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In the wake of Alexei Navalny’s sudden death in a remote Arctic penal colony last week, his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, has emerged as the new face of Russia’s opposition movement. A widespread, coordinated, and misogynistic disinformation campaign has emerged online to tarnish her reputation.
Lies about Navalnaya having affairs and abortions and not caring about her husband’s death are being shared widely on Telegram channels, Russian state-run media, and social media accounts controlled by groups with close ties to the Kremlin. The campaign, which features fake videos and doctored images, continues to gain momentum as Navalnaya speaks out about Navalny’s death and criticizes Russian president Vladimir Putin, according to details of the campaign shared with WIRED by researchers at Reset, a London-based nonprofit that tracks disinformation campaigns, and Antibot4Navalny, a group of anonymous Russian researchers who track the online activity of Kremlin-linked trolls.
The main focus of the campaign is designed to make Navalnaya appear disloyal to her husband by claiming she is having multiple affairs with prominent businessmen and journalists.
“The Kremlin is using gendered disinformation campaigns to crush dissent at home and to undermine democracy world over,” Kristina Wilfore, director of innovation and global projects at Reset, tells WIRED. “Rather than stand up to Vladimir Putin, social media platforms continue to provide the means for massive amplification of deeply harmful and defamatory rhetoric that puts women at risk and weaponizes gender.”
The campaign to undermine Navalnaya actually began weeks before her husband died. At the beginning of February, a a German-language website published an article alleging an affair between Navalnaya and Bulgarian journalist Hristo Grozev, based on a video that was supposedly produced by a former employee at Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. The allegations were based on images purportedly from Booking.com that featured Navalnaya’s and Grozev’s names.
The video was posted by an Instagram account that no longer exists, and no users with that username exist on any social media platform, the researchers at Reset concluded. “No public information or any social media profiles appear with the face of the woman from the video, which likely means the video was AI-generated,” the researcher wrote in a report on the campaign. “The video was likely posted on a newly created Instagram account, which was deleted immediately after the video was downloaded, and used only to prove that the account is an actual profile using the interface of the platform.”
Within hours, the same video was being used on an English-language website called Clear Story News, which is part of a pro-Kremlin disinformation network. Meanwhile, the German-language website where the story first appeared lists a Russian publisher with a Moscow address.
At the time, the stories did not reach a large audience and did not attract the attention of fact-checkers. Within hours of Navalny’s death being announced on February 16, links to the articles were spread widely on Russian-language Telegram channels as well as on Telegram accounts and blogs in other languages such as Finnish, Dutch, German, Italian, and English. One of the biggest accounts to spread the disinformation was Russian TV personality turned pro-Kremlin blogger Vladimir Solovyov, who has almost 1.3 million followers on Telegram.
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Over the next couple of days after news of Navalny’s death, Solovyov shared more content designed to suggest Navalnaya was having an affair, including a doctored image that appeared to show Navalnaya embracing Russian entrepreneur Evgeny Chichvarkin, who in the past has financed Navalny’s work.
The original image, taken in 2013, shows Navalnaya embracing her husband after he was released from jail. The doctored image has been in circulation for several years, with Reset’s researchers finding examples of it being shared online in 2021. The fake image has been widely debunked by fact-checkers.
In the wake of Navalny’s death, however, the image has taken on a new life and has been shared widely on X, where it has been viewed well over a million times, and on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, as well as on Russian social media platform Vkontakte. It has also been used on many Russian blogs and websites that amplify pro-Kremlin disinformation in multiple European languages.
A non-fake image, showing Navalnaya standing alongside Chichvarkin on a beach, is also being shared to support the false claim that the pair are having an affair.
Navalnaya, who has also said she was happy to be a politician’s wife rather than a politician, was thrust onto the world stage in the wake of her husband’s death, and within hours of his death being announced, she spoke at the highly influential Munich Security Conference. Last week, she spoke with EU leaders before jetting to San Francisco where she met with US president Joe Biden.
Global recognition came with some issues. Her X account, which she created last week, was suspended when the platform’s automated systems triggered an alert after Navalnaya amassed 100,000 followers in the space of just three days. As she struggled to recover her account, others on the platforms were seeking to undermine her campaign to get justice for her husband by sharing a video that claimed Navalnaya was faking her grief over her husband’s death..
The fake video was branded with the logo of the American Psychological Association (APA) and featured footage of US psychologist Paul Ekman, who wrote the bestselling book How to Tell if Someone Is Lying. The video, which looks like it was taken from the Instagram stories of the official APA account, attributes a statement to Ekman that Navalnaya’s grief for her husband’s death is simulated. However, no such video exists on the organization’s social media profiles or its website. A spokesperson for Ekman subsequently told an independent Russian news outlet that his work “does not include consultation on personal, legal, or political matters.”
Also on X, accounts linked to the Matryoshka influence campaign, which targets journalists and fact-checking organizations and was exposed earlier this year by the Antibot4Navalny researchers. Accounts that have been linked to this group have been posting videos claiming that Navalnaya had an abortion last month.
One account reviewed by WIRED that is part of this campaign responded to dozens of posts on X by news organizations in Europe and America by embedding the same fake video and making the same comment: “Yulia Navalnaya had an abortion in January 2024 at a private German clinic.” None of which is true.
