The Shadow War for France’s Presidency

As France hurtles toward a presidential election that could reshape Europe’s response to Russia’s war in Ukraine, an invisible battle is already being waged. It is not fought with missiles or drones, but with pixels, pixels designed to look like journalism, whispers dressed up as facts, and digital ghosts wearing the masks of trusted media outlets. The adversaries are not political parties in the traditional sense, but something far more elusive: a sprawling, well-funded disinformation apparatus that appears to take its orders from Moscow. The goal is not merely to influence who wins the Élysée Palace, but to ensure that no credible pro-Ukraine candidate even makes it to the final round. With the vote only months away, French authorities have detected hundreds of coordinated operations seeding the information ecosystem with lies aimed at destroying the reputations of the very people who might keep France on its current course of unwavering support for Kyiv.

At the center of this storm are three figures, each representing a different shade of the French political mainstream, but all sharing one critical trait: they have refused to waver in their commitment to Ukraine’s defense. There is Raphaël Glucksmann, the center-left MEP who has become one of Europe’s most vocal advocates for seizing frozen Russian assets and arming Ukraine to the teeth. There is Gabriel Attal, the young former prime minister under Emmanuel Macron, a man whose rapid rise has made him a symbol of the establishment’s continuity. And there is Édouard Philippe, the former prime minister who now runs Le Havre, a centrist pragmatist who has met Volodymyr Zelensky in person and has made no secret of his belief that Europe must stand firm against Putin’s aggression. These three men are not allies in any formal sense—in fact, they are rivals for the same centrist ground—but in the eyes of the Kremlin’s information warfare strategists, they are interchangeable targets. A victory for any one of them would mean France continues its pro-European, pro-Ukraine trajectory. And that is precisely what Moscow cannot afford to allow.

The campaign against Glucksmann has been particularly savage, a relentless series of fabrications designed to paint him as a war criminal, a hypocrite, and a puppet. In the summer, a fake story impersonating the French investigative outlet Blast alleged—using AI-generated voices to make the lie more believable—that his partner, Léa Salamé, had tried to bribe journalists into writing flattering articles about him. The real Blast journalists denied ever producing such a story, and Glucksmann himself blamed Russian military intelligence, the GRU, for the operation. Then came an even darker invention: a piece on VT Foreign Policy, a site that cheerfully amplifies pro-Kremlin narratives, alleging that Glucksmann had helped set up torture prisons in Georgia while advising then-President Mikheil Saakashvili, and had later replicated those same methods in Ukraine after the EuroMaidan Revolution, working alongside a military officer who is now Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, Mykhailo Drapatyi. The supposed source for these explosive claims? The Foundation to Battle Injustice, a front organization created by the late Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin—a group so openly tied to Russian influence operations that the European Union has formally sanctioned it. The story collapsed under the weight of its own absurdity, but not before it had been shared, screenshotted, and seeded into the murky corners of social media where conspiracy theories flourish.

The other candidates have been subjected to their own grotesque caricatures. Édouard Philippe, a man who radiates calm competence, was the subject of fake reports dressed up as BFM TV broadcasts claiming he suffers from dementia. The image was designed to chip away at his credibility, to plant a seed of doubt in voters’ minds about his fitness for office. Gabriel Attal, meanwhile, was hit with a truly bizarre fabrication: that he inherited a drug empire from his father. The accusation is so far outside the realm of plausibility that it might be laughable, were it not for the fact that disinformation does not need to be believable to be effective—it only needs to be repeated. In yet another twist, fake reports circulating on X claimed both that Attal supported a recent wave of student protests and that he blamed Russia for orchestrating them. The contradictions did not matter. The point was not to make a coherent argument, but to create a fog of noise in which all political figures become suspect, all truth becomes relative, and the very idea of a trustworthy candidate begins to dissolve.

Behind these attacks lie two well-documented operations, each with its own signature style. The first, known as Matryoshka, is the workhorse of the disinformation machine—a factory churning out nearly a dozen fake reports a day, each one posing as an established media outlet or a credible expert. Chine Labbe, a senior vice president at NewsGuard, a company that tracks misinformation, noted that by mid-October alone, her team had catalogued 89 fake Matryoshka reports aimed at French presidential candidates. The second operation, Storm-1516, is more sophisticated, a GRU-linked effort that uses generative AI not just to manipulate existing content but to build entire fake websites from scratch, complete with convincing layouts and plausible-sounding bylines. Since the summer, NewsGuard has identified at least seven claims from this operation targeting French candidates, three of which imitated real news outlets. The French government’s own counter-interference agency, Viginum, has traced the fake stories about Philippe and Glucksmann directly to Storm-1516, and a separate investigation by the Gnida Project linked the operation to a forged article on the environmental news site Reporterre, claiming Glucksmann had blown over two million euros on private jet travel. The pattern is unmistakable: the attacks are not random. They are concentrated, coordinated, and aimed with surgical precision at the three candidates most likely to continue France’s pro-Ukraine policies.

But the deeper purpose of these operations is not merely to damage individual reputations. It is to corrode the very foundations of French democracy. Amélie Jaques-Apke, a disinformation researcher at Sciences Po’s CEVIPOF center, argues that undermining trust in democratic institutions is the ultimate objective. Damaging specific candidates is the visible tactic, but the durable goal is to make whatever result emerges from the election look illegitimate. If voters come to believe that the entire system is rigged, that all media is fake, and that no politician can be trusted, then any outcome—even a victory by a pro-Kremlin candidate—can be framed as the only authentic choice. This is a strategy that Russia has refined not only in France but across the Western world, and it is particularly dangerous in a country where protest movements and institutional skepticism already run deep. The erosion of trust is a slow poison, and the disinformation campaigns are designed to administer it in increasingly large doses until the body politic no longer knows what to believe.

The actual impact of these campaigns on French voters is, for now, difficult to quantify. Viginum has described many of the operations as “mediocre” and lacking in visibility, suggesting that a majority of French citizens may never encounter the fakes directly. Yet the risk lies in amplification. A fabricated story that sits unnoticed on an obscure website can suddenly achieve viral reach if it is picked up by Russian state media, echoed by pro-Kremlin Western influencers, or amplified by French politicians who denounce it so loudly that they inadvertently spread it to millions. The strategists behind these operations are patient, and they are learning. They are deploying generative AI to produce ever more convincing fakes, professionalizing their methods, and finding new ways to monetize divisive content. Their limited success so far is no guarantee against a sophisticated surge as the election approaches. For France, for Ukraine, and for the future of European security, the stakes could not be higher. The disinformation machine is humming, and the final months before April will test not only the resilience of French institutions but the ability of ordinary citizens to see through the fog of lies and make a choice grounded in reality rather than in the carefully manufactured illusions of a foreign adversary.