In the wake of Alexei Navalny’s sudden death in a remote Arctic penal colony last week, his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, has emerged as the new face of Russia’s opposition movement. A widespread, coordinated, and misogynistic online disinformation campaign has now emerged online to tarnish her reputation.
Lies about Navalnaya having affairs, abortions, and not caring about her husband’s death are being shared widely on Telegram channels, Russian state-run media, and social media accounts controlled by groups with close ties to the Kremlin. The campaign, which features fake videos and doctored images, continues to gain momentum as Navalnaya speaks out about Navalny’s death and criticizes Russian president Vladimir Putin, according to details of the campaign shared with WIRED by researchers at Reset, a London-based nonprofit that tracks disinformation campaigns, and Antibot4Navalny, a group of anonymous Russian researchers who track the online activity of Kremlin-linked trolls.
The main focus of the campaign is designed to make Navalnaya appear disloyal to her husband by claiming she is having multiple affairs with prominent businessmen and journalists.
“The Kremlin is using gendered disinformation campaigns to crush dissent at home and to undermine democracy world over,” Kristina Wilfore, director of innovation and global projects at Reset, tells WIRED. “Rather than stand up to Vladimir Putin, social media platforms continue to provide the means for massive amplification of deeply harmful and defamatory rhetoric that puts women at risk and weaponizes gender.”
The campaign to undermine Navalnaya actually began weeks before her husband died. At the beginning of February, a a German-language website published an article alleging an affair between Navalnaya and Bulgarian journalist Hristo Grozev, based on a video that was supposedly produced by a former employee at Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. The allegations were based on images purportedly from Booking.com that featured Navalnaya and Grozev’s names.
The video was posted by an Instagram account that no longer exists, and no users with that username exist on any social media platform, the researchers at Reset concluded. “No public information or any social media profiles appear with the face of the woman from the video, which likely means the video was AI-generated,” the researcher wrote in a report on the campaign. “The video was likely posted on a newly created Instagram account, which was deleted immediately after the video was downloaded, and used only to prove that the account is an actual profile using the interface of the platform.”
Within hours, the same video was being used on an English-language website called Clear Story News, which is part of a pro-Kremlin disinformation network. Meanwhile, the German-language website where the story first appeared lists a Russian publisher with a Moscow address.
At the time, the stories did not reach a large audience and did not attract the attention of fact-checkers. Within hours of Navalny’s death being announced on February 16, links to the articles were spread widely on Russian-language Telegram channels as well as on Telegram accounts and blogs in other languages such as Finnish, Dutch, German, Italian and English. One of the biggest accounts to spread the disinformation was Russian TV personality-turned-pro-Kremlin blogger Vladimir Solovyov who has almost 1.3 million followers on Telegram.