Posts on the video-sharing site targeted Ukrainian and Russian users, as well as many across Europe, with content designed to “artificially amplify pro-Russian narratives” on the war, TikTok said in a report released Wednesday.
A separate BBC investigation published Friday identified 800 fake accounts, which it said targeted European countries with false claims that senior Ukrainian officials and their relatives bought luxury cars or villas abroad after Russia’s invasion in February 2022.
A TikTok spokesperson told CNBC that the company had already begun to investigate the accounts prior to the BBC investigation and that all fake accounts identified had since been removed.
“We constantly and relentlessly pursue those that seek to influence its community through deceptive behaviors,” they added in a statement.
The majority of the fake accounts — around 13,000 — identified by TikTok were operated from inside Russia and pushed Kremlin war propaganda in local languages to Ukraine, Russia, Germany, Italy, Turkey, Serbia, Czechia, Poland and Greece.
However, a number of the identified accounts were operated from within Ukraine and were found to be “artificially amplifying narratives aiming to raise money for the Ukrainian military.”
The combined followers of the fake accounts exceeded one million, TikTok said, though videos shared on the platform routinely reach viewers in their millions.
The latest figures add to previous reports of fake pro-Russia accounts identified by TikTok, as it steps up its self-reporting amid international pressure on social media sites to clampdown on false users and disinformation.
It comes a week after the U.K. accused Russia of conducting a years-long “campaign of malicious cyber activity” against politicians, civil servants and journalists aimed at undermining British democracy.
Russian anti-aircraft units destroyed 32 Ukrainian drones over the Crimean Peninsula, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Telegram. Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, a move that most of the world considered illegal, and has used it as a staging and supply point during the war.
Earlier, Russia’s Defense Ministry said that six drones had been shot down in the Kursk region, which borders Ukraine.
In Ukraine’s partially occupied southern Kherson region, the Russia-installed governor, Vladimir Saldo, reported on Telegram that Russian anti-aircraft units had downed at least 15 aerial targets near the town of Henichesk. Saldo said later Saturday that a Ukrainian missile attack on a village in the Russia-held part of the region had killed two people.
Meanwhile, shelling wounded two people in Ukrainian-held parts of the Kherson region, regional Gov. Oleksandr Prokudin said Saturday.
Stepped-up drone attacks over the past month come as both sides are keen to show they aren’t deadlocked as the war approaches the two-year mark. Neither side has gained much ground despite a Ukrainian counteroffensive that began in June, and analysts predict the war will be a long one.
On Friday, EU leaders sought to paper over their inability to boost Ukraine’s coffers with a promised 50 billion euros ($54.5 billion) over the next four years, saying the funds will likely arrive next month after some more haggling between the bloc’s other 26 leaders and the longtime holdout, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
Instead, they wanted Ukraine to revel in getting the nod to start membership talks that could mark a sea change in its fortunes — although the process could last well over a decade and be strewn with obstacles placed by any single member state.
Also on Saturday, Russia returned three Ukrainian children to their families as part of a deal brokered by Qatar, according to the head of Ukraine’s presidential office, Andriy Yermak, and Ukrainian human rights ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets.
Lubinets voiced hope last week that a coalition of countries formed to facilitate the return of Ukrainian children illegally deported by Russia — the National Coalition of Countries for the Return of Ukrainian Children — will be able to come up with a faster mechanism to repatriate them. More than 19,000 children are still believed to be in Russia or occupied regions of Ukraine.
At least 35 Ukrainian drones were shot down overnight over three regions in southwestern Russia, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a post on the messaging app Telegram.
A Russian air base hosting bomber aircraft used in the war in Ukraine was among the targets, according to a Russian Telegram channel critical of the Kremlin. The channel posted short videos of drones flying over low-rise housing in what it claimed was the Russian town of Morozovsk, whose air base is home to Russia’s 559th Bomber Aviation Regiment.
Vasily Golubev, the governor of Russia’s Rostov province, separately reported “mass drone strikes” near Morozovsk and another town farther west, but didn’t mention the air base. Golubev said most of the drones were shot down and there were no casualties. He didn’t comment on the damage.
As of Sunday evening, Kyiv didn’t formally acknowledge or claim responsibility for the drone attacks. A major Ukrainian newspaper, Ukrainska Pravda, cited an anonymous source in the security services as saying that Ukraine’s army and intelligence services successfully struck the Morozovsk air base, inflicting “significant damage” to military equipment. It wasn’t immediately possible to verify this claim.
Also Sunday morning, Ukraine’s air force said it shot down 20 Iranian-made Shahed drones launched overnight by Russian troops in southern and western Ukraine, as well as one X-59 cruise missile launched from the country’s occupied south.
A civilian was killed overnight near Odesa, a key port on Ukraine’s southern Black Sea coast, after the remnants of a destroyed drone fell on his house, Ukraine’s military said.
Stepped-up drone attacks over the past month come as both sides are keen to show they aren’t deadlocked as the war approaches the two-year mark. Neither side has gained much ground despite a Ukrainian counteroffensive that began in June.
Russian shelling on Sunday also killed an 81-year-old man in central Kherson. The southern Ukrainian city was recaptured by Kyiv’s forces last fall, according to the head of its municipal military administration.
Ukrainian and Russian forces exchanged fire outside Terebreno, a Russian village just kilometers (miles) from the Ukrainian border, according to Telegram posts by Gov. Vasily Gladkov. He did not provide details, but insisted Russian authorities had the situation “under control.”
According to Baza, a Telegram news channel set up by Russian journalists critical of the Kremlin, fighting between Russian troops and a “Ukrainian diversionary group” began around 11 a.m. near Terebreno, home to some 200 people, forcing residents to hide in shelters.
Hours later, a 69-year-old woman was reported killed in a Ukrainian border village in the northern Sumy region, about 25 kilometers (15 miles) west of Terebreno. According to the Ukrainian regional prosecutor’s office, the woman died after a Russian shell flew into her home. It wasn’t immediately clear whether her death was linked to the reported clashes.
Late on Sunday afternoon, a Ukrainian border force official reported in a video statement that multiple Russian “sabotage and reconnaissance” operatives had crossed into Ukraine’s northern Sumy and Kharkiv regions. Andriy Demchenko claimed that Ukrainian border guards and territorial defense units succeeded in pushing them back into Russia.
While cross-border raids on Russian territory from Ukraine are rare, the Russian military claimed in May to have killed more than 70 attackers, describing them as Ukrainian military saboteurs, in a 24-hour battle. Kyiv portrayed the incident as an uprising against the Kremlin by Russian partisans.
Ukraine’s foreign minister, meanwhile, welcomed what he called a sea change in Germany’s approach toward Kyiv’s European Union membership bid.
In an interview with Germany’s Bild newspaper, Dmytro Kuleba said that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has won “sincere and well-deserved admiration” among Ukrainians for his role in the EU’s recent decision to open membership talks for Kyiv.
Ukraine has long faced strong opposition in its attempts to join the 27-member bloc from Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has repeatedly spoken of his desire to maintain close ties with Russia.
Scholz said that, at an EU summit last week, he proposed that Orbán leave the room to enable the summit to launch accession talks with Ukraine, something that the Hungarian leader agreed to do.
“What German Chancellor Olaf Scholz did at the summit to remove the threatened Hungarian veto will go down in history as an act of German leadership in the interests of Europe. The chancellor has this week won a lot of sincere and well-deserved admiration in the hearts of Ukrainians,” Kuleba told Bild.
He also voiced hope that Scholz’s actions would mark a “broader and irreversible shift” in Berlin’s approach towards EU negotiations with Kyiv.
“When I campaigned in Berlin last May to grant Ukraine EU candidate status, my appeals to Germany to take the lead in this process mostly fell on deaf ears. ‘Germany doesn’t want to lead,’ experts and politicians in Berlin told me. I am glad that German political decisions have changed since then,” Kuleba said.
The Ukrainian government has long cast EU and NATO membership as key foreign policy goals, and the EU’s decision to start accelerated negotiations gave Kyiv a major boost — although it could be years before it’s able to join. NATO leaders, meanwhile, haven’t set any clear timeline so far for Kyiv’s membership bid, even as Moscow’s all-out invasion of Ukraine led another of Russia’s neighbors, Finland, to be accepted into the military alliance in April.
Russian President Vladimir Putin vowed to build military units near the Russian-Finnish border. The Kremlin leader declared, without giving details, that Helsinki’s NATO accession would create “problems” for the Nordic country.
“There were no problems (between Russia and Finland). Now, there will be. Because we will create (a new) military district and concentrate certain military units there,” he told Russian state television on Sunday morning.
Orban, who abstained from the vote Thursday by leaving the room, said the move to admit the war-torn country to the EU was “a bad decision.”
“We can halt this process later on, and if needed we will pull the brakes, and the ultimate decision will be made by Hungarian parliament,” he said, without adding detail on how he might do that.
Putin would work with “anyone who will understand that from now on, you have to be more careful with Russia and you have to take into account its concerns,” Dmitry Peskov said when asked if the Kremlin would be content working with Republican front-runner Donald Trump.
Peskov also suggested that the financial support given to Ukraine by the U.S. was ineffective, likening it to throwing money “into the wind” and that the U.S. and the West were prolonging the conflict.
In an interview with state TV network Rossiya 24, Putin dismissed comments by U.S. President Joe Biden, who said earlier this month that Russia would attack a NATO country if it won the war in Ukraine, according to Tass news agency.
“It is complete nonsense – and I think President Biden understands that,” Putin said in comments cited by Reuters.
“Russia has no reason, no interest – no geopolitical interest, neither economic, political nor military – to fight with NATO countries,” he added.
NATO’s eastward expansion has long been seen as a chief driver of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Biden’s claim formed part of his appeal to Republicans not to block further military aid to Ukraine.
Early results put the SNS at about 46%, while opposition center-left Serbia Against Violence coalition was set to come second with around 23% in a vote that was marred by reports of irregularities.
Serbia has resisted implementing sanctions against Moscow but has previously said Crimea and Donbas are Ukrainian sovereign territories.
“We welcome this achievement from Vučić,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters, according to Reuters.
Peskov, who referred to Serbia as a “brotherly” country, added that Moscow hoped the result would lead to the “further strengthening of friendship” between the countries.
Speaking at a press conference Monday, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius dubbed the move “historic” and said that the troops would be combat-ready in 2027.
It marks the first permanent foreign deployment of German troops since WWII and comes as NATO has sought to reinforce its defenses in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“The eastern flank has now moved to the east, and it’s the duty of Germany to protect it,” Pistorius said, in comments reported by Reuters. “The speed of the project clearly shows that Germany understood the new security reality.”
“We should expect not only good scenarios, but also the very worst scenarios. So we must be ready … Russia remains the main threat to us and NATO”, Lithuania’s Defense Minister Arvydas Anusauskas added, according to Reuters.
“There is a tenfold difference between what the West has promised, say, to African countries … and what the West has pledged to the developing world to cover the costs of overcoming climate change” versus Ukraine funding, Lavrov argued, according to state news agency Tass.
The minister also argued that Western countries are running out of funds to support Ukraine. “Everybody’s saying that openly, as far as I understand, there is no secret here,” he said.
