A day after U.S. officials said Ukraine could use American weapons in limited attacks inside Russia, a deepfake video of a U.S. spokesman discussing that policy appeared online.
The fabricated video, which is taken from real footage, shows State Department spokesman Matthew Miller appearing to suggest that the Russian city of Belgorod, just 40 kilometers north of Ukraine’s border with Russia, was a legitimate target for such attacks.
The 49-second video clip, which has an authentic feel despite telltale signs of manipulation, illustrates the growing threat of disinformation and, especially, so-called deepfake videos powered by artificial intelligence.
U.S. officials said they had no information about the origins of the video. But they are especially concerned about how Russia could employ such techniques to manipulate opinion around the war in Ukraine or even American political discourse.
In Belgorod there are “basically no civilians left,” the video purports to show Mr. Miller saying at the State Department in response to a journalist’s question, which was also made up. “It’s practically full of military targets right now, and we’re seeing the same thing starting in nearby regions.”
“Russia needs to get the message that this is unacceptable,” Miller adds in the video, which has been circulating on Telegram channels and followed by Belgorod residents enough to prompt responses from Russian government officials.
The video’s claim about Belgorod is completely false. While it has been the target of some Ukrainian attacks and its schools operate online, its 340,000 residents have not been evacuated.
False claims that civilians have fled and that the city is primarily a military zone could imply a Western willingness to support indiscriminate attacks there, which is not the case.
President Biden has granted Ukraine what officials call limited permission to use American weapons in self-defense attacks inside Russia. The policy change came in response to Russia’s positioning just inside its border of missiles, glide bombs and artillery shells that it is using to attack the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv and its surrounding areas.
The video also shows Mr. Miller appearing to respond to a journalist’s claim (also doctored) that other countries are “allowing their weapons to strike deep inside Russian territory,” which is not accurate, although some Western leaders have said that their weapons can be used. to attack border targets in Russia that threaten Ukraine.
“So we’re going to support our allies in whatever they decide to do, and maybe help some of the people who are on the fence about this make the right decision,” Mr. Miller is made to say.
Miller, who was traveling with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken this week to Moldova and the Czech Republic, denounced the video in a statement.
“The Kremlin has made the spread of disinformation a central strategy to deceive people both within Russia and beyond its borders,” he said. “It’s hard to think of a more compelling sign that your decisions aren’t working than having to resort to outright falsifications to defend them to your own people, let alone the rest of the world.”
Several Russian media outlets and websites referenced or broadcast the video, without mentioning that the lip sync was incorrect, or that Mr. Miller’s shirt and tie changed color midway through.
It turns out that combating Russian disinformation was a central theme of Blinken’s latest trip. In both Moldova and the Czech Republic, he spoke publicly of similar attacks in European nations engineered by pro-Russian propagandists. In many cases, actors spread lies through social media, even through fake accounts.
At a meeting Friday in Prague, Blinken and his counterparts from other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization discussed how to mitigate Russian disinformation and other types of “hybrid attacks” aimed at eroding governance and democratic systems in the United States and Europe. allied nations.
“I can tell you that in today’s meeting, virtually all allies were affected by this escalation of Russia’s hybrid attacks,” Blinken said at a news conference Friday afternoon. “We know what they are doing and we will respond both individually and collectively as necessary.”
At the trip’s first stop, in Chisinau, Moldova, U.S. officials and their counterparts discussed online propaganda aimed at undermining President Maia Sandu, who has been pushing for Moldova to join the European Union and run for re-election. in October.
On Thursday, Blinken and Jan Lipavsky, the Czech Republic’s foreign minister, signed a memorandum of understanding in Prague to counter “manipulation of information by foreign states,” the State Department said.
Joining the trip was James P. Rubin, who took Miller’s position in the Clinton administration and is now a special envoy addressing disinformation and coordinator of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center.
Mr. Miller’s false comments were repeated verbatim on the Telegram channel of the Russian Human Rights Council, a state body that nominally advises President Vladimir V. Putin. The council’s report then shared the angry response of its president, Valery Fadeyev.
“Washington deliberately does not want to notice the obvious crimes against humanity committed by kyiv,” Fadeyev wrote. “I don’t particularly expect this information to reach the cynics at the State Department, but the truth is ours in any case.”
Fadeyev, in his post condemning Miller’s “lies,” suggested that the United States did not understand that civilians were at risk in Belgorod. He said at least 175 civilians had been killed in the Belgorod region and another 800 wounded since February 2022.
Russia’s state news agency TASS published an article Thursday based on Fadeyev’s comments. As of Friday night, the Human Rights Council had not issued a statement on its Telegram channel acknowledging that the video was fake.
The Insider, an independent Russian outlet with a section dedicated to rooting out fake news, noted that the video was also available on the Russian social network VK, which is now controlled by businessmen close to Putin, and on other websites run by pro- The war propagandist Aleksandr Kots.
Life in Belgorod is far from normal: schools operate online only and air raid sirens sound regularly. Explosions are regularly heard, causing damage to buildings and killing civilians. A series of explosions on December 30, 2023, which Moscow blamed on Ukraine, killed 25 people and injured at least 100. The explosions came a day after Russian airstrikes on cities across Ukraine killed 57 people. and injured 160.
Some regions close to the border have been evacuated, and many smaller cities and towns within range of the border are regularly targeted by drone and artillery attacks from Ukraine. In late April, Belgorod regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said that at least 120 civilians, including 11 children, had died as a result of Ukrainian attacks. He said another 651 people had been injured since Russia launched its large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Julian E. Barnes contributed reporting from Washington.