EU report: Russian network faked newscasts during France riots

A covert Russian network spread videos impersonating Western media outlets to target French audiences during last month's riots, according to an internal European Union assessment seen by Reuters. Some of the fabricated clips falsely claimed that migrants had raped protesters or that terrorist attacks were imminent.

The assessment, reported by Reuters journalists Antoni Slodkowski and John Irish on November 9, covers the period from October 7 to 21. It was prepared by disinformation experts in the EU's diplomatic service and circulated on a restricted basis, the wire service said. It names the network Operation Overload, described in the document as a Russian-aligned effort to target Western public figures, institutions and media outlets.

The document says Russia sought to "depict the French leadership as weak and increasingly authoritarian." It adds: "Such events offer opportunities to undermine national governments, fuel fear and division, and shape public perceptions ahead of elections."

The analysis found no evidence that Moscow instigated or escalated the protests. It described the activity as "the opportunistic exploitation of unrest," Reuters reported. Rioting broke out in cities across France in October 2026 as demonstrations against rising living costs and declining public services spun out of control in some of the worst violence the country has seen in decades.

The list of techniques attributed to the network does not come from the EU assessment. It comes from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a Britain-based think tank, which described Operation Overload in a report last year as "a persistent and high-volume Russian information operation." The institute said the operation "creates and posts videos that appear to be news reports, uses AI to clone experts' voices, forges newspaper headlines, and manipulates images," and that it "pivots from country to country to exploit crises and debates." The EU document puts the network's activity back to at least September 2023, when the operation became active.

A separate internal assessment, compiled by France's foreign ministry and also seen by Reuters, found that social media accounts linked to Israel and to the US MAGA movement pushed "hostile narratives" that tied the riots to radical Islamism and migration.

That French assessment put numbers on the reach. It found that the 10 most-viewed X posts on the unrest from "pro-Russian spheres" drew 2.8 million views from October 16 to 18. The 10 most-viewed posts from MAGA-linked officials, media outlets and influencers got more than 49 million views over the same three days, and the 10 most-viewed posts from Israeli officials, government accounts, media outlets and influencers got more than 35 million, the ministry report said.

Every figure above comes from the French foreign ministry's assessment as reported by Reuters. It is a government assessment, not a finding by a court, and Reuters said it could not independently verify the assertions in either report.

Russia's foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment from Reuters. In August, ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova rejected a French state watchdog's disinformation allegations about France's 2027 elections and said they would "not be the last concoction which the authorities will use to manipulate public opinion." France's disinformation watchdog Viginum published a technical report on Matryoshka, the operation's other name, in June 2024, and French officials have said such campaigns resurface during protests, elections or other moments that can discredit France.

Elina Treyger, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, told Reuters the campaigns amount to a slow-burning "narrative competition" that over time can shape how Western democracies are seen in Europe and beyond. Treyger said they feed an anti-immigrant backlash that is pushing European voters toward political extremes.

French officials referred Reuters to remarks by President Emmanuel Macron, who said on October 21 that there had been no visible foreign interference behind the protests but that there had been "foreign manipulation of information."

For video makers, the technique the think tank attributes to the network, cloning voices and doctoring footage into something that reads as a familiar outlet's report, draws on the same classes of AI systems now sold openly, so a clip that appears to be a news broadcast carries less evidentiary weight on its own.

Both assessments remain internal and unreleased; no enforcement or legal action has been announced.