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Russia is working to subvert French support for Ukraine, documents show

“We have to change all the governments. … All the governments in Western Europe will be changed,” Jean-Luc Schaffhauser, a former member of the European Parliament for Le Pen’s party, said in an interview. “We have to control this. Take the leadership of this.”

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  • This is the best summary I could come up with:

    STRASBOURG, France — From the top floor of the house he shares here with a senior Russian diplomat — to whom he rents the apartment below — the man who helped bankroll the French presidential bid of far-right candidate Marine Le Pen has been working on plans to propel pro-Moscow politicians to power.

    Russia has been increasing its efforts to undermine French support for Kyiv — a hidden propaganda front in Western Europe that is part of the war against Ukraine, according to Kremlin documents and interviews with European security officials and far-right political figures.

    The talking points to be amplified by the Kremlin’s strategists included arguing that Western sanctions against Russia have damaged the French economy through a decline in trade, leaving the country at risk of falling into “the deepest social and economic crisis of recent years,” as well as asserting that the supply of arms to Ukraine has left France without the weapons to defend itself.

    The state watchdog, Viginum, said it had a “high degree of confidence” that the bots were connected to a Russian disinformation network known as Recent Reliable News, which produces content aimed at undermining Western governments’ stances on the Ukraine war.

    It cloned and usurped the sites of well-known Western media brands such as France’s Le Monde — and, eventually, of the French Foreign Ministry — to produce fake content that included depicting Ukraine as a Nazi state and blasting sanctions against Russia as harming European economies.

    After a six-month inquiry this year into foreign interference in the French political process, France’s Parliament focused in on the Kremlin, declaring in its final report: “Russia is conducting a long-term disinformation campaign in our country” that seeks “to defend and promote Russian interests and to polarize our democratic society.”

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