May 22, 2025

Pravda Network Pushes Canadian & Australian Election News on VK

The pro-Russian Pravda network maintains dozens of accounts on the Russian social media site VK, where it shares English-language news friendly to Russian interests.

TLDR

The Pravda network (as named by researchers) is an array of pro-Russian news aggregators that may be purposed with influencing Large Language Models (LLMs) with Russia-friendly narratives.
Pravda maintains dozens of said news aggregator sites with stories tailored to different international audiences, and many of those sites have associated accounts on the Russian social media site VK.
Pravda-linked VK accounts published hundreds of posts related to the recent Australian and Canadian elections. We found that a large portion of English-language posts about the elections on VK were published by these Pravda accounts.
The Pravda Canada VK account publishes news-like articles. These may be machine translated from the original Russian into English, potentially from Russia news outlets. In contrast, the Pravda Australia VK account pulls much of its content directly from far-right Australian Telegram groups.

Background

In April and May of 2025, Australians and Canadians took to the polls in federal elections. In Canada’s April 28 election, Mark Carney, with his Liberal Party of Canada (LPC), secured enough seats to form a government. On May 3, Australians voted to keep Anthony Albanese and his Australian Labor Party (ALP) in power.

Our researchers examined how election news was being shared on the Russian social media site VK, a Facebook-like platform. According to VK’s own numbers, the platform ranks among the social media giants in the Eastern European market¹ with over 100 million monthly users.²

Open Measures’ researchers found hundreds of instances of these countries’ politics being discussed in English on VK. The bulk of this chatter came from accounts linked to the Pravda network. The Pravda network, also known as “Portal Kombat,” are news aggregators that share pro-Russian content across the world. According to some researchers, the primary aim of the Pravda network may be to influence large language models (LLMs) used by AI chatbots in order to inject pro-Russian narratives into their responses.³ ⁴ The network was dubbed “Pravda” by researchers due to the occurrence of the word “Pravda” in the names of their sites and social media accounts.⁵

Methodology

Open Measures’ researchers identified Pravda-linked accounts on VK as those with “Pravda” in their account names. One example is “Pravda Canada – Actualités du Canada”, which shared Canadian news in French. Research by other organizations have shown that Pravda-linked websites frequently use the format [countryname].news-pravda[.]com.⁶ The bio of “Pravda Canada – Actualités du Canada” on VK lists their official website as canada[.]news-pravda[.]com/fr, seeming to verify itself.

The VK account “Pravda Canada – Actualités du Canada” shares French-language news from Canada. The term “Pravda” is used in the account name, and the account references the website canada[.]news-pravda[.]com/fr.

In our reporting, VK accounts attributed to Pravda used the term “Pravda” in their account names and included a link (see above).

Analysis

Canada

Our researchers were interested in learning which accounts were publicly discussing the Canadian election on VK. To find this information, we used the Open Measures Activity tool. We began by crafting a string of English keywords related to the 2025 Canadian election:

canad* AND (vote OR election OR carney OR poilievre OR trudeau)

Our string uses canad* with a wildcard at the end in order to capture results for, say, both Canada and Canadians. This string retrieves results mentioning Canada-related words in addition to general election-related language or the names of prominent political figures.

With this English-language keyword string, researchers captured many French-language results.

We looked for results from a month before election day (April 28) to a day after (March 28–April 29, 2025).

*The top 10 accounts on VK using English-language terms related to the Canadian election from March 28, 2025–April 29, 2025).*

These results demonstrated that Pravda-affiliated accounts were sharing a glut of information about the Canadian elections. Of the top 10 accounts, half were Pravda-affiliated (Pravda Canada, Pravda Canada FR, Pravda Trump, Pravda USA, Pravda EU). Of the 641 posts about Canadian elections from one of these top 10 accounts, 472 (~74%) came from Pravda.

Pravda Canada

Pravda Canada frequently publishes news article-esque posts. A manual review of a sample of these posts revealed benign (“Biography of Mark Carney” on April 29, 2025) to overtly politicized content. Some politicized themes include:

Discord between Canada and the US (“The World Trade War. How the United States is bringing Europe and the world to their knees and what will come of it” on April 6, 2025)
Discord between Canada and other global powers (“Bibi starts FEUD with Canadian PM over Israel ‘arms embargo’ comment” from April 10, 2025)
Ukraine-related news, with varying degrees of objectivity (“Is the ‘curse’ through a handshake back in business?: the network linked the death of the Pope with Zelensky’s visit to the Vatican last year” on April 21, 2025, as well as “Canada will not stop supporting Kiev in any election outcome” on April 17, 2025)
Canadian internal discontentment (“The Poisoned Chalice: Canada’s Next Prime Minister Inherits a Wreck” on April 25, 2025)

Origins of Pravda Canada Content

Researchers at VIGINUM found that news sites in the Pravda network “do not produce any original content but massively relay publications from [other] sources,” including Russian media outlets.⁷ VIGINUM is a French organization that has done extensive research on the Pravda network.

Open Measures found that Pravda Canada might have machine translated content into English. One clue was that opposition leader Pierre Poilievre’s last name was often spelled incorrectly and in different ways.

The Pravda Canada post below from April 29, 2025, on VK, illustrates this (emphasis added):

US President Donald Trump should not interfere in the parliamentary elections in Canada. This was stated by the leader of the main opposition Conservative party of the maple leaf country, Pierre Pouillevre, on the social network X.

“President Trump, stay out of our election,” Pualevre wrote.

These misspellings hint at possible transliteration errors resulting from machine translation from a language that does not use Latin script. Given Pravda’s Russian origins, it is plausible that the original text was in Russian.

Despite its high output, Pravda Canada has very few followers on VK. This squares with the industry understanding that Pravda’s main aim may be to influence LLMs.

*Pravda Canada has only 34 followers on VK at the time of writing.*

Australia

Our researchers repeated the same methodology to look at information about the 2025 Australian election. They began by creating a string of keywords in English:

australia* AND (vote OR election OR dutton OR albanese)

Again, their date range ran from one month before election day to one day after (April 3, 2025–May 4, 2025).

*The top 10 accounts on VK using English-language terms related to the Australian election from April 3, 2025–May 4, 2025.*

Pravda Australia

The second most prolific of the top 10 accounts was the Pravda-affiliated Pravda Australia. Pravda Canada, Pravda USA, Pravda Italy, and Pravda Trump were also in the top 10. Of the 520 posts posted by the top 10 accounts mentioning Australian election keywords, 235 originated from Pravda-affiliated accounts. Like Pravda Canada, Pravda Australia has few followers despite its high level of activity.

While Pravda Canada posts presented as news articles, Pravda Australia largely amplified far-right and white nationalist viewpoints. In contrast to Pravda Canada, Pravda Australia posts were more akin to posts on X (or “tweets”) than news articles. These posts were conspiratorial at times and often antagonistic to the Australian government.

Origins of Pravda Australia Content

Pravda Australia pulled many election-related posts directly from Australian Telegram groups, often citing the channels of origin. This tracks with prior findings by researchers at VIGINUM, who note that the Pravda network often shares content from Telegram accounts “belonging to… pro-Russian actors.”⁸

For example, the Pravda Australia account reposted content from the Telegram channel “AussieCossack.” AussieCossak is controlled by Simeon Boikov, a pro-Russian Australian extremist currently dodging charges in Australia by hiding in the Russian consulate in Sydney.⁹

One such AussieCossack post, reposted on VK by Pravda Australia on April 7, 2025, reads as follows:

️Maybe the Australian Government should cease the intentional self demilitarisation of the Australian Defence Force and stop the sending of it’s [sic] last reserve of 49 Abrams tanks.

️We warned this would happen. China is laughing as Canberra sends it’s [sic] last missiles, 777 artillery, Bushmasters and tanks to Ukraine. Shoulda, woulda, coulda.

The political candiate [sic] who announces an end to Australian weapons and money for Zelensky will win the upcoming election.

Subscribe @AussieCossack

Source Telegram Channel “AussieCossack”

Pravda Australia also shared posts from the Telegram channel belonging to The Noticer, an Australian news outlet with close ties to Australian neo-Nazis.¹⁰ We have reported on The Noticer before and their coverage of white nationalists.

The following is an April 11, 2025 post shared by Pravda Australia quoting The Noticer:

1.4 million first time voters will take part in Australia’s 2025 federal election – 30% of the[m] “new migrants”.

hxxps://www[.]noticer[.]news/australia-election-2025-first-time-voters/

Follow: @NoticerNews

Source Telegram Channel “NoticerNews”

The post seems to intend to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election as well as question who should be considered “Australian.” It should be noted that only Australian citizens—and in some exceptional cases, given Australia’s past as a British colony, British citizens in Australia—can vote in a federal election.¹¹

Conclusion

Pravda’s operations were exposed in February 2024 and received massive media attention in February and March 2025. However, the network continues to produce content at a high volume. Research suggests Pravda’s goal is to generate pro-Russian content at scale to influence LLMs and AI chat bots. This could explain the network’s apparent disinterest in maintaining stealth.

Our researchers found that Pravda produced a large portion of English-language content about the 2025 Australian and Canadian elections on VK. It’s interesting to consider the ways that this Russia-linked disinformation operation presents itself on Russia’s largest social media site. It includes dozens of accounts linked to various Pravda news aggregators. Each of these publishes hundreds of posts with very little engagement.

Likewise, it is worth noting the tonal differences between Pravda Canada and Pravda Australia. When it comes to discussing the recent elections, the former appears to draw from pro-Russian news articles before translating them into English. Pravda Australia, however, favors content from extremist Australian Telegram channels. We will continue to monitor the Pravda network’s activity on alt-tech sites.

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