Putin’s AI-Driven Disinformation Machine: Operation Overload and the New Arms Race for Truth

July 2,2025

A Russian-aligned disinformation campaign is harnessing the power of consumer-grade artificial intelligence to flood digital platforms with false narratives at an unprecedented scale. Known as Operation Overload—or Matryoshka and linked by some to Storm-1679—this campaign has rapidly evolved since 2023 into a high-volume, AI-enabled propaganda engine. Targeting democratic societies, especially Ukraine, the campaign spreads doctored videos, fake images, and misleading narratives designed to polarize public opinion, interfere in elections, and amplify social divisions. By exploiting widely available AI tools, its operators have shifted toward a faster, cheaper, and multilingual model of influence that circumvents traditional verification systems and overwhelms the global information ecosystem. The result is a dramatic escalation in coordinated online manipulation—one that challenges how societies prepare for and defend against foreign influence operations in the age of generative AI.