While Ukrainian athletes chase medals on the slopes and ice of Italy, Russia is working just as hard to make sure the world sees them differently.
The 2026 Winter Olympics in Milano-Cortina were supposed to be about sport. For Ukraine’s delegation, already carrying the weight of a country at war, the Games represented something rare: a chance to show the world that Ukrainian life, culture, and competition go on. Russia had other plans.
Before the opening ceremony was over, a wave of false stories had already been seeded across Telegram channels, social media platforms, and a network of websites spanning half a dozen European countries. The stories were fabricated. The videos were AI-generated. The quotes were stolen from real journalists and fed back to audiences with entirely different words. And behind it all, investigators and analysts found the same familiar fingerprints.
This is not a story about Russian propaganda in the broad, vague sense that term is often used. Propaganda is content designed to promote a political agenda—and Russia does plenty of that. What happened during these Olympics went further. It was coordinated disinformation: deliberately false information, systematically produced and distributed to deceive specific audiences. And layered beneath it was a set of recurring narratives, amplified by proxy outlets across Europe, designed not just to damage Ukraine’s image but to rewrite the story of who is the victim and who is the aggressor in this war.
To understand the scale of what happened in Italy, you need to understand the machine that produced it. The operation has a name: Matryoshka, after the Russian nesting doll—an apt metaphor for a campaign built on layers of imitation and concealment. NewsGuard, which has tracked the campaign extensively, identified 28 fabricated videos and images released between January 30 and February 10, 2026 alone, collectively gathering approximately 2 million views on Telegram.
Matryoshka’s method is precise. It does not invent stories from scratch and post them on unknown websites. It steals the branding, visual design, and authority of trusted institutions—Reuters, Euronews, CBC, the Italian Ministry of Health, and the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo—and uses them as vessels for invented content. As NewsGuard reports, the false claims had already generated 17 articles in eight languages, including Italian, French, and Czech, on the pro-Kremlin Pravda network alone—a web of approximately 280 websites that systematically republish Kremlin-aligned content across Europe.
This is also not a new operation. As AFP documented, the same campaign—also known as Operation Overload—was active during the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics. What changed in Milano-Cortina was the intensity. Pablo Maristany de las Casas, an analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told AFP that some posts impersonate media organizations such as Euronews, while others mimic the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad and even the Italian health ministry, all pushing one central message: “Ukrainians are sowing chaos.”
Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation was direct about what it found. As AFP reported, the Centre described a “coordinated” campaign of “completely falsified” stories that first appeared on Russian-language Telegram channels and were then “amplified by a network of propaganda accounts.” Ukraine’s Sports Minister Matviy Bidny put it plainly: Russia was “trying to discredit Ukrainians and undermine international support for Ukraine.”
If the campaign needed a face to attack, it found one in skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych. The Ukrainian athlete had planned to compete wearing a helmet bearing portraits of fellow athletes killed by Russian forces during the war. The International Olympic Committee disqualified him for it. That decision alone was a gift to Russian disinformation architects.
As Ukrainska Pravda reported, Russian outlets immediately began building fabricated stories around Heraskevych’s case. A fake video styled as a Reuters report claimed that Ukrainian authorities planned to pressure IOC members by releasing their personal data—a story with no basis in fact. Russian media simultaneously circulated a falsified Charlie Hebdo cover portraying the athlete as a Nazi. The real magazine published no such issue.
An earlier fabrication, also documented by Ukrainska Pravda and picked up by Yahoo Sports, showed Hungarian skier Ádám Kónya appearing to hold a sign reading “We’re all fed up with U (Ukraine).” The original photograph existed. The text had simply been digitally inserted—a small edit with a calculated purpose.
Meanwhile, RT ran its own commentary on Heraskevych’s disqualification under the headline “Zelenskyy attacks the Olympics,” framing Ukraine’s president as the aggressor for criticizing the IOC’s decision. When Zelenskyy wrote that Russian athletes under a neutral flag were “the ones who deserve disqualification,” RT described him as having “vented his frustration”—a choice of language that reduces a wartime leader’s political position to an emotional outburst. The article emphasized that Russian athletes had “not broken the IOC’s rules on political messaging,” casting their participation as apolitical and Ukraine’s objections as irrational.
The individual fakes were varied, but the underlying narratives were consistent. Taken together, they formed a coherent picture—one designed to flip the moral logic of the war.
Ukrainian athletes are criminals and cheats. NewsGuard documented claims that Ukrainian catering staff were spitting in food, that doping standards had been relaxed specifically for Ukrainian competitors, and that 52 Ukrainian interpreters had abandoned their posts. One fabricated CBC broadcast—confirmed as fake by the real CBC, which noted that an “AI-generated version” of chief correspondent Adrienne Arsenault’s voice had been used—claimed Ukrainian athletes were housed away from others because of their “extremely toxic” behavior at the Paris Olympics. The International Olympic Committee toldAFP the video was “absolutely false and an attempt at deliberate misrepresentation.” The real video, CBC confirmed, had not mentioned Ukraine at all.
Ukrainians are fleeing their own country. Three separate fabrications, tracked by NewsGuard, pushed the narrative that Ukrainian athletes were using the Olympics to desert military service. One—mimicking independent Russian outlet Agentstvo—falsely claimed that passports of male athletes’ family members had been confiscated en masse to prevent entire families from defecting. That story alone reached 249,000 views on Telegram.
Ukraine, not Russia, is the political aggressor. This is perhaps the most strategically important narrative, and RT has built it consistently. In an earlier article that has since become a reference point for the broader campaign, RT quoted the Russian Olympic Committee accusing international sports bodies of “the escalation of anti-Russian hysteria.” The same piece used Ukraine’s strikes on Russian territory to invert victim and aggressor: “Ukrainian rockets flew into residential areas of the Kursk and Belgorod regions… citizens of the Russian Federation and Ukrainian refugees were killed and wounded.” The article then asked whether Olympic officials would “want to visit Kursk or Belgorod”—framing Russia as the wounded party in a conflict of Ukraine’s making.
In another article, RT reported that “Moscow has branded the IOC sanctions a perversion of the Olympic Charter, under which the Games are supposed to remain free of politics,” framing Russia’s exclusion from team competitions not as a consequence of invading a sovereign country but as a violation of Olympic principles.
Russian state media sets the narrative. But what makes the operation effective across Europe is the network of local-language outlets that carry it further, add local flavor, and reach audiences that RT and Sputnik simply cannot touch. These are not fringe blogs with a handful of readers. Some of them are widely circulated, nationally recognized publications with established audiences who may have no reason to suspect the content they are reading was shaped, directly or indirectly, in Moscow.
The pattern is not uniform. Some outlets function as translation nodes, taking Russian narratives and delivering them in Polish, Hungarian, Czech, or Dutch without adding much of their own. Others go further, developing original angles and conspiracy theories that Russian state media itself has not made explicit—using the Kremlin’s foundational narratives as raw material and building something new and more locally resonant on top. Understanding this distinction matters because it tells us something important about how sophisticated this ecosystem has become.
In Hungary, the site oroszhirek.hu offers a clear example of the first type. Drawing on CNN’s own reporting about Ukraine’s efforts to document Russian military ties among athletes ahead of the Paris 2024 Games, the site reframed the story entirely. What was originally a piece of investigative journalism became, in oroszhirek.hu’s retelling, a story about Ukrainian persecution. The head of the Ukrainian National Olympic Committee, Vadym Gutzeit, was quoted saying his country had managed to exclude around 30 athletes “with our facts”—and the site placed the word “victory” in scare quotes, a small but deliberate editorial choice designed to make Ukraine’s position look petty and vindictive. It also reproduced Moscow’s accusation that IOC conditions for Russian athletes amounted to “a form of racism,” presenting this claim without any critical response or factual context whatsoever.
Magyar Nemzet, one of Hungary’s most widely read newspapers and one with a well-documented pro-Kremlin editorial position, took a softer but equally calculated approach. Covering Russia’s exclusion from ice hockey at the 2026 Games, the paper suggested the decision might still be reversed and framed the broader situation through the lens of peace negotiations— noting that Donald Trump had named Russian-Ukrainian peace “among the first in his program,” but that “this is currently just a dream; the guns are still roaring.” The implication, never stated directly, is that Ukraine’s continued resistance is the obstacle standing between Russian athletes and the Olympics. It is a narrative that says nothing false on its face and everything damaging in its framing.
The Slovak site armadnymagazin.sk represents the second, more dangerous type of outlet. It does not merely translate Russian narratives—it builds on them. In a piece ostensibly about a Russian figure skater who was forced to change his short program music and costume just days before competing at the 2026 Games, the author moved well beyond the facts of the case to speculate, without any evidence, that Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate—known as the HUR—was directly coordinating the targeting of Russian athletes at international competitions. “I would not be surprised later,” the author wrote, “if HUR admitted to coordinating specific tasks in sports.” No such admission exists. No such evidence was presented. This is original conspiracy theory production, and it is more insidious than anything RT published on the same topic, precisely because it comes dressed in the language of analytical commentary rather than state propaganda.
The Dutch site ninefornews.nl chose a different angle entirely, one that reflects a broader tactical shift visible across several European proxy outlets: the false equivalence argument. Using a domestic scandal involving a convicted Dutch athlete who competed at the Paris Games, the site asked its readers why Russia was excluded from the Olympics while a convicted criminal was allowed to represent the Netherlands. The logic sounds superficially reasonable to someone unfamiliar with the context, which is precisely the point. The comparison between an individual athlete’s criminal record and a state’s decision to invade a sovereign country and weaponize its sports infrastructure is not a comparison at all—but presented to a Dutch-speaking audience already skeptical of elite institutions, it lands differently.
At the most extreme end of the spectrum sit the French site reseauinternational.net and the Slovenian insajder.com. Reseauinternational has built an extensive catalogue of content describing Ukraine’s leadership in terms like “neo-Nazi thugs” running “an endemically corrupt mafia state” and has referred to President Zelenskyy as showing “his true face as a criminal madman.” This is not political commentary with a particular slant. It is dehumanization, and it serves a function: once an audience accepts this framing, every Ukrainian action at the Olympics—demanding Russian exclusion, honoring fallen athletes, objecting to disinformation—becomes the behavior of criminals rather than the position of a country defending itself.
What ties all of these outlets together—despite their different languages, countries, tones, and approaches—is the consistency of the underlying message. Russia is a victim. Ukraine is the aggressor. Western institutions are hypocrites. And anyone defending Ukraine is either naive or complicit. The narratives change shape depending on the audience, but the architecture beneath them is always the same.
What emerges from this investigation is not a chaotic flood of random lies but a structured, two-tier system. At the top sit Russian state outlets that establish the core narratives: Ukraine as aggressor, Russia as victim of “anti-Russian hysteria,” Ukrainian athletes as either criminals or deserters, and Ukrainian leadership as enemies of Olympic values. These outlets operate in multiple languages and are unambiguously Russian state media regardless of the language they publish in.
Below them sits a second layer: European-based websites with pro-Kremlin positions that translate, amplify, and in some cases escalate those narratives for local audiences. Some function primarily as translation and distribution nodes. Others act as conspiracy incubators, taking Russian foundation narratives and developing them into new, original accusations that Russian state media itself has not made explicitly.
As France 24’s Truth or Fake segment noted, the pattern and method of distribution across all of this content carry the hallmarks of Matryoshka. And as Mezha.netreported, citing Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, the campaign was coordinated and pre-planned—with fake narratives seeded even before the Games had opened.
The fakes were debunked. CBC confirmed its footage was stolen. The IOC denied the housing claims. The Charlie Hebdo cover was exposed as invented. Fact-checkers at AFP,Provereno Media, and others have been working quickly. But debunking travels slower than fabrication. The fake CBC video had already reached 504,000 views on Telegram before any correction appeared. The passport confiscation story had 249,000 views. Across all 28 fabrications tracked by NewsGuard, the total stands at roughly 2 million views—and that is before the Pravda network’s 280 sites republished them in Italian, French, Czech, and five other languages.
Vladyslav Heraskevych did not compete. The helmet honoring his fallen compatriots stayed off the track. And while the IOC made its ruling on the basis of its own regulations, Russian disinformation ensured that the story around him was buried under an avalanche of invented scandal—making it harder for international audiences to focus on what he was actually trying to say.
The Games are still running. So is the operation. With five days left until the closing ceremony on February 22, there is little reason to expect the campaign to slow down—if anything, the final stretch of any major international event is when these operations tend to push hardest, knowing that attention is at its peak and corrections take time to land.
That is the real objective of this kind of operation. Not to win an argument. Not to convince anyone of a specific fact. But to generate enough noise, confusion, and suspicion that the truth becomes just one more option among many—and Ukraine’s voice in that conversation gets lost.
The Olympics are not over. Neither is the disinformation.
Ahead of the February 2026 Geneva talks, Moscow flooded the European information space with coordinated…
A six-month investigation by a Czech media outlet has revealed how the Kremlin quietly funds…
Russian occupation authorities have constructed a sophisticated propaganda machine on the Zaporizhzhia region's occupied territories,…
As Norway gets ready for a possible Russian military invasion in the Arctic, the country…
The far-right Reform UK leader is attempting to rehabilitate his controversial stance on Russia as…
Roberto Vannacci's break from Matteo Salvini's League to form a new far-right movement exposes deepening…