Kyiv Independent journalists who analysed about 140,000 posts on X found popular politicians in Germany, Czechia and Poland amplifying anti-Ukrainian narratives that circulate online, in an investigation published on 30 October 2026 as attacks on refugees rise.
A Kyiv Independent fact-check published the same day as the investigation and its documentary, "Dealers of Hate", showed that two Russian operations, Storm-1516 and Matryoshka, are producing fake news reports against the three French presidential contenders most committed to Ukraine. NewsGuard counted 89 Matryoshka fakes aimed at French candidates by mid-October, six months before the April 2027 vote.
Trump and his senior officials have openly backed AfD, Nawrocki and Marine Le Pen, Babiš calls his European bloc Trump's natural allies and the Israeli government courts Babiš, Okamura and Le Pen's National Rally (RN). The Kyiv Independent's published findings show matching narratives, not a single operator behind them: the investigation does not name the accounts or any state actor responsible for the posts it measured. Czech intelligence findings and French and German government attributions document the Russian money and operators separately.
The attacks
Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office told the Kyiv Independent it had logged thousands of crimes against Ukrainians since 24 February 2022. Police classified 139 of them as politically motivated attacks on Ukrainians, and 137 of those involved physical assault.
Eva Yakubovska and Vladyslava Vorobiova, co-founders of the Berlin group Vitsche, were holding a Ukrainian Independence Day rally near the Brandenburg Gate on 24 August 2024 when a man approached with a knife, shouting about Russia. He cut his own arms and chest and knelt. Police did not at first answer repeated calls, then detained him and did not log the incident, the women said. Yakubovska said some activists have stopped attending rallies because they cannot protect their families.
In Prague, Patrik Slastan attacked Kateryna Lebed, who fled Zaporizhzhia with her son in 2022, near a tram stop in June 2025. He was sentenced to 20 months. He had assaulted two Ukrainian women in 2023. The Czech group In Iustitia documented 129 anti-Ukrainian attacks by early 2026, roughly half of all hate-motivated violent incidents it recorded since 2022, and its director Klára Kalibová said Czechia had never seen a wave this intense against one group. A PAQ Research survey found that 57 per cent of Ukrainians who arrived in Czechia, about 216,000 people, reported verbal abuse and 5 per cent, about 19,000, reported physical attacks.
Oleksandra Iwaniuk, a University of Warsaw lecturer who has lived in Poland since 2010, was abused on a tram for speaking Ukrainian while other passengers watched. In Gdansk in summer 2026 a Polish man attacked two Poles he took for Ukrainians and broke one person's arm. In Czechia a man attacked a 13-year-old Czech girl he mistook for Ukrainian.
The narratives
Data analyst Denys Hubashov led the work on posts published in German, Czech and Polish between summer 2024 and summer 2025, a period that covered several election campaigns. An AI classifier trained on hundreds of hand-labelled posts sorted 98,000 substantive posts, and reporters checked its results by hand.
About a quarter of 12,000 German-language posts about Ukrainians concerned alleged harm to the welfare system. More than 1,000 accused Ukrainians of Nazism, a standard Kremlin line. AfD co-chair Tino Chrupalla has repeatedly said that 700,000 Ukrainians in Germany do not work and live on the Bürgergeld benefit. Official figures show that about a quarter of Ukrainian recipients are children or unable to work and about 200,000 able-bodied recipients are unemployed. Co-chair Alice Weidel told a rally in July 2026 that Ukraine should receive no aid, money or weapons.
About 2,500 of 23,000 Czech-language posts said Ukrainians bring crime and danger. Tomio Okamura's Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD) has pushed anti-Ukrainian rhetoric since 2022 and campaigned on it in 2025; Okamura has blamed Ukrainians for rising crime, a claim that Czech police data and the fact-checker Demagog contradict. Andrej Babiš told voters during 2025 debates that refugees were overburdening the state budget. Babiš won the October 2025 election, formed a coalition with SPD and became prime minister. Okamura became speaker of the Chamber of Deputies and on 6 November 2025 ordered the Ukrainian flag, which had flown since February 2022, removed from the parliament building.
Polish posts centred on crime and on historical grievances, including "Banderite" slurs and references to the Volhynia massacres. Grzegorz Braun of the Confederation of the Polish Crown popularised the slogan "Stop the Ukrainianisation of Poland" and won a European Parliament seat in 2024. Nawrocki ran a 2025 presidential campaign video captioned with an instruction for Ukrainians to go to the back of the queue, and won. On 19 June 2026 he stripped Volodymyr Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle over the naming of a Ukrainian unit after the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. The Kyiv Independent recorded a wave of attacks on Ukrainians after that clash.
Rafał Pankowski of the Never Again Association told the Kyiv Independent that far-right groups and politicians in Poland were the first sources of hate toward Ukrainians and that their narratives bear the hallmarks of Russian propaganda. He said not everything should be blamed on Russia. Susan Benesch of the Dangerous Speech Project said fear is the operative emotion of such speech.
The networks
Viginum, France's agency against foreign digital interference, documented 77 Storm-1516 operations in a May 2025 report and found the involvement of John Mark Dougan, a former Florida deputy sheriff who fled to Russia in 2016, along with figures from the Yevgeny Prigozhin and Aleksandr Dugin networks. Viginum obtained further information on Yury Khoroshenky, a suspected officer of GRU Unit 29155 who has been publicly accused of financing and coordinating the operation. At least 20 of the operations Viginum reviewed sought to discredit candidates in national elections or boost parties favourable to the Russian government.
Ukrainian intelligence says Unit 29155, under Oleg Kushnir, paid for Storm-1516's servers and the AI tools that produce its videos, Bloomberg reported in April 2026. More than 40 per cent of its fabrications target Ukraine, and its output in the first quarter of 2026 was double that of the year before. The European Union sanctioned Dougan on 15 December 2025 under its regime for Russia's destabilising activities. Dougan has denied any link to the GRU.
CORRECTIV, working with NewsGuard and the Gnida Project, found more than 100 German-language fake news sites built by Storm-1516 before the February 2025 Bundestag election. In the campaign's final week, videos circulated showing Leipzig postal ballots with AfD missing and Hamburg ballots for AfD being shredded; the city of Leipzig called the documents forged, and the federal Interior Ministry said indicators pointed to Storm-1516. The same operation had circulated a near-identical video about destroyed Trump ballots in the U.S. in October 2024. German intelligence attributed a fake video discrediting postal voting before the 6 September 2026 Saxony-Anhalt election to Storm-1516, the Leipziger Volkszeitung reported. AfD won that election with 43.8 per cent.
Matryoshka, also called Operation Overload, dresses fabricated material in the branding of real outlets. Before Poland's June 2025 presidential runoff it spread claims that Ukrainian refugees were preparing terrorist attacks on the election, drawing more than 654,100 views on X, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found. Polish Deputy Prime Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski said Russian intelligence had offered Poles between €3,000 and €4,000 to spread disinformation before that vote. On 22 June 2026, three days after the White Eagle revocation, Matryoshka bots posted claims presenting the dispute as proof of Ukrainian "Nazism", the monitoring group Antibot4Navalny found.
Online Risk Labs identified 286 anonymous TikTok accounts spreading pro-Russian narratives and promoting SPD, the left-wing Stačilo! alliance and the PRO movement before the Czech election of 3 and 4 October 2025. The Czech Security Information Service (BIS) later said the network had no significant effect on the result, and its 2025 annual report found that most disinformation in Czechia is produced by Czech actors for financial, ideological or political gain.
The French election
Fabricated reports aim at Glucksmann, the Place Publique co-leader and MEP who has called for seizing immobilised Russian assets; Attal, the former prime minister and Renaissance leader; and Philippe, the former prime minister and mayor of Le Havre who met Zelensky in Kyiv in May. A victory by any of them would keep France on its course as a supplier of long-range missiles, fighter jets and artillery to Ukraine, the Kyiv Independent wrote.
VT Foreign Policy, a self-described alternative outlet that amplifies Kremlin narratives, published a story on 29 August 2026 saying that Glucksmann helped set up torture prisons in Georgia and Ukraine. Its only source was the Foundation to Battle Injustice, a front created by Prigozhin's network and sanctioned by the EU. A fake report styled as the investigative outlet Blast used AI-generated voices to claim that Glucksmann's partner, the journalist Léa Salamé, tried to bribe media; Blast denied publishing it, and Glucksmann called it a GRU operation. A fake Reporterre story said he had spent more than €2 million on private jets. Other fakes branded as BFM TV said Philippe has dementia and that Attal inherited a drug empire.
Viginum attributes the summer fakes about Philippe and Glucksmann to Storm-1516. NewsGuard's Chine Labbé counted seven Storm-1516 claims against French candidates since the summer, three of them imitating real outlets. France's General Secretariat for Defence and National Security alerted Attal's team to interference linked to organs of the Russian central authorities, RFI reported. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said on 11 June 2026 that the presidential vote faces heavy interference threats. Viginum describes the operations as "mediocre" and of limited visibility.
Amélie Jaques-Apke of Sciences Po's CEVIPOF told the Kyiv Independent the more durable aim is to make any result look illegitimate, and that the danger lies in amplification by Russian officials, pro-Russian Western figures and politicians.
Le Pen leads the polls for the April 2027 vote. A Paris appeals court upheld her conviction for embezzling European Parliament funds on 7 July 2026 but lifted the ban on her standing for office, and she declared her candidacy that night while appealing to the Court of Cassation. RN voted against the EU's €90 billion loan to Ukraine in February 2026. The Kyiv Independent wrote that damaging the three pro-Ukraine candidates could clear the way for a runoff between Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon of La France Insoumise.
The Trump administration
JD Vance repeated a Storm-1516 fabrication as a senator in December 2023. The story, first published on DC Weekly, a site researchers tied to Dougan, said Zelensky's associates bought two yachts with Western aid; brokers said the yachts had not been sold. Vance told Steve Bannon's podcast that some politicians would cut Social Security so that one of Zelensky's ministers could buy a bigger yacht. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene shared the same story.
Vance used a February 2025 speech at the Munich Security Conference to attack the exclusion of AfD from government and met Weidel nine days before the Bundestag election. When the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution classified AfD as a confirmed right-wing extremist organisation on 2 May 2025, a designation the party is contesting, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called it "tyranny in disguise" and Vance wrote that the German establishment had rebuilt the Berlin Wall. Elon Musk campaigned for AfD and told voters it was Germany's best hope. After AfD's Saxony-Anhalt win, Trump wrote on 8 September 2026 that Germany's populist party had a big night and blamed the country's immigration rules, without naming AfD.
Trump hosted Nawrocki in the Oval Office on 1 May 2025, a month before the runoff, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem travelled to Poland and urged Poles to vote for him. Trump received Nawrocki again on 3 September 2025 and said he rarely endorses candidates but had endorsed him.
Trump posted "FREE MARINE LE PEN" on Truth Social on 3 April 2025, calling her conviction a witch hunt. He endorsed Viktor Orbán in February 2026, and Vance spent two days in Hungary the week before the 12 April vote. Orbán built his campaign around Ukraine, portraying it as Hungary's enemy and his opponent Péter Magyar as Zelensky's puppet, and lost to Magyar.
Orbán, Le Pen and Babiš shared a stage in Madrid on 8 February 2025 under the slogan "Make Europe Great Again" at the first rally of the Patriots for Europe group, where Babiš called the Patriots Trump's natural allies in Europe. SPD sits in the European Parliament with AfD in the Europe of Sovereign Nations group; Okamura received AfD Saxony leader Jörg Urban in Prague and congratulated the party on its Saxony-Anhalt result.
Jordan Bardella, RN's president, cancelled a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington in February 2025 after Bannon made a gesture Bardella said alluded to Nazi ideology. Bannon said it was a wave.
The Israeli government
Amichai Chikli, Israel's diaspora affairs minister, invited Bardella and Marion Maréchal to an antisemitism conference in Jerusalem on 26 and 27 March 2025, the first time European far-right figures had been invited to an official Israeli government event. Israel ended its boycott of RN, the Sweden Democrats and Vox that month while keeping its boycott of AfD and Austria's Freedom Party. Bernard-Henri Lévy and Germany's antisemitism commissioner Felix Klein withdrew, and European Jewish Congress president Ariel Muzicant called the invitations "a stab in the back to European Jewry".
Okamura left the Israeli flag flying on the Czech parliament when he removed the Ukrainian one, saying he had nothing against Israel. Czech Foreign Minister Petr Macinka announced in December 2025 that the Babiš government expected to move the Czech embassy to Jerusalem in 2026, and Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar met Babiš in Prague on 19 January 2026 and called him "courageous and exceptional". Orbán hosted Benjamin Netanyahu in Budapest on 3 April 2025 in defiance of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant and announced Hungary's withdrawal from the court the same day.
Grzegorz Braun has no such ties to the Israeli government. He used a fire extinguisher on Hanukkah candles in the Polish parliament on 12 December 2023 and called the festival satanic.
Voice of Europe
BIS produced the clearest evidence of Russian money reaching European politicians. It found in March 2024 that Voice of Europe, a Prague-based site, was covertly financed by Viktor Medvedchuk, the former Ukrainian oligarch and Vladimir Putin's close associate, and run by his associate Artem Marchevskyi. The Czech government sanctioned both men and the site on 27 March 2024. BIS concluded the operation had paid at least half a million euros to pro-Russian politicians across Europe, partly in cash in Prague and partly in cryptocurrency, ahead of the 2024 European Parliament election.
Czech intelligence suspects AfD's Petr Bystron of receiving €20,000 and says it filmed him meeting Marchevskyi at least three times. German prosecutors opened a bribery investigation, and the European Parliament has twice lifted Bystron's immunity. Bystron denies taking money and called the allegations revenge by Petr Fiala's government, then in office. Maximilian Krah, AfD's lead candidate in 2024, visited Medvedchuk under house arrest in 2021 and gave interviews to the site, which also featured RN and Vlaams Belang politicians and Václav Klaus, the former Czech president who backs SPD.
The X accounts behind the narratives the Kyiv Independent measured remain unnamed; account-level data held by X or by the Kyiv Independent's analysts would show whether they overlap with Storm-1516 or Matryoshka infrastructure. Viginum's case files hold its attribution of the Glucksmann and Philippe fakes. German prosecutors' file on Bystron holds the BIS recordings and any payment trail from Marchevskyi. The French presidential election's first round is due in April 2027, and Le Pen's appeal to the Court of Cassation is unlikely to be decided before then.
