Fake Euronews reports spread disinformation about Middle East war

Doctored videos impersonating Euronews and other major media outlets have been used to spread false claims about the war in the Middle East, shared across social media and relayed by the pro-Kremlin Pravda network.

According to researchers from the Antibot4Navalny collective, the campaign is tied to the Russia-linked “Matryoshka” operation, which carries out mass, coordinated disinformation campaigns across social media and online, targeting Ukraine and the West.

Researchers say the campaign is not directly focused on the Middle East war, but that the crisis has been used to push unrelated narratives to tarnish the West. This includes presenting Ukrainians as criminals, taking aim at Western governments and seeking to undermine the Armenian government ahead of Parliamentary elections in June.

Fake claims about Ukrainians

One fake Euronews video manipulated the voice of a journalist reporting on a drone strike which hit the luxury Fairmont The Palm Hotel in Dubai.

The doctored clip incorporated an authentic Euronews report on the strike but manipulated a real reporter’s voice halfway through, making her claim that “Ukrainian looters” used the chaos of the strikes on Dubai to attack “shops, jewellery stores and abandoned cars” — which she did not say in the real news package.

The doctored footage also falsely claimed that authorities detained 19 Ukrainians following the looting, alleging that they coordinated their activities on WhatsApp, but there is no evidence for this.

The journalist’s voice was likely altered with the help of AI-voice cloning software. Another clue that the clip is inauthentic is that her manipulated voice plays over generic stock images, a common technique used by disinformation actors to avoid generating realistic deepfakes of reporters on camera.

The same strategy was employed for another false Euronews report, which alleged that strikes on the UAE had damaged a luxury mansion belonging to a Ukrainian general worth $7 million.

Fake report targets Armenian prime minister

Euronews branding was also used in a separate doctored report which claimed that strikes targeting the UAE damaged an apartment allegedly belonging to Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.

The doctored report claimed that the revelation about multiple apartments owned by Pashinyan in the UAE had triggered a “debate among both residents of Armenia and the Armenian diaspora around the world”.

The video also alleged that Pashinyan’s UAE property was worth $170 million (€147 million), before stating that Pashinyan’s press secretary had responded by asserting that the property’s value “did not exceed” $70 million dollars.

However, Pashinyan’s press secretary, Nazeli Baghdasaryan, has publicly responded to the false allegations, declaring on on social media that “Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan DOES NOT OWN any property in the UAE or any other country”.

“All the figures, ‘values’ circulating in the videos, as well as the comments presented in my name as the Prime Minister’s spokesperson, are entirely fabricated and do not correspond to reality”, she said.

Baghdasaryan also accused disinformation actors of seeking to discredit the country’s prime minister ahead of parliamentary elections scheduled for June 2026.

“We are dealing with a classic FIMI [Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference] mechanism, where several characteristic tools are used: false attribution to reputable international news outlets (“Al Jazeera”, “Euronews”) — with the aim of giving the material a false impression of credibility,” she said.

False information about an apartment belonging to Pashinyan in the UAE has spread online since as early as 2021, relayed by the Telegram channel Mediaport and the “Gazeta of Armenians in Russia”.

Middle East conflict a breeding ground for doctored videos

Plenty of other international media outlets and organisations have indeed been impersonated alongside Euronews, in an effort to spread disinformation about Europe within the context of the war in the Middle East.

A doctored video imitating French newspaper Le Point has spread across social media, falsely claiming that Ukrainian phone scammers have managed to con French citizens out of tens of millions of euros following an escalation of the Middle East conflict.

A further fake clip falsified a report from the Institute for the Study of War, in a bid to claim that France had covered up the death of 70 French servicemen following an Iranian strike on a base in Abu Dhabi.

In another report imitating American outlet USA Today, disinformation actors claimed that Ukrainian weapons had been used in strikes on French, German and American military bases in the Gulf States.

It’s not the first time the Matryoshka network has used Euronews graphics to spread false claims. A campaign using similar methods was launched during the Milan Winter Olympics, and during Moldova’s electoral campaign.