­tives and under­mine West­ern uni­ty, often by orches­trat­ing “edit wars” and insert­ing pro-Russ­ian per­spec­tives into high-traf­fic articles.

In par­al­lel, the Russ­ian cam­paign has esca­lat­ed its tac­tics by cloning major Ger­man media web­sites to spread pro-Russ­ian pro­pa­gan­da, with hun­dreds of fake accounts ampli­fy­ing fab­ri­cat­ed arti­cles and videos across social media to erode sup­port for sanc­tions and desta­bi­lize pub­lic trust—a method that mir­rors the find­ings of inde­pen­dent researchers who have doc­u­ment­ed how these cloned sites and Wikipedia edits are often ref­er­enced by AI lan­guage mod­els and cit­ed as legit­i­mate sources online. These coor­di­nat­ed efforts high­light the Kremlin’s evolv­ing strat­e­gy to weaponize both trust­ed online resources and coun­ter­feit media brands, embed­ding dis­in­for­ma­tion in ways that are increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult for the pub­lic to detect, as inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ists have revealed net­works of Wikipedia edi­tors work­ing in con­cert with Russ­ian state media to dis­tort the his­tor­i­cal and polit­i­cal record.

Exter­nal References:

1. How Russ­ian Pro­pa­gan­da Infil­trates Wikipedia

2. Wikipedia Edi­tors Linked to Russ­ian State Media Revealed

3. Krem­lin Dis­in­for­ma­tion Net­works and AI Lan­guage Models

Dis­claimer:

The Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) employs AI through­out the post­ing process, includ­ing gen­er­at­ing sum­maries of news items, the intro­duc­tion, key points, and often the “con­text” sec­tion. We rec­om­mend ver­i­fy­ing all infor­ma­tion before use. Addi­tion­al­ly, images are AI-gen­er­at­ed and intend­ed sole­ly for illus­tra­tive pur­pos­es. While they rep­re­sent the events or indi­vid­u­als dis­cussed, they should not be inter­pret­ed as real-world photography.

Image Alt Text: AI-gen­er­at­ed image depict­ing Russ­ian infor­ma­tion war­fare tech­niques tar­get­ing dig­i­tal knowl­edge sys­tems and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence models.

TRANSLATE with x

Eng­lish

Ara­bic	Hebrew	Pol­ish
Bul­gar­i­an	Hin­di	Por­tuguese
Cata­lan	Hmong Daw	Roman­ian
Chi­nese Simplified	Hun­gar­i­an	Russ­ian
Chi­nese Traditional	Indone­sian	Slo­vak
Czech	Ital­ian	Sloven­ian
Dan­ish	Japan­ese	Span­ish
Dutch	Klin­gon	Swedish
Eng­lish	Kore­an	Thai
Eston­ian	Lat­vian	Turk­ish
Finnish	Lithuan­ian	Ukrain­ian
French	Malay	Urdu
Ger­man	Mal­tese	Viet­namese
Greek	Nor­we­gian	Welsh
Hait­ian Creole	Per­sian

TRANSLATE with

COPY THE URL BELOW 

Back

EMBED THE SNIPPET BELOW IN YOUR SITE

” title=”” title=”