Russia-tailed AI-generated deepfake videos target US presidential elections, NATO

The upcoming U.S. presidential elections have already been “falsified,” “President Joe Biden is senile,” former “President Donald Trump is mischievous,” and American families are being “robbed” by hordes of migrants: the viral video “Bye Bye Biden” amplifies every controversial trope and hot-button issue in American politics today.

Stuffed with conspiracy theories and racial and political stereotypes, it ends with an alien (who resides in Biden’s brain) sending a codified command to “destroy the Tryzub,” a Slavic name for Trident, Ukraine’s coat of arms, and “Berehynia,” the Slavic goddess of life and death. Ukraine has named a star and the extrasolar planet orbiting it after these symbols.

This isn’t the only recent music video in this style.

Voice of America’s Russian service found another music video on YouTube and other social platforms called “NATO – Provocato.” It contains similar music and over-the-top tropes: a factory labeled “U.S. Army” eating African children and spitting out their skulls; parents giving their children to a pedophile dressed in a mascot costume; a militarized Mickey Mouse and hints of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Written in simple English with a catchy beat, these videos are characteristic of a broader trend in Russian influence operations or “active measures” that date back to the 1950s: a focus on intensifying discord and confusion rather than support of specific ideological positions and political outcome.

The “Bye Bye Biden” video clip is going viral on X this month, boosted, among others, by superspreader “Russian Market,” an anonymous user that features a blue check mark — a trend increasingly utilized by authoritarian regimes to spread propaganda on the X platform after it abolished mandatory verification, indiscriminately assigning the blue check mark to all prime subscribers.

Finnish disinformation analyst Pekka Kallioniemi exposed the Russian Market account as a pro-Kremlin blogger. He also exposed former musician Vadim Loskutov, who resides in Switzerland, as a promoter of pro-Kremlin views on X.

The video was later boosted by a network of X accounts that are part of “Doppelganger,” a Russian disinformation campaign, according to @Antibot4Navalny, an X account that researches Russian disinformation and has been widely cited by Western news outlets.

The U.S. and European Union allege that Doppelganger has for two years been conducting an influence campaign advancing Kremlin interests online.

Reporting by VOA’s Russian Service has traced the creation of the propagandistic song to Russia and established that several of the actors in the video live in Moscow. This matches the conclusions of Russian independent news site Agents.Media, which identified two of the actors.

Made in the style of a song by Little Big, a Russian pop group known for their outrageous hits, the video features frontman Ilya Prusikin who appears to be singing “Bye-Bye Biden” throughout the clip. But Prusikin and his band fled Russia after coming out against the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and Russian authorities declared Prusikin a foreign agent and blocked his financial assets. Neither he nor Little Big responded to multiple requests for comment.

The creators may have used a “deep fake” — a realistic video generated by artificial intelligence (AI) — to imitate Prusikin’s appearance.

The pro-Kremlin Telegram channel Two Majors claimed that the group in the video is called “Little Bug.”

“These guys are parodying the fugitive bastards from Little Big,” the channel wrote.

The video begins with a scene showing a “ballot counting incident.” In it, a ballot counter, a Black woman sits behind a desk separating paper ballots into two piles each time adding counts to the “Biden” — “Trump” columns on her computer screen. She then accidentally spills coffee on her hard drive, causing the screen-count to accelerate, giving Biden more votes than Trump and deciding his victory in the election.

Agents.Media established that the “ballot counter” is played by Alisa Valikova, a Russian actress with African ancestry who lives in Russia.

The ballot incident scene if followed by “Biden” being rolled in a wheelchair by a female assistant, played by Russian actress Daria Karlo (Andreeva). Both women confirmed to Agents.Media that they had roles in the video but did not reveal who was behind its creation. Valikova said that the filming took place in Moscow.

The video presents a series of provocative scenes exaggerating to grotesque the high-octane political rhetoric and racial stereotypes.

It depicts Biden wearing diapers and handing out wads of dollars to a Latin American man in a sombrero, while ignoring an African American woman who stands next him. Biden only changes his mind once the woman dons a Ukrainian folk costume.

In another scene, Biden leads a crowd of Latin American migrants into the home of a White American family where they devour the food on the family’s table while a Confederate flag hangs in the background.

Later scenes show Trump dancing with American flags and, briefly, wearing drag.

Biden and Trump’s faces in the video are likely deepfakes.

VOA’s Russian Service was able to identify two male actors using reverse image searches and Amazon Rekognition, a program that compares faces and assesses their similarity.

None of the men responded to requests for comment or confirmed their role in the video. VOA is not publishing their names because it could not determine whether they were aware that they had appeared in a propaganda video.

VOA was unable to establish who ordered the videos’ creation.

U.S. and EU authorities, disinformation researchers and journalists have linked the Doppelganger campaign to marketing and technology companies owned by Russian political consultant Ilya Gambashidze. They say he produces propaganda and disinformation at the behest of the Kremlin.

In March, the U.S. Treasury imposed sanctions on Gambashidze, his business partner and his companies Social Design Agency and Structura.

In a recent investigation, VOA found that Gambashidze had previously visited the United States and that his two sons live here.

VOA also discovered that one of Gambashidze’s associates attributed to him a zany English-language music video that encouraged residents of the Russian city of Tambov to get out to vote in the 2024 Russian presidential elections.

Doppelganger has at times pursued concrete political aims. According to reporting by the Washington Post, it aimed to exploit tensions between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Valery Zaluzhny, the former commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces.