Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, leveled the false claim that U.S. prison inmates were being used as forced labor to fight the Los Angeles wildfires. Her comments were part of a broader campaign to sow discord within the United States and damage its reputation abroad by denigrating U.S. authorities’ response to the Los Angeles wildfires.
Researchers at FDD have identified a network of 14 accounts on X that are promoting other Kremlin-aligned narratives while falsely presenting themselves as the accounts of American citizens. All 14 accounts utilize stock, generic, or stolen profile pictures, lack a bio, and post variations of overlapping content. This suggests that their creators likely use AI to generate the network’s content. FDD cannot definitively attribute the network to Russia, but its content strongly supports that conclusion.
Foreign adversaries have previously exploited natural disasters in attempts to sow division among Americans, for example during the 2023 Maui fires and last year’s Hurricane Helene. In that vein, Sputnik asserted this month that the Los Angeles Fire Department’s donation of firefighting equipment to Ukraine in 2022 undermined firefighting efforts. Meanwhile, the Russian governor of Kherson — a partly occupied Ukrainian territory — encouraged Californians affected by the fire to move to occupied Kherson and obtain Russian citizenship.
Thousands of Los Angeles area homes were destroyed by raging wildfires, but social media claims that Ukrainian generals lost mansions in the blazes are baseless. Several pro-Kremlin outlets promote...