Russian influence operators called it Project 2026. The plan wasn’t just to spread fabricated stories on social media platforms. It outlined efforts to create an alternative information ecosystem.
Leaked documents from a private Russian agency reviewed by Bloomberg News reveal plans to build a sprawling network of Wikipedia-style reference sites, media outlets and phony think tanks to shape how people and AI chatbots understand political issues.
The documents from the Social Design Agency (SDA), which has been sanctioned by the US, the UK and the European Union for supporting Kremlin-directed disinformation, show how the Moscow-based agency has emerged as a central node in Russia’s cognitive warfare system, involved in false flag operations and planting sham stories online.
Among the 73 leaked files are project proposals and screenshots of chats and websites dating from May 2023 to April 2026. Combined, they suggest Russian influence operators are expanding beyond spreading false stories on social media platforms to trying to control the sources of information that underpin search engines and large language models. Fact Investigation Platform, an Armenian media outlet focused on disinformation, first reported on some of the documents.
Internal planning papers outline an ambitious effort spanning multiple countries and languages to build websites controlled by the Kremlin. The endeavor is designed to capture search traffic and influence AI chatbots with false information about politicians and current events, the documents show.
One proposal outlined plans to build a reference site “cloned” from Wikipedia for Armenia that operators would optimize for search engines and insert Russia-friendly narratives into the most-read pages. The proposal was dated April 14, according to its metadata, just two months before the country’s June 7 election.
Bloomberg found three Wikipedia-style sites for Armenia created in January that were recently suspended by their web-hosting provider. Despite Russian efforts to spread false stories about Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, he won a decisive victory.
Another project targeting Germany said 200,000 web pages were created, according to a planning document dated Jan. 15. It set goals, including editing 100 articles a month targeting search engines. The plan also aimed to “train” six AI platforms a month using edited articles. It did not disclose the names of the websites. The BfV, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, said it was aware of the leak but declined to comment.
“Their approach is to try to break search engines by flooding the zone with content that cross-references their content or their narratives,” said Katerina Sedova, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and a former US State Department official who specializes in technology and national security. “This will be their indirect way of breaking into popular chatbots and search engines.”
Most of the leaked documents don’t contain SDA logos, but European officials and researchers told Bloomberg they believed the files were genuine based on their content and the style of the proposals, some of which are similar to SDA documents disclosed by the US Justice Department and European media in 2024.
Bloomberg also used historical Domain Name System data to independently confirm the existence of the 42 websites shown in screenshots of the operation’s content management system, evidence that would be difficult to falsify. Almost all of them were hosted on the same Russia-based internet protocol address, which also appears in the leaked documents.
Founded in 2002 by Ilya Gambashidze, the SDA has worked for Russian officials and government agencies on what it calls “information warfare.” The Justice Department said in 2024 that it was involved in a “persistent foreign malign influence campaign” directed by the Russian government, including efforts to impersonate media outlets and government organizations. That same year the US sanctioned Gambashidze. The SDA didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The new documents provide insight into how Russian officials manage so-called “active measures” — disinformation and broader efforts to destabilize the West and shape public opinion. They show an operation run like a Western consulting firm, with a focus on performance targets, case studies and opinion-tracking systems.
It marks a significant evolution from the defunct Internet Research Agency, the troll farm run by the late mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, which a whistleblower once described as driven by quotas for social media posts rather than sophisticated targeting.
A key figure in the documents is Sofia Zakharova, an official in the Kremlin’s information and communication directorate who was sanctioned by the EU in 2024 for working with the SDA. A spreadsheet of user names and emails included in the new documents shows she is called Kristin Kiler in the chats, a likely reference to Christine Keeler, the English model at the center of the Profumo scandal in the early 1960s that raised fears British national security had been compromised. Chats also reference her as Sofia, who appears in a managerial role discussing funding and approvals.
“We’re still waiting for the go-ahead from SVK,” she wrote in one chat dated July 24, 2024, in response to unspecified applications. The initials likely refer to Sergei Vladilenovich Kiriyenko, the Kremlin’s first deputy chief of staff, who was first exposed for working with the SDA in the 2024 Justice Department disclosures. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov didn’t respond to a request to comment.
The chats appear to reference known operatives of the agency talking about security protocols in 2024, around the time of the previous leak. One chat dated Dec. 20, 2024, lists questions for “Ilya,” asking why he took “notes/records of all closed meetings related to the international project.” The Justice Department disclosures in September 2024 referenced minutes taken by Gambashidze, the SDA founder.
The projects to create reference sites for Germany and Armenia are in keeping with Russia’s past efforts to influence public opinion in both countries by spreading false stories about politicians on social media.
A document about the SDA’s Armenia proposal outlined plans to create a cloned Wikipedia page that would include fabricated criminal activities of a leading politician. Editors would monitor which pages attracted the most readers and insert their own narratives through links and information blocks. It said the site could reach 5,000 daily visitors within the first three months.
Russia has succeeded in building its own rival to Wikipedia. Ruwiki, an online encyclopedia copied from Wikipedia, began in 2023 and has since expanded to other languages used in the Russian Federation. Unlike the SDA projects, which appear designed to hide their origins, Ruwiki is an explicitly Russian-branded platform.
After copying and pasting Wikipedia entries, exploiting its open source architecture, Ruwiki edited content to alter pages about topics important to the Kremlin. The 2022 Bucha massacre in Ukraine is described as a “provocation.” Content about Prigozhin recruiting prisoners to fight in Ukraine was removed.
Bloomberg found three websites — spyurk.cyou, sevan.info and khachkar.info — hosted at the same internet protocol address and registered in January that have pages copied from Wikipedia on Armenia in Russian. The spyurk.cyou page on the Armenian diaspora appears to be a copy from the Russian-language version on Wikipedia, which removed references to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The sites were suspended by their internet provider on June 9. The provider didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The SDA’s Armenia proposal called for the project to be hosted in Turkey to hide that it’s Russian-led. The host for spyurk.cyou was a Delaware-registered company with an office in Turkey, according to domain registration records.
Bloomberg also found numerous websites run by SNG-Media, a group working with the SDA to advance pro-Russian views according to a leaked SDA brochure. The websites credit images to spyurk.cyou, even though they’re available on Wikipedia, Shutterstock or social media. The websites, including erevan.one targeting Armenia, are hosted in the Russian Federation and registered with Russia’s communications regulator Roskomnadzor, which controls and restricts online information.
Jacob Rogers, associate general counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation, which provides technical and legal support to the encyclopedia, said he wasn’t aware of the SDA’s efforts, but he doubted that a copycat, known as a fork, could take off without a sizable number of editors. “We don’t generally see forks have any sort of long-term success,” Rogers said. “They’re able to snapshot Wikipedia, but they’re not able to keep the information updated.”
Sedova, the former State Department official, said English-language AI chatbots might be able to guard against what she called Russian “data poisoning,” but she raised concerns about the risk that models in other languages might be infected. “For smaller languages, trust and safety teams may not have enough human specialists proficient in the language to prevent manipulative sources making it into the training data,” she said.
The leaked documents included plans to create phony think tanks to populate the internet with Kremlin-friendly content. One website purporting to be for the “World Center for Strategic Studies” rewrites articles in established journals to emphasize Kremlin talking points. One of its lead pieces, “European Energy Powers Pull Apart as Industrial Crisis Deepens,” summarizes a paper presented at the French Institute of International Relations and concludes that Europe is facing a political and economic crisis. The original paper makes no such conclusion.
Russia has tried to use think tanks and news outlets as fronts to influence Western public opinion over the past decade. In 2021, the US imposed sanctions on the Moscow-based Strategic Culture Foundation and three other outlets for working with Russian intelligence agencies to spread false information. Reports in 2022 revealed that Wikipedia pages in multiple languages, including Arabic, Spanish and Portuguese, referenced the SCF.
The documents also reveal how the SDA is involved in tracking the success of disinformation campaigns that Bloomberg has identified as the work of a Russian operation known as Storm-1516. Its September 2025 assessment of a fabricated story about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy buying his mother two apartments in Dubai’s Burj Khalifa found that the story got 86 million views, including 10 million from 19 “project contractors” who shared the story.
A false story about Armenian Prime Minister Pashinyan buying a villa in France got 10.6 million views, according to another case study. It said 17 “project contractors” shared it on social media, garnering 2 million views, more than double the number of posts rebutting the narrative. A leaked chat noted the story’s success had forced Pashinyan to refute the allegations.
The documents also revealed systems the SDA used to track views in Europe. The Project 2026 proposal said a contractor had been selected to create a database that would scrape 10,000 accounts of opinion leaders to help place 2,000 social media messages for what it called “narrative injection.” The project aimed to produce monthly analytics on “discussion trends,” a sign that operatives were seeking to amplify divisive content.
It also outlined a plan to monitor 100 French opposition politicians and republish 30 to 40 of their posts daily. A screenshot of an opinion tracker for France from April revealed that the group was monitoring social media posts of a dozen far-right and left-wing politicians and public figures, noting hashtags and themes that emerged. Those tracked included Catherine Griset, a member of the European Parliament for the right-wing party Reassemblement National, and Louis Boyard, a member for the left-wing France Unbowed party. Griset and Boyard didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Bloomberg found evidence of similar tracker websites created for the UK and Germany earlier this year. The sites group influencer posts around hashtags that operatives created about divisive themes. In the UK tracker, trending hashtags included #MigrantCrisis, #BrokenSystem and #WarSpillover.
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