«Russia’s online information attacks on Middle East countries» — editorial position

This piece has two parts: the news and documented context with sources, followed by the Sardaana News editorial position.

What the UAE said

Abdulla bin Mohammed bin Butti Al Hamed, Chairman of the UAE National Media Authority, told the UAE Correspondents’ Majlis in Dubai that more than 11,000 new bots appeared on social media in October 2026 alone. He said the automated accounts were being used to amplify content that aggravates relations between countries in the region. Khaleej Times reported this on 19 October; the Russian-language outlet Russian Emirates followed on 21 October, citing Khaleej Times.

Al Hamed did not say which platforms were involved or who was behind the bots. He said authorities work with social media companies to remove such accounts, largely without public announcements. In May 2026 the authority’s Secretary-General, Dr Jamal Mohammed Al Kaabi, said 10,000 TikTok accounts posting AI-generated videos and false claims about Dubai and other emirates had been removed. In April, more than 100 accounts were blocked for inciting violence during the Iranian attacks; Al Hamed said they were not linked to any one country. Spreading false news in the UAE carries at least one year in prison and a fine of at least Dh100,000 (Article 52, Federal Decree-Law No. 34 of 2021).

UAE officials did not name Russia or any other country in this context.

What is documented about Russian influence operations

• Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency (IRA). In February 2018 a US grand jury indicted 13 Russians and three companies, including the IRA and Prigozhin-linked Concord, for interfering in US politics through fake accounts. In October 2019 Meta (then Facebook) removed networks tied to Prigozhin operating in several African countries, including Libya and Sudan; the Stanford Internet Observatory documented those operations in detail.
• After Prigozhin. Mandiant (Google) found that some of his campaigns continued after his 2023 mutiny and death, while the “troll factory” was reportedly closed. Kremlin contractors moved to the centre: in September 2024 the US Justice Department seized 32 domains used by the Doppelganger operation and said the Social Design Agency (SDA) and Structura acted at the direction of Russia’s Presidential Administration under First Deputy Chief of Staff Sergei Kiriyenko. Sweden’s Psychological Defence Agency, drawing on leaked documents, described SDA as part of a Kremlin network worth about €600 million a year.
• Doppelganger / RRN. France’s Viginum exposed in 2023 a campaign cloning websites of European media and governments; the EU sanctioned those involved. Meta’s Q2 2023 Adversarial Threat Report said the operation expanded its targets from France, Germany and Ukraine to the United States and Israel. In May 2024 OpenAI reported that Doppelganger used its models to write comments in English, French, German, Italian and Polish.
• Storm-1516. In 2025 Viginum analysed dozens of operations built on staged videos and fake “revelations” (PDF report); it said one coordinator was Yury Khoroshenky, linked to GRU Unit 29155.
• Pravda network / “Portal Kombat”. In 2024 Viginum identified a website network run by the Crimea-based company TigerWeb. According to NewsGuard, by 2025 it spanned about 150 domains in dozens of languages and 49 countries, including the Middle East, and published some 3.6 million articles in 2024; researchers called its strategy “LLM grooming” — seeding the data AI chatbots draw on.

Strikes on data centres

According to OSW and the BBC, between 7 and 11 October 2026 Ukrainian drones hit three Yandex data centres (Sasovo, Kaluga, Vladimir), on 14 October a Sberbank data centre in Balakovo, and on 18 October a VK server facility in Leningrad Oblast. Volodymyr Zelensky called the strikes a response to Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centres, which OSW says have been under way since mid-September.

Sardaana News editorial position

Russia is behind such attacks in the Middle East, just as it is in Europe. Russia is the world’s largest disinformer and destabiliser. Hundreds of servers under different IP addresses push pro-Russian narratives worldwide, in every language. Russia spares no money on these bot farms. Prigozhin used to run this; now it is the FSB. That is why Ukraine’s strikes on data centres in Russia are not evil but a way to curb the spread of lies across the world.