The latest Storm-1516/R-FBI disinformation campaign targets Ukraine, the campaign promotes a false narrative about alleged secret torture camps for the Ukrainian draft dodgers
08.03.2026 15:56
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The latest Storm-1516/R-FBI disinformation campaign targets Ukraine, the campaign promotes a false narrative about alleged secret torture camps for the Ukrainian draft dodgers
The latest Storm-1516 disinformation campaign is targeting Armenia. The campaign also links to a publication by Okay Deprem in dikgazete[.]com
The campaign also links to a publication on a recently created website "Epstein Files Database" epsteinfilesdb[.]com
In 2023 Centrocast was renamed to "Fire Point", changed beneficiary and became the producer of Flamingo cruise missiles, which made it a target for the Russian disinformation campaigns.
In reality, there is no evidence that Centrocast was ever a casting agency, as it was reported by The Insider in relation to a different fake narrative by RT, and the primary activity of the company was specified as "activities of informational agencies"
theins.ru/antifake/287...
The latest Storm-1516 disinformation campaign is targeting Ukraine, the campaign promotes a false narrative that a "casting agency" Centrocast, which allegedly worked with Kvartal 95 Studio, was involved in the trafficking of Ukrainian minors for Jeffrey Epstein
The majority of the publications are linking to a YouTube "short", which was published in a "hidden_truth_87" channel, registered in May 2025. While a similar approach with YouTube videos was used in the early Storm-1516 campaigns, it's less typical for the contemporary campaigns
While the campaign skews from the typical Storm-1516 content format, one of the accounts involved in the campaign distribution linked a different Storm-1516 campaign, which is targeting France, as the source in a subsequent tweet
Another disinformation campaign, which was likely conducted by Storm-1516, appears to be targeting Pavel Durov, the campaign is alleging Durov's visit to Epstein's estate in Paris and goes into several controversies around Durov's figure
The campaign also involves a recently created copycat website macronavecbournazel[.]fr, which attempts to copy the real website of Bournazel's campaign
The campaign promotes a false narrative that a Paris mayor candidate Pierre-Yves Bournazel is proposing to repurpose the Centre Pompidou into a shelter for homeless migrants, with the backing from the French president Emmanuel Macron
The latest Storm-1516 disinformation campaign is targeting France and it seems to be the first one to target the upcoming local elections in the country
The latest Storm-1516/R-FBI disinformation campaign promotes another false narrative that the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy funnelled money from EU aid funds
The latest Storm-1516 disinformation campaign is targeting Armenia, the campaign promotes a false narrative that prime minister Pashinyan introduced a bill to protect Islam in the country. The campaign also links to a publication on a Turkish-speaking portal ulusal[.]com[.]tr
In the recent weeks our team identified several disinformation campaigns around the upcoming parliamentary election in Hungary, which appear to be conducted by the Storm-1516 operators. The election seem to be critical for the rule of Viktor Orban, the biggest Russian ally in EU
More details are available in the full report here:
gnidaproject.substack.com/p/storm-1516...
The campaigns are focusing primarily on the figure of Peter Magyar, the leader of the most popular opposition party, according to the polls
In the recent weeks our team identified several disinformation campaigns around the upcoming parliamentary election in Hungary, which appear to be conducted by the Storm-1516 operators. The election seem to be critical for the rule of Viktor Orban, the biggest Russian ally in EU
The campaign links to a publication in a recently created fake media website velvetnews[.]co[.]uk and "laundered" through a publication by a Russian propagandist of Turkish origin Okay Deprem in "Oda TV" once again
The latest Storm-1516 disinformation campaign is targeting Armenia, the campaign promotes a false narrative alleging an affair between Nikol Pashinyan's wife Anna Hakobyan and a Turkish actor Ozan Akbaba, and also her separation with Pashinyan
The campaign also links to a recently created copycat website franceagricole[.]net, which copies an agriculture news portal "La France Agricole"
The latest Storm-1516 campaign is targeting France and Ukraine, the campaign promotes a false narrative that an alleged disease outbreak in cattle in France was caused by grain sourced from Ukraine
The campaign also links to a recently registered copycat website celebrity-homes-tmz[.]com, which copies the website of American tabloid TMZ
The latest Storm-1516 disinformation campaign is targeting Ukraine and the president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the campaign promotes a false narrative that P Diddy mansion was sold to Zelenskyy
I would like to briefly introduce you to Raphael Machado, a pro-Russian propagandist who apparently works for several disinformation campaigns - it looks like he’s in a coordinating role for both Doppelganger and Storm-1516.
In 2024 Konovalchik was appointed as the Assistant to the Secretary of Russia's Security Council by a presidential decree, which at the same time relieved him of his current post
www.kremlin.ru/acts/news/74...
An unverified leak from 2022 on sliv[.]top pointed to Konovalchik as the head of the unit 55111 and Starunsky as his deputy.
In another case, our team was able to catch Pavel Konovalchik in 2023, whose career path is harder to trace, but most of it seems to be associated with the infamous unit 26165 (Fancy Bear), which is responsible for hacking
- currenttime.tv/a/29374007.h...
- government.ru/docs/all/675...
Starunsky is also a former head of the Unit 54777, which is the main center for "psycological operations", and belongs to the same structure
In May 2021 Starunsky was mentioned in a presidential decree as the deputy head of the unit 55111, when he was appointed into the Scientific Council of Russia’s Security Council
meduza.io/en/feature/2...