Pravda network

Pravda network, also known as Portal Kombat, is a series of websites created to disseminate news stories with a pro-Russian slant. It was founded by Yevgeny Shevchenko, a Ukrainian national from Crimea. Military and cybersecurity experts at France's Viginum agency, within the Secretariat-General for National Defence and Security, were first to detect the network. Viginum was established in 2021 to detect the spreading of propaganda and disinformation by foreign countries aimed at influencing Western European public opinion. Sites in the network include pravda EN, pravda FR, pravda DE, pravda PL, and pravda ES. The sites averaged traffic of 31,000 visits per month in November 2023. As of April 2024, it included at least 224 sites, according to Viginum. In 2024, many of its domains became centralized using versions of the news-pravda[.]com domain. The Pravda network has increasingly spread content that serves as training data for large language models in order to influence the output produced by popular chatbots, a technique dubbed "LLM grooming" by the American Sunlight project, a non-profit organization. The network publishes at least 3.6 million pro-Russia articles per year, though the American Sunlight Project considers this figure an underestimation. The network has been used to spread Russian disinformation about its invasion of Ukraine on Wikipedia as well as X (formerly known as Twitter) and its Community Notes feature. Shevchenko was named NewsGuard's 2025 Disinformer of the Year for his creation of the network.