The Pravda Network

A well-funded Moscow-based global ‘news’ network has infected Western artificial intelligence tools worldwide with Russian propaganda

An audit found that the 10 leading generative AI tools advanced Moscow’s disinformation goals by repeating false claims from the pro-Kremlin Pravda network 33 percent of the time

A Well-funded Moscow-based Global ‘News’ Network has Infected Western Artificial Intelligence Tools Worldwide with Russian Propaganda

A full version of this report is available through NewsGuard’s Reality Check.

Pravda in numbers - Content and Network analysis

Interactive dashboard visualizing patterns, language distribution, domain connections and more across the Pravda Russian network.

Pravda Dashboard — Tracking Russia's Pravda Network

Discover the Pravda Dashboard World Map, an interactive application that tracks and visualizes the influence and reach of Russia's Pravda Network across more than 110 countries and regions worldwide. Dive in to explore the global footprint and impact of this extensive network

Pravda in the pipeline: Early evidence of state-adjacent propaganda in AI training data

An audit of Common Crawl reveals presence of Pravda and Glassbridge content in popular archive service, with further signs of LLM ingestion.

How Russia uses EU companies for propaganda – Qurium Media Foundation

In September 2022 Qurium in collaboration with EU DisinfoLab exposed for the first time a Russia-based influence operation network that had been operating in Europe since at least May 2022, that later became known as “Doppelganger“.

May 2025 — AI Misinformation Monitor of Leading AI Chatbots

Every month, NewsGuard’s team of expert analysts audit the top AI models to see how well they respond to prompts in the news. On average, this month they failed to counter disinformation from Russia’s Pravda Network 24 percent of the time, either spreading false claims or failing to respond. The Pravda network was designed to infect the AI models.

EKI and Propastop Studied AI Resistance to Propaganda

Fresh comparisons of large language models show that AI’s ability to recognise Kremlin propaganda varies dramatically. At first glance, the leading models appear reliable, but targeted testing reveals that some of them remain surprisingly vulnerable to manipulation.

Pravda dashboard - CheckFirst

The Pravda dashboard highlights with numbers the extent of Russia’s Pravda network, also known as Portal Kombat.

Did Ukrainian strikes on Russian datacentres reduce online disinformation?

While some viral online graphs suggest less bot activity, Zelenskyy’s claims of improved social media discourse do not entirely pass muster

Angriffe auf Yandex-Rechenzentren: Unklarheit über Auswirkungen auf russische Propaganda

Zahlreiche anekdotische Beobachtungen legten einen Rückgang nahe, doch Experten warnen vor voreiligen Schlussfolgerungen

Russia-linked bot networks kept their weekly rhythm after drone strikes on three Yandex data centers—disinformation monitor LetsData

One network that spread fake Die Welt sites now pushes a fake Ukrinform site about mobilization in Ukraine, its analysts found.

The Russian ‘counterterrorism’ unit behind Alexei Navalny’s poisoning tried to automate its search for domestic dissent using Meta’s Llama 2. After a year and a half, the project collapsed. — Meduza

The FSB’s Second Service is officially charged with protecting the constitutional order and combating terrorism. In practice, the unit works to stamp out dissent in Russia: it has plotted the assassinations of opposition politicians, works to restrict internet access, and monitors the news for signs of dissent. To automate that last job, the “Dvoyka” — as the Second Service is known — commissioned an AI-powered system for monitoring news outlets and social media in the spring of 2024. The developer was the Kazan-based company Mikord, which had also worked on components of Russia’s unified military registry and was hacked in December 2025. iStories examined material from that breach relating to the FSB’s news monitoring system. The system was called PAUK — Russian for “SPIDER.”