Fake Tom Cruise documentary is part of a Russian influence campaign aimed at the Paris Olympics, report finds

Pro-Russian propagandists are ramping up their efforts to denigrate next month’s Paris Summer Olympics and undermine Western support for Ukraine through a series of brazen online and offline stunts, private experts and Western officials told CNN.

Pro-Russian propagandists are ramping up their efforts to denigrate next month’s Paris Summer Olympics and undermine Western support for Ukraine through a series of brazen online and offline stunts, private experts and Western officials told CNN. The stunts have included using artificial intelligence to impersonate the actor Tom Cruise’s voice narrating a fake documentary attacking the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and placing coffins with an inscription invoking the Ukraine war near the Eiffel Tower, sources said. The activity appears to be part of an increasingly frantic effort from Russian operatives to tarnish the Olympics and stall any momentum Ukraine is building to use Western-made weapons to attack Russian territory, experts who track Russian disinformation told CNN. The IOC has placed restrictions on Russian athletes’ participation in the Paris Olympics because of Russia’s war on Ukraine. There is a mix of desperation and opportunism to the recent spate of propaganda, said Gavin Wilde, a former Russia expert at the National Security Council. “For the tech-savvy propagandists working in Russia, the alternative they’re hedging against isn’t irrelevance — it’s a one-way trip to the front lines,” Wilde told CNN. The Russian operatives used the fake Cruise voice, the Netflix logo and even a fake New York Times review to try to lend the documentary legitimacy, according to analysts at Microsoft, who released a report on the activity on Sunday. The propaganda video, released on social media platform Telegram last year, was “the first glimpse of what would prove to be an extensive campaign” by the same Russian propaganda actor to smear the Paris Olympics, Microsoft said. Russian propagandists have also been ginning up fake news stories claiming that Parisians are buying property insurance because of fears of terrorism around the Olympics, and fake press releases purporting to come from the CIA and French intelligence warning about terrorism, according to Microsoft.