The Doppelgänger project, as revealed by internal documents and reporting, was an ambitious and deceptive Russian influence operation dressed up in the clothes of legitimate scholarship. The core idea was to create nonprofit organizations in various countries that would look like independent research institutes but were actually vehicles for recruiting international experts and laundering pro-Russian narratives into public discourse. These fake think tanks were meant to give Russian talking points a veneer of academic credibility, making them more palatable to Western audiences. The documents show a clear pattern: set up a seemingly respectable front, staff it with sympathetic voices, and use it to push messages that would be dismissed if they came directly from Russian state media. One proposal, associated with the SDA, asked for $80,000 just to launch a nonprofit in Israel, plus roughly 3 million rubles a month—about $36,500—for content creation, work with opinion leaders, and promotion. Another project, an “Institute of Anti-Globalism,” was even more expensive, with a price tag of 5 million rubles a month, or more than $61,000. This was not small-scale tinkering; it was a serious investment in shaping how the world sees Russia and its role in global affairs.
The planning behind this effort was remarkably cynical, particularly in the way its architects pitched it to the Kremlin. Nikolai Tupikin, one of the figures involved, drafted what he called “a justification for strengthening and expanding the project with Israeli colonels from various intelligence services,” explicitly framing the initiative as a form of Russian soft power. The document went further, arguing that Russian information warfare and interference campaigns were a cost-effective way to preserve Russia’s image as a superpower. In other words, the more Russia meddles in elections, foments social division, and spreads discord abroad, the stronger its global standing appears. This is a revealing admission: the goal was not to win debates but to project strength through chaos, to make Russia look too dangerous and too busy to be ignored. The same expanded presentation for the proposed Israeli institute acknowledged a weakness—that “our narratives lack a legitimate source of information and a news hook”—but it also expressed confidence that in Europe and other Western countries, the narratives they needed already existed and enjoyed sustained popularity. In other words, they didn’t plan to create new beliefs from scratch; they intended to amplify and exploit existing ones, using the cover of an independent research body to do so.
Eventually, the project moved from planning to reality, and the result was the International Burke Institute, or IBI. In February 2025, someone acquired the domain ibi.institute, which had previously belonged to the Instituto Iberoamericano, and used it to build a website for this new entity. The choice of name was interesting—Edmund Burke is often associated with conservative thought, which fit with the goal of pulling right-leaning audiences into narratives useful to Russia. The website listed an impressive array of partners: the United Nations office, UNICEF, UNESCO, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), and the World Bank. It looked authoritative, at least to a casual visitor. But when The Insider contacted these organizations, every single one denied any partnership with IBI, now or ever. The site also conveniently omitted any mention of ties to Russian experts, gave no official address, named no founders, and provided no information about financing. In other words, it was a phantom institution with a polished face and no visible skeleton. The only real connections were to the people and structures behind the Doppelgänger operation, and those connections were carefully hidden from public view.
The content produced by the IBI was just as deceptive as its institutional presentation. As promised in the pitch to the Kremlin, the site published economic and political reviews of the “country of the month.” In practice, though, it churned out reports for all countries at once, packaged as a “sovereignty index.” The quality of these reports told its own story. They were almost certainly written with large language models and then translated from Russian into English, and the translation was clumsy in ways that betrayed the origin. One article about Russia referred to “Lugovoy’s Law (2020)” and then used the pronoun “he” to describe the law—a mistake that makes sense only if you start from Russian, where the word for law is masculine. Another article about the United States used the phrase “guerrilla struggle” when it clearly meant “partisan struggle” in the sense of party politics. This confusion comes from the Russian word partizansky, which can mean both partisan and guerrilla. The reports also contained the kinds of hallucinations that are common when AI systems are pushed beyond reliable sources: the IBI cited nonexistent UNESCO heritage sites such as “Gerngut” in Germany and “Imbargo” in the United States. Neither exists on any map or list. The IBI even claimed that Russia ranked 27th in a 2023 PISA study, but no PISA assessment was conducted in 2023, and Russia did not participate in the most recent one from 2022. These were not minor editorial errors; they were signs of an operation that valued appearance over accuracy.
The Russian hand behind the operation was eventually exposed, at least in part, by OpenAI. In August 2026, after an internal investigation, OpenAI published results showing that IBI content had in fact been produced using its systems, and that the accounts responsible were operated by users in Russia. OpenAI moved to block the group of ChatGPT accounts involved in the effort. That was a significant technical step, but it didn’t eliminate the threat—it just forced the operators to adapt. Meanwhile, the IBI was not entirely fictional. The organization was registered as a legal entity in Israel in July 2025, which shows how the project combined real-world structures with online fabrications. Its founders were Igor Kaminnik and Gabriel Mart, and the board members with signing authority were Alexei Vilents and Roy Yaakov Yankelovich. The Insider obtained copies of the founding documents, confirming that while the website was full of false claims and generated content, the institution itself was a genuine legal creation, at least on paper. This is a common move in influence operations: one foot in reality, one foot in fiction, so that anyone trying to debunk the operation has to chase down a maze of half-true details and legal entities that exist only in certain registries.
What makes this whole episode so troubling is not just the specific lies or the fake partnerships, but the entire approach it represents. The Doppelgänger project and its offspring like the IBI show a deliberate strategy to blur the line between real scholarship and state propaganda. By creating institutions that look like research centers, the operators sought to exploit the trust that people place in academic and policy institutes. They didn’t need to convince everyone; they just needed to seed enough confusion, enough seemingly credible reports, and enough social media chatter to make it harder for people to sort fact from fiction. The low quality of the AI-generated content, complete with translation errors and invented heritage sites, suggests that the operation was more about volume and presence than about producing genuinely persuasive analysis. It was a paper tiger, but a paper tiger with a bank account and an address. The real lesson is that influence operations don’t have to be perfect to be dangerous. They just have to exist, to be visible, and to make people wonder whether what they’re reading is independent or the product of a foreign intelligence service. The International Burke Institute was a fake, but the strategy behind it was all too real, and it’s a reminder that in the information age, even a poorly translated article from a nonexistent think tank can become part of a much larger weaponization of doubt.