An investigation by The Insider, published on 21 October, has obtained hacked correspondence and internal documents that lay out the inner workings of a major Kremlin influence operation aimed at Ukraine. The operation, which was launched in early 2023 under the codename “Uganda,” is described as the Ukraine strand of the broader Russian disinformation network known as Doppelgänger. According to the leaked files, Sergei Kiriyenko, first deputy chief of staff of the Russian Presidential Administration, personally set the goals for the Ukraine campaign. Oversight was assigned to Alexander Kharichev, who is now head of the Kremlin’s Directorate for Monitoring and Analysis of Social Processes. The documents show that the operation was planned and executed with the same kind of structured management that one would expect in a government department, complete with internal briefings, meeting minutes, and performance reports. The Doppelgänger network itself has been publicly linked to Russian influence work for years, and in 2024 the FBI named Kiriyenko among its orchestrators. The operation’s main commercial contractor is the Social Design Agency, or SDA, run by Ilya Gambashidze, a Russian political strategist. Despite exposure and sanctions, the SDA is still expanding, and the new files show that it is now turning its attention to AI chatbots as a new channel for disinformation. The most striking finding of the investigation is that the same operation reported even its exposed fakes to the Kremlin as achievements, treating debunks as evidence of activity and reach rather than failure.
The leaked files provide unusual detail on how the operation’s Telegram channels were run. According to an internal briefing on narratives, the project operated on principles borrowed from agent work and psychological operations, and the Russian-language version of The Insider’s investigation draws particular attention to this framing. From the beginning, the team decided to disguise all of its outlets as Ukrainian and to run campaigns without direct Russian propaganda. Every channel created or controlled by the operation was required to carry ordinary Ukrainian news, so that the accounts would appear to be independent local sources. The internal briefing warned that dropping pro-Ukrainian themes would eventually expose the client and wreck the whole plan. In other words, operators had to maintain the fiction of being Ukrainian outlets even if that meant reporting on daily events, local politics, weather, or other neutral content that had nothing to do with Russian interests. This was a long-term tradecraft strategy: build trust, blend into the Ukrainian media environment, and only then insert the desired narratives. The documents show that operatives carefully managed the editorial identities of these channels, decided how often to post, and reacted to real Ukrainian news events in real time to make their accounts look organic. The operation’s understanding of cover was sophisticated, and the warning that any break in the Ukrainian persona could “wreck the whole plan” suggests that senior managers were deeply concerned about exposing the project’s Russian origins.
At the top of the operation, Sergei Kiriyenko set four strategic goals. The first was to discredit Ukraine’s military and political leadership. The second was to split Ukrainian elites and create internal tensions. The third was to demoralize the Ukrainian army. The fourth was to disorganize the civilian population. The Social Design Agency prepared the project’s pitch and carried out the operational work under Kharichev’s supervision. To advance these goals, the team produced a constant stream of fabricated stories, often coordinated with pro-Russian media and Telegram communities. The files identify political strategist Alexander Asafov as a key figure in proposing fakes. In May 2023, Asafov suggested pushing the claim that Ukrainian soldiers were bribing their commanders to avoid being sent to the front line. In January 2024, he proposed another narrative alleging that Ukraine was pulling air defenses back from the front to Kyiv in order to protect the authorities. That story was designed to suggest that Ukrainian leaders cared more about their own security than about soldiers and civilians. These fakes were not merely posted on obscure channels; they were distributed across multiple Telegram accounts, social media pages, and websites controlled by the operation, and then amplified by pro-Russian voices. The internal files show that the team tracked whether its stories were picked up by Ukrainian media, foreign outlets, and Western politicians. The four goals were the framework against which every proposed message was apparently assessed, and the operational machinery was designed to support them with relentless content production.
The leaked meeting records contain one especially revealing episode following the crash of an Il-76 military transport aircraft in Russia’s Belgorod Oblast on 24 January 2024. Moscow claimed that the plane had been carrying Ukrainian prisoners of war, a claim that was immediately disputed by Kyiv. At an internal meeting chaired by Yevgeny Kazakov, a subordinate of Alexander Kharichev acting in Kharichev’s place, participants discussed how to exploit the crash for the influence operation. Kazakov proposed sending a fake message to the widows of Ukrainian soldiers, telling them that their husbands had died for an expensive Il-76 because “the Russians have few of those.” That idea was eventually dropped. But the same meeting produced another fake that the team launched three days later. This story alleged that Ukrainian recruitment centers had sent the widows of fallen soldiers a can of stewed meat with a small flag as compensation. The story was intended to portray Ukrainian authorities as cruel and disrespectful toward the families of dead soldiers. The investigation also reports that the same group of producers was responsible for letters falsely attributed to Nataliia Kalmykova, who was then a deputy defense minister of Ukraine. These fakes were designed to be emotionally powerful, and they deliberately targeted the grief of war widows. The fact that the more extreme proposal regarding the Il-76 was dropped shows that the operation had some internal limits, but those limits did not extend to more plausible falsehoods. Even after such stories were debunked, the operation filed the fact-checking coverage itself in its reports to Moscow.
The Social Design Agency’s reporting system to the Kremlin reveals a deeply cynical understanding of success. The SDA collected coverage of its work in a folder for the Kremlin, and that folder included both the fabricated content and the fact-check articles that exposed it. One notable example is the “Zelensky’s yacht” story, which claimed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had purchased a superyacht. That story gained international attention and was even echoed by JD Vance, then a US senator and now the Vice President of the United States. The SDA filed the story alongside its own debunk, presenting the entire episode as a completed operation. Another example is a TikTok campaign about the family of former Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov, which had already been exposed by the BBC. The investigation reports that the SDA included that campaign in its internal reporting to the Kremlin as well. According to The Insider’s review of the leaked files, the team has had more failures than successes. Many of its fabricated stories were quickly detected by Ukrainian fact-checkers, Western researchers, and journalists. Yet the operation did not seem to treat detection as a defeat. In the attention economy of disinformation, even a debunked story can achieve the operation’s broader goal of amplifying confusion, deepening polarization, and forcing Ukrainian officials and media to spend time responding to absurd claims. By filing debunks as results, the SDA could demonstrate to the Kremlin that it was active and productive, regardless of whether any target was actually deceived.
The international response to the operation has been growing, but the network has proven resilient. In March 2024, the United States sanctioned Ilya Gambashidze and the Social Design Agency, and the United Kingdom followed with its own sanctions in October of the same year. These measures were meant to disrupt the financial and operational capacity of the group. The new files, however, indicate that the SDA is still functioning and is actively expanding into new areas, including attempts to manipulate AI chatbots and to use generative AI tools to create disinformation at a larger scale. The broader Doppelgänger network has evolved from cloning news websites into a much more complex ecosystem that includes Telegram channels, TikTok accounts, fake official documents, and now AI-assisted content. The investigation into the “Uganda” campaign offers a rare inside look at how one strand of that ecosystem was managed: clear strategic goals, strict rules of cover, and a bureaucratic reporting structure that reaches the highest levels of the Russian state. At the same time, the leaked files expose a significant gap between the Kremlin’s ambitions and the actual effects of the operation. Many of the fakes failed to gain traction, and some were easily ridiculed. But the network’s ability to survive exposure and sanctions, and its pivot to AI chatbots, raises serious concerns for platforms, intelligence agencies, and civil society. The overriding message from the leaked files is that the operation measured its work not by whether the content was true, but by whether it shaped the conversation. As long as that remains the standard, the Kremlin appears ready to keep funding projects like Doppelgänger and “Uganda,” and to report even its failures as achievements.