Kremlin propaganda operatives, state news outlets, and top officials used the deepfake video of the US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller for a massive disinformation attack against the US and Ukraine.
“As far as we know, there are no civilians left in Washington, New York, Berlin, Paris, and Warsaw, not to mention Kyiv. There are only military targets there,” Dmitry Rogozin, the Kremlin’s senator for Russia-occupied Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region, news site News.ru on May 31.
Rogozin was to a footage that showed the U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller purportedly telling reporters that it was OK for the Ukrainian military to attack the Russian border city of Belgorod because all civilians left it, and only military targets remained in there.
The ex-director general of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos and ex-deputy prime minister, discharged from both posts, Rogozin nevertheless remains on the vanguard of the Kremlin’s hybrid war against Ukraine.
Rogozin’s as a senator in the Russian Federation Council, the upper house of the parliament, “representing” Ukrainians living under Russian occupation is illegal under the international law.
Estonian fact-checking site Provereno.Media that the video is fake and its creators combined footage from two different U.S. State Department press briefings: a and a .
Forensic analysis aside, the video has obvious red flags of digital manipulation. For one, within seconds between taking a question and answering it, Miller’s shirt changes color from white to blue, while his tie changes from blue to purple. His lips move independently from his words, signaling a lack of synchronization between articulation and speech.
DELFI, a prominent Baltic media portal estimated that around 300 posts with the Miller deepfake video surfaced on the on the Russian messenger Telegram between May 30 and June 3, garnering more than 2 million views in the first four days. DELFI an online scraper that monitors and catalogs Telegram channels and posts.
A news site associated with Russian military intelligence, , was among the first the deepfake video on its Telegram channel.
Simultaneously, numerous Russian-language accounts pushed the deepfake video across Russian state-owned social media and video streaming platforms and , as well as and .
Such mass distribution suggests a Russian information warfare tactic called “informatsionny vbros” -- in English.
With the help of an X account with more than half-a-million followers as frequent distributer of disinformation and false content, the deepfake video made to the English language segment of X on May 31, instantly becoming viral.
Among those who shared the video on X with an anti-U.S. comment was the Russian embassy in South Africa, which deleted the post the next day offering no correction note to its followers.
At first, the Russian news agencies and papers largely ignored the video, picking up the only after the Russian President and Chairman of Russia’s Human Rights Council Valery Fadeyev the deepfake on his Telegram channel, calling Miller “the cynic from the State Department.”
Fadeyev later deleted the post, , “regrettably, it was fake” which didn’t change anything because the video “accurately reflected the U.S.’ true position.”
"This video is a fake that does not represent statements made by the Department’s Spokesperson nor U.S. policy," the U.S. State Department official told Polygraph.info in an email.
Top outlets like the Russian government official newspaper , state-owned news agency , the Kremlin’s main foreign propaganda outlet , formerly Russia Today, the mega popular tabloid , and reported the story as if the Miller deepfake was an authentic U.S. State Department video.
None of them corrected their reports or added editor’s notes to indicate the falsified context. More than ten days after the deepfake’s exposure, those reports are and shared by Russian content-boosting services like and .
Several Russian language media outlets in exile fact-checked the video establishing that it is a deep fake: , a Latvia-based Russian independent online media; , an Estonian fact-checking site. So did the U.S. and European outlets including the , a Colorado-based fact-checking website, and , a department within Agence France-Presse.
On June 5, Matthew Miller the doctored video, remarking that the Russian government has previously created similar videos and used disinformation to mislead both its own citizens and people from other countries.