Unknown people created clone pages of UNIAN and “Oboz.UA” media outlets. They publish pro-Russian fakes and manipulations

A network of fake accounts through shell sites redirects users to fake pages masquerading as popular Ukrainian media outlets UNIAN and “Oboz.UA” (“Obozrevatel”). This scheme works on the principle of Operation “Doppelganger”, a Russian disinformation campaign that began after Russiaʼs full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The operationʼs peculiarity is its mimicry of major national publications and the distribution of links to the text through bot networks on social networks.

The URLs of the fake sites are almost identical to the real ones. They are distinguished only by the domain: the real UNIAN and “Oboz.UA” have “.ua” and “.com”, while the fake ones have the “.st” domain of the African island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe, which is open for free registration.

All of the discovered texts were posted on September 3-4. They concern socially sensitive topics, for example:

• Allegedly, the authorities are preparing the mobilization of women — on August 25, the Councilʼs Committee on National Security, Defense, and Intelligence stated: the mobilization of women in Ukraine is not being conducted, is not being prepared, and is not being considered.
• Actions of the TRC employees. In particular, false information is being spread that TRC employees in Lviv killed a man and then threw him near a building — on August 22, the Lviv Regional TRC denied this.

During the week of September 3-10, six posts received 40 349 views and 1 884 shares. The fake UNIAN and “Oboz.UA” pages were distributed by at least four accounts in X. In addition to fake news related to Ukraine, some of the accounts distributed posts in German supporting the pro-Russian far-right Alternative for Germany party and criticizing the current German government.

Babel contacted the editorial offices of UNIAN and “Oboz.UA” for comment.

The communications director of the "1+1 Media" group Yana Lyakhovich responded on behalf of UNIAN that these pages do not belong to their media, and the editorial office does not know who is behind this. The identified resources were transferred to the Sudum copyright protection team, which is working on blocking them.

“Oboz.UA” also replied to Babel that they had nothing to do with these pages. Such incidents have already occurred during a full-scale war (in particular, “Detector Media” wrote about a similar incident with “Oboz.UA” in 2023) and the publication contacted the cyber police. The editorial board is now agreeing on an action plan.

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