Among the many bleak artifacts that have emerged from Russia’s war on Ukraine, few feel as strange and as chilling as the internal files of the operation codenamed “Uganda.” Launched in early 2023, it was the Ukraine-focused branch of a much larger Kremlin campaign known as Doppelgänger, and its purpose was not to fire missiles but to wage a quieter, more insidious war on information itself. According to hacked correspondence published by The Insider on 21 October, the man setting the overall goals was Sergei Kiriyenko, first deputy chief of staff of the Russian Presidential Administration, while the daily oversight fell to Alexander Kharichev, who now heads the Kremlin’s Directorate for Monitoring and Analysis of Social Processes. Doppelgänger itself was already familiar to researchers: it disguised Russian narratives as local news through cloned media websites, fake social media accounts, paid advertisements, and fabricated videos. In 2024, the FBI named Kiriyenko among its orchestrators. Its paid contractor, the Social Design Agency, or SDA, run by Ilya Gambashidze, has not only survived exposure but is expanding, with new efforts now targeting AI chatbots. What makes the new leaked files so disturbing is that they offer an all-access tour of the operation’s inner workings: the careful, cynical psychology, the petty tactical choices, the way even debunked fakes were reported to the Kremlin as proud achievements. It is a world where strategic communications collapse into something more like a theatrical production staged for an authoritarian audience, in which the actors are networks of anonymous accounts and the director is a man in an office thousands of miles away.
The internal strategy documents reveal a surprisingly self-aware operation. One briefing on narratives explained that the project ran its Telegram channels according to the principles of “agent work” and psychological operations, the Russian version of the investigation shows. This was not just about posting propaganda; it was about building believable identities, relationships, and rhythms. Early on, the team made a key decision: all of its outlets would be disguised as Ukrainian. The campaign would never, or almost never, carry direct Russian propaganda. Instead, every channel was stuffed with seemingly genuine Ukrainian news, curated to look like the work of local citizens, local media, or disgruntled soldiers. The goal was to create a untraceable presence, a mask so convincing that when the propaganda came, no one would suspect who was really speaking. The briefing warned, with an almost professional solemnity, that dropping these pro-Ukrainian themes too quickly would eventually expose the client and wreck the entire plan. In other words, the operators had to learn to imitate their enemy convincingly, to post patriotic Ukrainian content day after day, to mourn Ukrainian losses, to share Ukrainian wartime recipes, to argue about Ukrainian politics, all waiting for the right moment to slip in a lethal dose of demoralization. There is something almost absurd about this effort, and yet its authors treated it with deadly seriousness. The human toll is harder to measure: the Ukrainian citizens who encountered these channels may have fallen for a lie wrapped in a familiar flag, or they may have simply absorbed a slow drip of distrust toward their own leaders. The psychological operation was designed to feel like a friend, not an enemy, and that is perhaps the most unsettling part.
Kiriyenko set four explicit goals for the Ukraine strand. The operation was to discredit Ukraine’s military and political leadership, split its elites, demoralize its army, and disorganize its population. Those words, drawn from a leaked pitch, summarize an entire theory of warfare: if you cannot win on the battlefield, you can win in the mind, you can make the target country unable to trust its own commanders, its own government, its own future. The SDA prepared the pitch and carried out the work. Political strategist Alexander Asafov came up with some of the fakes himself. In May 2023, he proposed a story that Ukrainian soldiers were bribing their commanders to avoid the front. In January 2024, he floated another narrative that Ukraine was pulling air defenses back to Kyiv to protect the authorities, leaving the rest of the country exposed. Neither was true, but truth was never the point. The operational logic was familiar from generations of disinformation research: play on existing grievances, confirm suspicions, make people feel that their leaders are corrupt and indifferent, and eventually reduce their will to fight or support those who do. The fact that these fakes were proposed by a political strategist, not some random internet troll, shows how deeply professionalized the project had become. It was not a handful of amateur trolls posting in the dead of night; it was a machine with project managers, creative teams, and strategic goals, occupying an odd bureaucratic space between the presidential administration and a private advertising agency. The four goals read like a corporate mission statement for a company whose product is chaos.
One of the most disturbing episodes in the leaked files revolves around a real tragedy: the crash of an Il-76 military transport aircraft in Russia’s Belgorod Oblast on 24 January 2024. Moscow immediately claimed the plane had been carrying Ukrainian prisoners of war who were being exchanged, a claim that Ukraine has disputed and which independent investigators have never been able to fully verify. In a meeting chaired by Yevgeny Kazakov, a subordinate of Kharichev, the conversation turned to how to exploit the crash. Kazakov proposed sending a fake message to the widows of Ukrainian soldiers, suggesting that their husbands had died for the sake of an expensive Russian plane. The phrase in the leaked files is chilling: “They died for an expensive Il-76—the Russians have few of those.” The idea was ultimately dropped, maybe because even the operators recognized that mocking grieving widows would generate a backlash, but the fact that it was raised at all reveals the moral universe of the operation. The same meeting, however, produced another fake that was actually launched three days later: the claim that Ukrainian recruitment centers had sent widows a can of stewed meat with a small flag as compensation. The story was absurd, designed to portray the Ukrainian state as callous and petty, and yet it was carefully produced and distributed across their network. The same producers also oversaw letters falsely attributed to Deputy Defense Minister Nataliia Kalmykova. In these letters, the Ukrainian official supposedly wrote cold, bureaucratic messages to families of the dead, another attempt to erode faith in the government’s humanity. The account of these meetings and their aftermath reads like a dark workshop where human pain is treated as raw material, where the suffering caused by war is repackaged into propaganda and sold back to the people enduring it.
Perhaps the most telling detail in the leaked files is how the SDA measured its own success. The agency collected coverage of its work in a folder meant for the Kremlin, documenting every story it had seeded. But the folder did not just contain reports of viral posts or favorable comments. It also contained the debunks. When fact-checkers and investigative journalists exposed the fake about President Zelensky’s yacht, the SDA filed the complete story, including its refutation, as evidence of work done. That particular narrative had even been echoed by JD Vance, then a US senator and now the vice president, showing how a single fabricated story could travel from Kremlin-linked channels all the way into the mouths of American politicians. The report also included a TikTok campaign about former Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov’s family that had already been debunked by the BBC. From an operational standpoint, filing a debunked story as a success makes no sense, unless the goal is not actually to convince people. It suggests a bureaucratic ritual: the Kremlin wants to see action, the contractors produce volume, and neither side cares much about whether the stories survive contact with reality. It also suggests that the true audience for these operations may be the Kremlin itself, which needs to believe that its expensive, sophisticated efforts are working. In that sense, the disinformation campaign is like a mirror turned inward; it reassures the powerful that they are feared, that their weapons are sharp, even when those weapons are constantly being exposed and dismantled.
When the investigation reaches its conclusion, the overall tally is not flattering. The Insider concludes that the team has had more failures than successes. Their fakes are frequently identified, their networks are frequently suspended, and their methods are increasingly well-documented by researchers. The United States sanctioned Gambashidze and the Social Design Agency in March 2024, and the United Kingdom followed in October. Yet the operation continues, still expanding into new frontiers like AI chatbots, still producing fresh layers of fictional reality. That persistence may be the most important lesson. These campaigns are not built to win every argument or convert every reader; they are built to saturate the information environment, to make truth harder to find, to keep everyone suspicious of everything. The human cost is profound: the Ukrainian widows who received a story about a can of stewed meat instead of a moment of peace; the soldiers who read that their commanders were selling them out; the citizens who cannot tell whether a channel is run by a neighbor or by an operative in Moscow. The men behind the operation sit comfortably in their offices, setting goals, reviewing folders of debunked stories, proposing fakes with the casual cruelty of people who will never have to live with the consequences. The files published by The Insider do not stop the machine, but they force it into the light. And in the end, the most human response to such machinery is not despair, but clarity: understanding how it works, naming the people behind it, and refusing to let their engineered confusion become our own.