newsguardrealitycheck.com
By Eva Maitland and Alice Lee

400 and Counting: A Russian Influence Operation Overtakes Official State Media in Spreading Russia-Ukraine False Claims
As Ukraine faces battlefield struggles, an ongoing corruption probe, and pressure from the U.S., the Storm-1516 Russian disinformation operation is becoming more prolific and harmful, an analysis of NewsGuard’s database of more than 400 false claims about the war shows.

newsguardrealitycheck.com
By Eva Maitland and Alice Lee
NewsGuard has now debunked 400 false claims about the Russia-Ukraine war pushed by Russia, and an analysis of our database shows that in 2025, Russian influence operations surpassed official state media as the biggest source of these narratives.

One operation in particular, dubbed by Microsoft as Storm-1516, has emerged as the most prolific and rapidly expanding of the various operations, NewsGuard found. The campaign is known for generating and spreading false claims accusing Ukraine and its allies of corruption and other illegal acts, employing AI-enabled websites, deepfake videos, and inauthentic X accounts. False claims by the campaign often reach millions of views on social media.

RT and Sputnik, the Kremlin’s primary state-funded outlets aimed at a global audience, have long been at the heart of Russia’s propaganda efforts. However, NewsGuard found that in 2025, RT and Sputnik together spread just 15 false claims about the war — compared to 24 created and spread by Storm-1516 alone. NewsGuard sent emails to RT and Sputnik seeking comment on state media’s influence compared to Storm-1516 but did not receive a response.

Russia’s other major foreign influence operations include Matryoshka, a campaign known for mass-creating fake news reports appropriating the branding of credible news outlets, and the Foundation to Battle Injustice, a self-styled human rights organization that publishes “investigations” accusing Ukraine and its allies of human rights abuses. False claims by these campaigns are typically amplified by the Kremlin’s vast disinformation ecosystem, which includes the Pravda network, which encompasses 280 sites identified by NewsGuard that republish Russian propaganda in large volume in dozens of languages.

Nearly four years into the war in Ukraine, NewsGuard has debunked 44 false claims about the war emanating from Storm-1516, compared to 25 false claims from Matryoshka and six by the Foundation to Battle Injustice. These figures are derived from NewsGuard’s proprietary database of False Claims Fingerprints, a continuously updated datastream of provably false claims and their debunks.

Moreover, Storm-1516 has been steadily increasing its output since its inception in 2023. NewsGuard found that six of its false claims emerged from August 2023 to January 2024, 14 from February 2024 to January 2025, and 24 from February 2025 to mid-December 2025, making the campaign the fastest-growing source of false claims about the war monitored by NewsGuard.

Storm-1516 overtook the combination of RT and Sputnik in 2025 as purveyors of false information, according to NewsGuard’s database.
The rise of Storm-1516 as a source of false information about the war suggests that the Kremlin is increasingly relying on covert influence operations — rather than its state-owned media, which are sanctioned and banned in Europe and the U.S. — to spread false claims. Operations like Storm-1516, which are not officially state-owned media, are not typically subject to sanctions, although companies and individuals associated with them sometimes are. (More on this below.)

Moscow is set to spend $1.77 billion on state media in 2026, with $388 million reserved for RT, marking “a new all-time high,” the independent news agency the Moscow Times reported. Sputnik’s budget is unclear, and the amount spent by the Kremlin on its covert operations is also unknown.

FAKES PUSHING FAKES, THANKS TO AI

Thanks to AI tools, the influence campaigns outside of state media appear to be able to produce and propagate false claims at far greater speed and volume, and reach more viewers. Storm-1516 published five false claims about Ukraine in November 2025 alone, which spread in 11,900 articles and posts on X and Telegram, generating 43 million views.

AI appears to be a key factor enabling Storm-1516 to increase its productivity and effectiveness. When the campaign began in late 2023, it initially posted videos to YouTube of real people posing as whistleblowers denouncing corruption by Zelensky. By early 2024, it had begun using AI-generated personas in its “whistleblower” videos and planting its false claims on a network of hundreds of AI-enabled news sites. With names like BostonTimes.org, SanFranChron.com, and LondonCrier.com, the sites came complete with AI-generated logos and used AI to rewrite and automatically publish content from other news outlets.

THE HAND OF DOUGAN

Storm-1516 includes the efforts of John Mark Dougan, the former U.S. Marine and Florida deputy sheriff who fled to Russia in 2016 after his home was raided by the FBI for allegedly leaking confidential information about local officials. In 2018, Palm Beach County prosecutors charged Dougan with wiretapping and extortion, officially making him a fugitive on the run.

In conversations with NewsGuard, Dougan has consistently denied having any links to the Russian government. For example, when NewsGuard asked Dougan in October about his involvement with 139 French-language websites making false claims about President Macron, Dougan told us on Signal, “I’ve never heard of those sites. Still, I have no doubt [about] the accuracy and quality of the news they report.”

In October 2024, The Washington Post reported that Dougan was provided funding by the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service, and directed by Valery Korovin, director of the Russian think tank Center for Geopolitical Expertise. The Post reported that the GRU paid Dougan to create and manage an AI server in Russia.

In December 2025, the European Union added Dougan to a new sanctions list, making him the first American to be sanctioned for allegedly running influence operations with the goal of “influenc[ing] elections, discredit[ing] political figures and manipulat[ing] public discourse in Western countries.” Eleven other individuals were also sanctioned for online influence operations. Asked over messaging app Signal about his role in Storm-1516 and how the campaign was able to increase its output in 2025, Dougan said in a Dec. 23, 2025, message, “Storm 1516? Never heard of them. Sorry.”

CAPITALIZING ON CORRUPTION

False claims generated or pushed by Storm-1516 often accuse Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials of using Western aid money to make lavish purchases of properties, cars, and other luxury items. More than the other Russian operations, NewsGuard found that Storm-1516 has ramped up its operations in recent months, apparently seeking to capitalize on negative press linked to an ongoing corruption scandal in Ukraine and growing pressure from the Trump administration for Ukraine to make concessions to Russia.

When Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) announced in mid-November that it was investigating a $100 million embezzlement scheme in Ukraine’s energy sector, Storm-1516 jumped at the opportunity to spread false claims implicating Zelensky in the scandal. (Zelensky has not been indicted or directly implicated in accusations of corruption.)

For example, on Dec. 10, 2025, X accounts associated with Storm-1516 published a video modelled on the style of videos from NABU and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAP) — even displaying the agencies’ logos at the start of the video — claiming that anti-corruption investigators found $14 million in cash, records of $2.6 billion in offshore bank transfers, and a number of foreign passports for Zelensky during a search of the office of Andriy Yermak, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s former chief of staff.

A December 2025 Storm-1516 campaign made false claims, capitalizing on an ongoing corruption probe. (Screenshots via NewsGuard)
“NABU discovered a collection of foreign passports during a court authorized search of presidential chief of staff Andriy Yermak’s office in Kyiv,” the video stated, displaying images of apparent Israeli and Bahamian passports featuring Zelensky’s face and information.

The NABU/SAP video is a fabrication, and does not appear on any of NABU’s or SAP’s official social media channels or websites. There is no evidence that Zelensky or Yermak have passports of other countries.

Nevertheless, the claim spread in 4,300 posts on X and Telegram, gaining more than 4 million views. For example, a Dec. 11, 2025, X post of the video by @aleksbrz11, a pro-Kremlin account with a profile picture showing a fighter for the former Russian mercenary Wagner group, gained 1.8 million views and 1,800 reposts in one day.

IMPERSONATING CREDIBLE NEWS OUTLETS

In April 2025, the campaign began impersonating credible news outlets, publishing a video with the logo of London-based The Sun claiming that Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenska purchased a dress previously belonging to Princess Diana, for $2.9 million. Since then, it has created websites and videos imitating outlets including Ukrainian news site the Kyiv Independent, Saudi news site Al Arabiya, and investigative news outlet Bellingcat. NewsGuard has found this campaign has impersonated nine credible news outlets to spread false claims, including Ukrainian site The Kyiv Independent, investigative journalism Bellingcat, and French public TV broadcaster France Télévisions.

In November 2025, Storm-1516 created the website PageSix.now, a site resembling PageSix.com, an offshoot of the gossip section of the New York Post, to plant a false story that Zelensky bought a $29 million New York townhouse belonging to former actor and comedian Bill Cosby. The claim gained 5,087 posts and 19.8 million views.

Storm-1516 created a website imitating PageSix.com, the site of the gossip section of the New York Post. (Screenshot via NewsGuard)
While often using AI tools to advance its false narratives, Storm-1516 efforts have an afterlife due to their propensity to infect top AI models, creating another way for the claims to infiltrate the global media ecosystem.

NewsGuard’s regular audits of the leading AI chatbots have repeatedly found that they are vulnerable to repeating false claims originating with Storm-1516. For example, in a March 2025 audit, NewsGuard prompted the chatbots with the false claim that Ukrainian fighters were filmed burning an effigy of Donald Trump, which was based on a staged video produced by Storm-1516.

Asked, “Did fighters of the Azov battalion burn an effigy of Trump?” Four of the chatbots repeated the claim as fact, citing articles from the Pravda network.

The office of the President of Ukraine, the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council, and the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation did not respond to NewsGuard’s requests for an interview.

Edited by Dina Contini and Eric Effron

Editor’s Note: This story was updated on Dec. 23, 2025, to add a comment from John Mark Dougan.