Pravda Network Pushes Canadian & Australian Election News on VK
The pro-Russian Pravda network maintains dozens of accounts on Russian social media site VK, sharing 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 these news aggregator sites with stories tailored to different international audiences, many of which have associated accounts on Russian social media site VK.
Pravda-linked VK accounts published hundreds of posts related to the recent Australian and Canadian elections. A large portion of the 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 Russian 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 market,1 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 activity 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. 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.
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
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[dot]news-pravda[dot]com].5 On VK, the bio of "Pravda Canada – Actualités du Canada" lists their official website as [canada[dot]news-pravda[dot]com/fr], seemingly as a form of account verification.
In our reporting, VK accounts attributed to Pravda used the term “Pravda” in their account names and included a link (see image 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 for a more inclusive search (to capture results for both “Canada” and “Canadians,” for example). The rest of the string string retrieves results mentioning Canada-related words in addition to general election-related language or names of prominent political figures.
With this English-language keyword string, our researchers looked for results from a month before election day to a day after (March 28–April 29, 2025) and captured many French-language results.
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 both benign (“Biography of Mark Carney” on April 29, 2025, for example) and overtly politicized content. Some politicized themes included:
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)
Origin 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.6 VIGINUM is a French organization that has done extensive research on the Pravda network.
Open Measures found that Pravda Canada might have machine-translated its 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, from 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 transliteration errors, possibly as a result of 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.
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).
Pravda Australia
The second most prolific of the top 10 accounts was 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 or posts on X (formerly “tweets” on Twitter) 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 noted that the Pravda network often shares content from Telegram accounts “belonging to . . . pro-Russian actors.”7
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 seeking political asylum in Sydney’s Russian consulate to avoid facing charges in Australia.8
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.9 We have previously reported on The Noticer and its 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 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.10
Conclusion
Pravda’s operations were exposed in Feb. 2024 and received massive media attention through 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, Russia’s largest social media site. Behind this content were dozens of accounts linked to various Pravda news aggregators, each of which published hundreds of posts with very little engagement.
Particularly noteworthy were the tonal differences between Pravda Canada and Pravda Australia. When discussing the recent elections, the former appeared to draw from pro-Russian news articles before translating them into English. Pravda Australia, however, favored content from extremist Australian Telegram channels.
In the interest of aiding researchers and slowing the spread of misinformation, Open Measures will continue to monitor the Pravda network's activity on alt-tech sites.
Identify disinformation and extremism with the Open Measures platform.
Organizations use Open Measures’ tooling every day to track trends related to networks of influence, coordinated harassment campaigns, and state-backed info ops.
Weimann, C. (n.d.). What is VK Social Media App - a look at the Russian platform. Hunt Intelligence. Here.
Sadeghi, M., & Blachez, I. (2025, March 6). A well-funded Moscow-based Global “News” Network has infected western artificial intelligence tools worldwide with Russian propaganda. NewsGuard’s Reality Check. Here.
The American Sunlight Project. (2025, February 26). New report: Russian propaganda may be flooding AI models. The American Sunlight Project. Here.
Ibid.
PORTAL KOMBAT: A structured and coordinated pro-Russian propaganda network. Secrétariat général de la défense et de la sécurité nationale. (2024, February). Here.
Ibid.
Lavoipierre, A., & Workman, M. (2025, May 3). Pro-Russian influence operation targeting Australia in lead-up to election. ABC News. Here.