How a Russian influence network is spreading anti-Ukrainian propaganda in Ivory Coast

Read moreFrom 250 to 700 dollars per article: How Russia influenced West African media content

Ghanaian news site Ghana Web published an article on July 12, 2024 that sparked controversy in Ivory Coast. As a segment of the Ivorian public opinion looks to distance itself from the Russia-Ukraine war, the article claimed that Ukraine was trying to recruit Ivorian citizens for the Ukrainian armed forces. The article, written under what appears to be a pseudonym, claims that recruitment posters were spotted in the streets of the Ivorian capital, Abidjan. These posters, coloured yellow and blue like the Ukrainian flag, were said to lay out a lucrative offer: the Ukrainian army would offer Ivorian volunteers a $3,000 bonus and “European residency” if they signed up to fight in the conflict.

It turns out, however, that these flyers were not created by the Ukrainian authorities, whose identity was stolen. When we contacted the Ukrainian Embassy, they formally denied any connection to the flyers.

“Since we opened in April 2024, the Ukrainian Embassy has not carried out any such activity. The Embassy does not recruit [army volunteers]: an activity like this does not fall under its auspices. As a result, the Ukrainian Embassy cannot be behind the printing or the ordering of these materials,” said the Ukrainian Embassy in Abidjan. 

Moreover, ​​it remains to be verified whether these posters actually appeared on the streets of Abidjan. The Ukrainian Embassy said that it had not seen them. 

Our team worked with a consortium of investigative media outlets, including The Continent, Forbidden Stories, All Eyes On Wagner and RFI, to investigate this fake news story targeting Ukraine and Ivory Coast. We determined that it was seeded by a shadowy network known as the Company that is tasked with carrying out pro-Russian disinformation operations.

Our investigation focused on 76 leaked internal Company documents, shared anonymously with the team at the pan-African media outlet The Continent.

The Company was initially run by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of private military organisation the Wagner Group. After Prigozhin was killed in a plane crash in August 2023, the disinformation network slowly came under the auspices of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service or SVR. The network appears to be made up of around 90 specialists who organise influence operations in nearly 30 countries in Africa and Latin America. The organisation is headquartered in St. Petersburg. 

The leaked documents – which include financial reports, documents detailing global strategy, operational plans for disinformation campaigns and even invoices – offer a detailed vision into the inner workings of the Company. 

Why Ivory Coast is seen as ‘a promising country’ for The Company’s operations 

In a 2023 document, the Company lays out an influence campaign aimed at the entire African continent – what it calls its “Africa Project”. Its stated aim is to provide support to “political leaders loyal to Russia”, to work against Western influence and protect Moscow’s interests. 

The Company began its operations in the Central African Republic in 2018 and in the countries that are part of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), which – since 2023 – has included Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. As part of its expansion strategy, the Ivory Coast is listed as a “promising country in which to launch operations”, as indicated by a map of Africa that was part of these documents. 

The Company clearly has designs on Ivory Coast, which it believes is part of the “sphere of Western influence". The Company’s stated aim is to shift public opinion in Ivory Coast by discrediting French and American influence. The organisation also criticises the international diplomatic position that Ivory Coast has taken, saying that it sides with the European Union “on all international resolutions concerning the Ukrainian question".

Attempts to discredit Ukraine in Ivory Coast 

Ukraine appears as one of the Company’s primary targets. Between May and September 2024, Russia carried out four operations targeting Ivory Coast on social media and in traditional media outlets – both influence operations designed to promote pro-Russian narratives and disinformation campaigns aimed at spreading fake news. Three explicitly targeted the Ukrainian Embassy.

“Since it was created in April 2024, the Ukrainian Embassy has regularly been the target of these attacks. The first campaign began in May 2024 – less than a month after it opened,” the Ukrainian Embassy in Abidjan said.

In May 2024, the fake news story about the Ukrainian Embassy’s alleged drive to recruit Ivorian soldiers started to spread on social media. An image of a fake recruitment ad was also widely circulated on Facebook. The Ukrainian Embassy has denied that it is behind its creation. This disinformation campaign continued in July 2024 with the publication of the Ghanaweb article claiming that the Ukrainian Embassy’s recruitment flyers had been spotted in the streets of Abidjan. In that case, the Ukrainian chancellery denied that they were behind these posters and added that they had seen no sign of them in Abidjan. 

In September 2024, the photo of a fake invitation to a cultural event supposedly organised by the Ukrainian Embassy in Abidjan was widely circulated on Facebook and WhatsApp. The event was portrayed on Ivorian social media as an attempt to enlist African citizens in the conflict in Europe. The Ukrainian Embassy also formally denied the authenticity of the document. 

A campaign to place articles in the media 

Along with the sharing of misleading content on social media, the Company also financed the placement and publication of news articles in African media outlets that reflect its language of propaganda. The documents that we obtained detail what is called Project Magadan, an influence campaign originally launched by Prigozhin’s teams. As part of this project, the Company organised the publication of 49 articles aimed at Ivorians in 22 media outlets between May and October 2024. One Ivorian media outlet was also used for the publication of 14 articles targeting other African nations. 

The organisation says that it spent $39,800 USD (around 34,430 euros) to get these articles published or roughly $631 dollars (or 545 euros) per article. While the Company might have directly paid some journalists and media outlets, it also functioned more discreetly and in a more concealed manner.

The Ghanaweb article about the fake recruitment campaign supposedly being carried out by the Ukrainian Embassy in the Ivory Coast wasn’t written by journalists with the Ghanaian news site, as is made clear in the warning on the article. It was published in a paying space reserved for promotional content – for which GhanaWeb charges a fee of $250 USD (215 euros) – or outside contributors. Our team contacted Ghanaweb to ask about the publication of this article in particular, but they had not responded to our questions at the time of publication. 

However, the Company’s financial documents indicated that they spent $700 USD on the publication of the Ghanaweb article.

Free articles sent to newsrooms

The Company also appears to have developed another model for getting articles placed: providing free articles to newsrooms.  

A recognised Ivorian media outlet published 18 articles sent to them by the Company between May and October 2024. The documents say that the Company spent $10,200 on these articles. 

The journalist from the Ivorian media outlet who published these articles – who spoke to our team on condition of anonymity – told our team that he had no idea that they had been written by a Russian intelligence service. He further said that he was not paid for their publication: 

“At my level, I didn’t receive the sums that you are talking about. Perhaps an intermediary received this money, but I often published these articles in good faith without wanting to participate in Russian propaganda and even less so in a campaign that was anti-Western or anti-French. 

By the way, I didn’t publish all the articles that they sent my way. Especially when the information they contained was hard to verify.”

The journalist explained that the articles attributed to the Company were not written by journalists on his team but by “special correspondents”, which is noted in the signature of the authors of these 18 articles. This title refers to outside contributors who write on a voluntary, unpaid basis for the publication. 

“They are authors who want to write for us about an event, for example. They send us pitches, which we edit. They are not paid. But I do not personally know these authors. All of them introduced these articles through an intermediary who supplies content. Maybe these authors deal with him [about payment],” said the Ivorian journalist. 

Marc-André Boisvert, an analyst with communications and digital services company Cronos Europe, explains how these free articles were used in certain Ivorian media outlets. 

“In Ivory Coast, some newspapers are dedicated to the promotion of one politician in particular. Once they’ve promoted the politician they support, they will take pretty much any other articles to fill their pages. That’s where these disinformation networks work well in Ivory Coast. They often send these newspapers free articles.”

While not all of the articles by unpaid contributors are misleading, this practice is easy to abuse. 

Even though independent contributors are not paid by the media outlets that publish their articles, they are often paid by outside sources for placing articles promoting certain topics or figures. We delve into the media outlets used by the Company in the second part of our investigation.

Polarising debates 

One of these articles written by one of these so-called correspondents, published on September 4, 2024, was about a fake musical event being organised by the Ukrainian Embassy in Abidjan. The article claimed that the organisation of this (fake) event angered some social media users, who saw it as foreign interference. 

While the spreading of this rumour was a disinformation operation launched by the Company – as indicated in its internal documents –, the article seemed to spark real concern among some Ivorian social media users about the war between Russia and Ukraine.  

“The feeling – I wouldn’t say dominant but often expressed by Ivorians on social media – is captured in this article. People want to distance themselves from this war,” said the Ivorian journalist who published this article. We also spoke to Boisvert, who warned that it was important not to exaggerate the amount of time that most Ivorians spend thinking about Ukraine.

Not all of the Company’s publications feature flagrant disinformation – often, they promote pro-Russian or pro-AES narratives. They also aim to polarise debates within the Ivorian population, which is already fertile ground for divisions. Mohamed Kebe, an Ivorian journalist and factchecker, explains:

“Ivory Coast is divided politically. When you are part of the opposition, you are likely to criticise anything that those in power do, whether good or bad. Similarly, those on the side of the government often reject any position held by the opposition. 

The result is that, today, there are narratives fed by one part of the population. Because some don’t like the government, they might connect more with pro-Russian content, especially content shared by pro-AES accounts, and then share it.” 

‘Sort of botched’ campaigns

So, how effective are these campaigns aimed at discrediting Ukraine in Ivory Coast? 

The experts we interviewed had mixed feelings. For example, Ivorian journalist Mohamed Kebe said that there was “a lot of noise” on social media about the fake news story about the Ukrainian Embassy trying to recruit Ivorians. 

In the leaked internal documents, the Company also brags about carrying out disinformation campaigns in the real world, not just on social media and in media outlets – like hanging up the fake recruitment posters in the streets of Abidjan. However, as for the actions supposedly carried out in the real world – as it remains to be seen if they actually were carried out – they seem to have had a very limited effect. 

“I didn’t see any of these flyers in Abidjan,” said Mohamed Kebe. The Ukrainian Embassy in Abidjan also said that they had not seen the flyers in the streets of the Ivorian economic capital.  

For his part, expert Boisvert says that the disinformation campaigns about Ukraine carried out in Ivory Coast provoked “very little reaction” and had no significant impact on Ivorian opinion.

 “The attacks on the meeting between President Alassane Ouattara and [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky [in June 2024] were shared, but without any real political impact. 

Increasingly, we feel like these campaigns are not specifically targeting Ivorians. They seem, more like an attempt to try and convince an outside public – like AES countries – that the Ivorian government is on the wrong path and too aligned with the West. Often, there seems to be underlying narratives about French conspiracies [Editor’s note: against AES nations]. 

Ivorians are more immune to these kinds of campaigns, which are sometimes sort of botched.”

This article has been translated from the original in French by Brenna Daldorph.