The fake Cruise video, which appeared on the Telegram messaging platform last year, is called Olympics Has Fallen and uses artificial intelligence-generated audio of the film star’s voice to present a ‘strange, meandering script’ disparaging the IOC. The documentary, whose title riffs on the Gerard Butler action film Olympus Has Fallen, also claims falsely to have been produced by Netflix and is promoted with bogus five-star reviews from the New York Times and the BBC.

Does a 50-second video show authentic remarks by U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller discussing “military targets” in the Russian city of Belgorod, with “virtually no civilians left” in that city? No, that’s not true: The video mixes video of different briefings, during which Miller made no such remarks. The words falsely attributed to him in the video were AI-generated. The State Department labeled the video a deepfake. The video of fake remarks was also posted by the Russian Embassy in South Africa account on X, but later that post was deleted.

Recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative framing popular protests as Western-led colour revolutions, in this case the mobilisations against the approval of the so-called ‘foreign agents law’ in Georgia.