Russian influence operators called it Project 2026. The plan wasn’t just to spread fabricated stories on social media platforms. It outlined efforts to create an alternative information ecosystem.
Leaked documents from a private Russian agency reviewed by Bloomberg News reveal plans to build a sprawling network of Wikipedia-style reference sites, media outlets and phony think tanks to shape how people and AI chatbots understand political issues.
The documents from the Social Design Agency (SDA), which has been sanctioned by the US, the UK and the European Union for supporting Kremlin-directed disinformation, show how the Moscow-based agency has emerged as a central node in Russia’s cognitive warfare system, involved in false flag operations and planting sham stories online.
Among the 73 leaked files are project proposals and screenshots of chats and websites dating from May 2023 to April 2026. Combined, they suggest Russian influence operators are expanding beyond spreading false stories on social media platforms to trying to control the sources of information that underpin search engines and large language models. Fact Investigation Platform, an Armenian media outlet focused on disinformation, first reported on some of the documents.
Internal planning papers outline an ambitious effort spanning multiple countries and languages to build websites controlled by the Kremlin. The endeavor is designed to capture search traffic and influence AI chatbots with false information about politicians and current events, the documents show.
One proposal outlined plans to build a reference site “cloned” from Wikipedia for Armenia that operators would optimize for search engines and insert Russia-friendly narratives into the most-read pages. The proposal was dated April 14, according to its metadata, just two months before the country’s June 7 election.
Bloomberg found three Wikipedia-style sites for Armenia created in January that were recently suspended by their web-hosting provider. Despite Russian efforts to spread false stories about Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, he won a decisive victory.
Another project targeting Germany said 200,000 web pages were created, according to a planning document dated Jan. 15. It set goals, including editing 100 articles a month targeting search engines. The plan also aimed to “train” six AI platforms a month using edited articles. It did not disclose the names of the websites. The BfV, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, said it was aware of the leak but declined to comment.
“Their approach is to try to break search engines by flooding the zone with content that cross-references their content or their narratives,” said Katerina Sedova, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and a former US State Department official who specializes in technology and national security. “This will be their indirect way of breaking into popular chatbots and search engines.”
Most of the leaked documents don’t contain SDA logos, but European officials and researchers told Bloomberg they believed the files were genuine based on their content and the style of the proposals, some of which are similar to SDA documents disclosed by the US Justice Department and European media in 2024.
Bloomberg also used historical Domain Name System data to independently confirm the existence of the 42 websites shown in screenshots of the operation’s content management system, evidence that would be difficult to falsify. Almost all of them were hosted on the same Russia-based internet protocol address, which also appears in the leaked documents.
Founded in 2002 by Ilya Gambashidze, the SDA has worked for Russian officials and government agencies on what it calls “information warfare.” The Justice Department said in 2024 that it was involved in a “persistent foreign malign influence campaign” directed by the Russian government, including efforts to impersonate media outlets and government organizations. That same year the US sanctioned Gambashidze. The SDA didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The new documents provide insight into how Russian officials manage so-called “active measures” — disinformation and broader efforts to destabilize the West and shape public opinion. They show an operation run like a Western consulting firm, with a focus on performance targets, case studies and opinion-tracking systems.
It marks a significant evolution from the defunct Internet Research Agency, the troll farm run by the late mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, which a whistleblower once described as driven by quotas for social media posts rather than sophisticated targeting.
A key figure in the documents is Sofia Zakharova, an official in the Kremlin’s information and communication directorate who was sanctioned by the EU in 2024 for working with the SDA. A spreadsheet of user names and emails included in the new documents shows she is called Kristin Kiler in the chats, a likely reference to Christine Keeler, the English model at the center of the Profumo scandal in the early 1960s that raised fears British national security had been compromised. Chats also reference her as Sofia, who appears in a managerial role discussing funding and approvals.
“We’re still waiting for the go-ahead from SVK,” she wrote in one chat da…
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