Following The Doppelganger

The Insider exposed the special Kremlin unit behind disinformation, whose operations IESS has been tracking across a dozen European countries. Now, this unit delivers sabotage, not just disinformation

The people running Ru-PSYOPs don't call themselves propagandists: internally, they use the terms "ideological troops" and "social architects," and the hacked correspondence obtained by The Insider shows exactly how literally they mean it. 

What the West nicknamed Doppelganger isn't a loose constellation of trolls. 

It is a standing unit inside Russia's Presidential Administration, with a reporting structure, a budget cycle, and a production line, run by Sergei Kirienko's office through a PR operator named Ilya Gambashidze and his Agency for Social Design. 

The Insider's documents expose the organizational chart.

The chart behind the incidents

Doppelganger splits its work into two tracks, and the division maps cleanly onto distinctions IESS has already drawn in separate pieces. 

Aleksandr Kharychev, a Kiriyenko loyalist who began his career in Russia's chemical and biological defense troops before moving into "moral-psychological provision," runs the Ukraine-facing track: discrediting Kyiv's leadership, splitting its elite, demoralizing its army, disorienting its population. Sofia Zakharova runs the Western-facing track, aimed at the publics whose governments arm Ukraine. 

The Western track's output is cruder than their own promotional material admits. Gambashidze tells his superiors that the project has become "effectively the only way to naturally influence public opinion" in target countries "without the obvious stamp of Russian propaganda." 

The leaked working notes tell a different story: fabricated videos of Ukrainian refugees mocking German hosts, invented claims that Italian authorities will hand seized Russian villas to Ukrainian refugees at local taxpayers' expense, a planned clip of a London man posing as a member of a terror group threatening Ukrainians, deepfaked footage timed to a terrorist attack in Mozambique. 

None of this requires the target population to love Russia. 

It only requires them to stop trusting their own institutions, which is precisely the mechanism IESS described this month in Accelerant, examining how Russian and Iranian networks piled onto genuine French protests over school funding to manufacture an impression of a country sliding toward civil war. Doppelganger's own staff notes, proposing a fake municipal fire during last year's French legislative elections, describe exactly that kind of amplification in the planning stage rather than after the fact.

The same seam, country after country

The Insider's investigation also examines broader patterns about ASD's territorial-dispute coordinated campaigns.

In Ghosts of Zaolzie, we noted that the operation combined a hacked radio station, a fabricated diplomat's account, and AI-generated supporting documents, a production mix that matches, almost component for component, the "reality augmentation" toolkit Doppelganger's staff wrote into their own internal playbook: deepfaked faces, computer-generated inserts into real footage, staged filming that substitutes Russian locations for German, Italian, or British ones using nothing more than props and a rehearsed script. 

In The Synthetic Partition, we examined how a Slovak MEP pushed the idea of dividing Ukraine along fake ethnic lines. So we traced this back to a broader narrative structure, because the core narrative persists not because of any individual speaker, but because it is centrally maintained as a standing reference for anyone willing to amplify it.

The Insider shows that this kind of narrative never dies because it is managed centrally in Kremlin reference guides, ready for any sympathetic voice to adapt locally.

The through-line is strategic rather than coincidental, and the strategy behind the seam, probing the gap between a real European grievance and the state's capacity to address it.

Therefore, we set it out in Russia's Next War: an approach built on testing Europe's thresholds before any shot is fired, so that by the time a genuinely dangerous incident occurs, the public has already been primed to distrust the institutions meant to respond to it. 

Doppelganger wasn't designed as a parallel operation to that strategy. Judging by its own internal paperwork, it is one of the strategy's primary production facilities, staffed by former Foreign Ministry officials, Security Council aides, and MGIMO graduates who write fake quotes for fake Western commentators between shifts.

When the architects pick up tools

The most consequential finding in The Insider's files is not about content at all. 

People directly tied to Kharychev's operation have been organizing training camps in the Balkans, where neo-Nazis and football hooligans recruited for "activity of various kinds" were taught, and taught to teach others how to fly drones and attach explosives to them. 

The stated range of planned uses spans interference in Moldova's elections to "provocations and sabotage" inside Western Europe itself. 

Read against the rest of our reporting this year, that detail resolves a question we had been circling from the opposite direction. In the Pre-Sabotage Phase, we examined Danish counterintelligence's arrest of two men photographing a Danish defense contractor for what investigators believe was a Russian intelligence task, exactly the kind of low-level reconnaissance a sabotage campaign needs before it can select targets. 

The Doppelganger documents show where the resources for these operations, both human and material, come from.

This is the point at which "information operation" stops being an adequate description.

A unit that spends one afternoon fabricating a quote about Volodymyr Zelenskyy's yacht and another coordinating drone-and-explosives instruction for recruited hooligans isn't running two different projects. We observe two delivery mechanisms, narrative and kinetic, managed by the same people, reporting to the same office, and justified in the same internal paperwork as contributions to a single "counter-campaign" against the West.

1. The information side softens target population trust in its own institutions. 
2. The sabotage side does the rest, once trust has eroded enough that a burned warehouse or a damaged power substation reads as just one more confusing incident rather than a clear act of war.

Failure as a feature, not a flaw

It would be a mistake to read all this as evidence of a uniquely sophisticated adversary. 

Gambashidze's own internal reporting concedes that failures still outnumber successes. The leaked material backs him up: clumsy comment-bot language lifted wholesale across supposedly distinct personas, stock narratives recycled so often that France, Italy, and Germany are handed nearly identical migrant-hatred scripts with the nationality swapped out, campaigns caught and named publicly by Meta's own threat researchers as early as 2022. 

What should concern European governments isn't Doppelganger's competence. It is its persistence, documented across more than three years, surviving the collapse of Yevgeny Prigozhin's rival troll operation in 2023 by simply absorbing its market share, and institutionalized deeply enough that failure gets logged, reviewed, and iterated on rather than treated as a reason to shut the project down. 

We addressed the information-security dimension of that resilience in Sound of Silence, examining how Russia's dependence on Western hardware to rebuild damaged computing infrastructure creates a genuine pressure point; Doppelganger's human infrastructure, spread across a presidential administration department, an NGO with thousands of staff, and a loose network of recruited hooligans in the Balkans, is considerably harder to disrupt with a single strike.

What the chart demands of the response

A fragmented adversary invites a fragmented response: debunk the yacht story here, expose the fake border dispute there, treat each new "revelation" as its own news cycle to be refuted and forgotten. 

The documents The Insider has published argue against that approach as clearly as anything we have reviewed for the last 1,5 years, because Doppelganger isn't fragmented. 

It has a budget line, a performance review process, and a single office in the Kremlin that reads the results of a French election protest, a German migrant-hatred video, and a Ukrainian demoralization campaign as entries in the same ledger. 

Europe's response has so far been organized the opposite way, country by country, incident by incident, each government treating its own slice of the campaign as a local problem to be managed rather than one input into a continental one. 

In Special Cognitive Operation, the actual target of this entire apparatus was never any single fake story: it is the public's capacity to tell a real grievance from a manufactured one, country after country, until that capacity itself is the thing that has quietly stopped working.