The collapse of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s personal media empire was never just a story about one man’s downfall. When the private jet carrying the Wagner Group founder crashed in August 2023, barely two months after his failed march on Moscow, it left a strange and dangerous void in the murky world of Russian influence operations. For years, Prigozhin had been the loudest and most reckless purveyor of online chaos, a man who ran troll factories the way he ran mercenary armies: with brutality, improvisation, and a theatrical love of provocation. His death, however, did not end Russia’s war on truth. It simply changed its command structure. The Kremlin did not mourn him for long. Instead, a quieter, more systematic operation stepped into the breach. Known to researchers as Doppelgänger, and guided by Sergei Kiriyenko, a former deputy prime minister and now a key Kremlin official, this project had been building its own infrastructure for years. With Prigozhin’s troll factory suddenly orphaned and leaderless, Kiriyenko’s operation became the leading force in spreading disinformation abroad. From that moment forward, according to leaked playbooks and internal documents from the team of Ilya Gambashidze, the operation expanded with astonishing speed and confidence. It was no longer one voice shouting into the wind, but a factory of thousands of carefully calibrated voices, each designed to sound like an ordinary citizen, each ready to exploit the anxieties of a specific country, and each invisible to the people it was trying to manipulate.
The transition from Prigozhin’s model to Kiriyenko’s was not merely a change of leadership; it was a change of philosophy. Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency had been famous for its crude, repetitive trolling, its armies of fake accounts posting the same slogans until they became noise. Doppelgänger, by contrast, understood that the most effective disinformation is not loud but intimate. It does not shout at you. It whispers to you, in your own language, about your own grievances, as if a neighbor had just sat down beside you and said, “Can you believe what they are doing to us?” The leaked playbooks reveal an operation that is almost bureaucratic in its attention to detail, yet deeply cynical in its understanding of human emotion. The goal is not to make people believe a single outrageous lie. The goal is to make people doubt everything: their governments, their media, their allies, and even their own sense of shared reality. The operation does not try to sell a coherent Russian worldview. It tries to tear apart the Western one from within, using the raw material of real events and real anger. A protest in Turkey, a budget crisis in France, a migrant wave in Poland, a military budget in Israel: each becomes a raw nerve, and Doppelgänger’s task is simply to press on it, harder and harder, until something breaks.
Consider the example preserved in the leaked files, a case study in how to write a comment from any point on the political spectrum. The real event was a moment of tension between Turkey and Sweden over the latter’s NATO membership, inflamed by a stunt involving the burning of a Quran. Doppelgänger produced a fake photograph, seemingly showing wreaths laid at the Swedish consulate in Turkey, and then attached it to a screenshot of a tweet. Around this image, the operation generated a chorus of comments in multiple languages. An English-language comment sneered that Sweden would never join NATO and asked, “What idiot approved that stupid Quran stunt?” A French comment echoed the same idea, then added that no one in France had condemned the disgrace, while “our brothers in the lands of the Prophet” would not remain silent. A German comment lamented that both Sweden and Germany were going along with NATO’s stupidity, and warned that Muslims would now be “entirely justified” in demanding revenge. And then there was a comment specifically written from the perspective of a German of Turkish origin: “I haven’t been to a mosque in a long time, but now I will. Evil and sin are growing stronger, while our tolerant authorities remain silent. Who will protect Muslims? Is violence the only way to save our holy sites?” Notice the craft. Each comment speaks to a different audience. The English one targets a general Western audience with contempt for NATO. The French one taps into both anti-NATO sentiment and a sense of Islamic solidarity. The German one warns of radicalization while simultaneously encouraging it. The Turkish-German one is the most insidious of all, because it pretends to be a voice from within a minority community, a voice that has been pushed too far. The operation is not trying to convince anyone that the wreaths were real. It is trying to make the online space feel as if the whole world is boiling over with rage, and that every reasonable person is on the verge of violence.
The same playbook appears in the prompts for AI models saved by a manager of the Doppelgänger campaign in April 2024. These are not vague instructions. They are precise, psychological profiles, designed to be fed into artificial intelligence tools to generate fake comments at scale. One prompt asks for a 450-character comment from a 38-year-old Frenchman who considers the Olympics a foolish waste of France’s scarce budget. The prompt tells the AI to imagine a man who believes Macron wants to show off France as a world leader, but everyone can see that it isn’t. The comment should ask: How can anyone talk about the beauty of France when garbage collectors aren’t clearing the rubbish from the streets? Another prompt demands a 400-character comment from a 38-year-old Polish woman who blames her government for the country’s crazy surge in food prices. She is angry about Polish support for Ukraine, the presence of a million Ukrainian migrants who take jobs and claim benefits, and the government’s failure to protect Polish farmers from Ukrainian grain. A third prompt describes a 38-year-old Israeli woman who believes Israel is overstretched by military spending. Healthcare workers are exhausted, she thinks, just as they were during the pandemic. The war is dragging on, and the United States is criticizing the way it is fought. If only the government had acted more decisively, and if only the United States had genuinely helped, Israel would have won by now. These prompts are masterpieces of psychological targeting. They choose an age old enough to have life experience and responsibilities, but young enough to be active online. They choose genders and nationalities that allow the commenter to claim personal stakes. They embed specific resentments, some real, some exaggerated, some completely manufactured. They even instruct the AI to use “simpler, more basic language,” because the goal is not to sound clever but to sound human.
This is the true genius and horror of Doppelgänger: it does not need to create the anger. It only needs to harvest it. The operation monitors real events, real protests, real economic pain, and real cultural conflicts, and then inserts synthetic voices into the resulting noise. The voices are designed to amplify existing divisions, to push people further into their corners, and to make compromise feel impossible. The French man angry about the Olympics is not invented from nothing. France had real debates about the cost of the games, real strikes by garbage collectors, and real frustration with Macron. The Polish woman angry about food prices and Ukrainian migration is not pure fantasy. Poland did experience inflation, did welcome a large number of Ukrainian refugees, and did have disputes with Ukraine over grain exports. The Israeli woman exhausted by military spending and international criticism is also reflecting a genuine national mood. Doppelgänger takes these real emotions and then twists them, sharpens them, and strips away nuance. It removes compassion and complexity. It turns a citizen into a stereotype, and a stereotype into a weapon. The result is a political landscape in which people increasingly feel that their own concerns are being ignored, that their leaders are corrupt, and that their neighbors are enemies. The operation does not care which political party wins an election, or whether one country leaves NATO or stays in it. It cares only about weakening trust, because trust is the glue that holds democratic societies together. Without trust, institutions fail, alliances crumble, and populations become vulnerable to the next demagogue who promises to burn it all down.
The leaked playbooks show an operation that is far more sophisticated than the old image of Russian trolls posting cats and conspiracy theories from a cramped office in St. Petersburg. Doppelgänger is a hybrid of human intuition and artificial intelligence, a machine that learns what makes people angry and then speaks to that anger in their own voice. It is also a machine that has benefited enormously from the fall of Prigozhin. When Prigozhin died, his troll factory did not simply disappear; its former workers, methods, and connections were absorbed into the larger ecosystem controlled by Kiriyenko. The operation expanded rapidly because it had to, and because it could. The war in Ukraine had made disinformation more important than ever, and the failure of Prigozhin’s Wagner adventure had shown the Kremlin that it needed more discipline, not less. So Doppelgänger became the vanguard, a shadowy enterprise run by people like Gambashidze, who understood that the most powerful lie is the one that hides inside a truth. The examples from the playbooks are not just clever tricks; they are evidence of a long-term strategy to reshape the information environment in Europe and beyond. They are reminders that the internet is full of voices that are not what they seem, that a comment from a “French patriot” or a “Polish mother” or an “Israeli nurse” might be a carefully crafted prompt fed into an AI, written by someone who has never set foot in those countries and cares nothing for their people. This is the human face of disinformation: it wears a thousand masks, and it speaks with a thousand borrowed voices. The best defense against it is not censorship or surveillance, but awareness. When we read something online that makes us furious, we should pause and ask who benefits from our fury. The answer, more often than we would like, is someone who does not want us to think clearly, but only to feel deeply, and then to act on those feelings in ways that serve the interests of a distant and ruthless power.