March 10, 2026
Global, real-time events like the Olympic Games don’t just attract athletes and sponsors. They attract adversarial narratives and influence operators. The audience is worldwide, emotions run high, and the information environment is primed for speed, ambiguity, and viral “packaging.”
During the Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics (6–22 February), GDI monitored Olympics-adjacent narratives across multiple European languages and platforms. The overall volume of hostile activity appeared lower than in some past flashpoints, but the targeting was sharper, translated more quickly across languages, and increasingly intertwined with cyber disruption and AI-enabled amplification. Building on patterns we observed around the 2024 Paris Olympics, this is a short field guide to the three playbooks that surfaced most consistently, and what they reveal about the current operating environment for Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI).
We tracked content that targeted delegations or vulnerable communities, undermined trust in institutions and media, or showed signs of coordination and “packaging” designed for rapid spread (spoofed news-like formats, repeated scripts, AI-generated content). This is a field assessment: it captures what breaks through publicly and leaves traces, the claims that circulate, and their amplification. What emerges is that major sporting events have become one of the most reliable theatres for FIMI.
The most persistent pattern revolved around delegitimising Ukrainians in the Olympic context. The mechanism is straightforward: take a globally visible event and reframe Ukrainians as undeserving, entitled, criminal, dangerous, or cynically “political. This playbook doesn’t require everyone to believe every claim. It only needs to seed suspicion.
A first group of claims leaned into social resentment: Ukrainians as misbehaving guests who cause damage, commit fraud, and are frowned upon by other athletes and locals. That framing circulated alongside “evidence-like” snippets and commentary that invited readers to fill in the gaps with their own preconceptions, amplified, for example, via X posts and at times piggybacking on real-time Olympics coverage. The point is not the factual detail; it’s the emotional payload.
A second family of claims escalated from “bad behaviour” to institutional sanction: the allegation that Ukrainian athletes had been placed in isolation inside the Olympic Village because of “toxic behaviour.” This is a classic credibility hack: a moral accusation wrapped in a veneer of mainstream media. The claim circulated on X while parallel versions appeared in Italian-language ecosystems that specialise in republishing pro-Kremlin narratives and was even disseminated further via the infamous Pravda Network. The Russian-affiliated Pravda Network, also known as Portal Kombat, was particularly active in promoting adversarial narratives in the Italian information environment.
Other variants sought to dehumanise Ukrainian athletes. Public-health accusations, such as the claim that Ukrainian athletes are spreading HIV, operate as a cognitive shortcut: if the target is framed as a biological threat, exclusion becomes automatic, a disgust response bypassing reasoned judgment. That specific narrative was flagged in Ukrainian official channels monitoring Russian-affiliated disinformation activities. Similarly, the claim that Ukrainian athletes were using the Olympics to escape military service aims to flip solidarity into contempt, casting participation as cowardice and fraud in a wartime context, which was amplified on various social media platforms.
A final set of narratives tried to reframe Ukrainian visibility itself as illegitimate “crazy PR” and “provocations.” Here, the goal is to portray any statement from Ukraine as manipulative and any Ukrainian symbol as provocative. This dynamic can be observed in how live coverage gets reframed and then amplified with commentary by different X accounts. The same logic appears with micro-scandals, such as the claim that Ukrainian skeleton athlete Vladyslav Heraskevych’s helmet was a “political stunt”, disseminated by the Italian Pravda Network website and then echoed by Italian and English-language X accounts.
Alongside reputational attacks, we observed accusations designed to cast Ukraine as a rule-breaker rather than a victim, such as claims that Ukrainian intelligence services doxed the International Olympic Committee or narratives implying Italy rejected a speech by President Zelenskyy. When the goal was maximising moral revulsion, the same ecosystem reaches for toxic labels and defamation, for instance, by circulating content implying “Charlie Hebdo claims Ukrainian athletes are Nazis”. Even the more “petty” humiliations such as portraying Ukraine as blaming Russia “because its athletes are losers”, serve a purpose: they shrink war and accountability into a sneering sports rivalry, amplified via X posts.
The throughline is consistent: whether the accusation is moral (“they misbehave”), institutional (“they are isolated”), biological (“they spread disease”), or political (“it’s PR”), the endpoint is the same: reduce Ukrainian legitimacy, diminish sympathy, and undermine support.
A second cluster framed the Games as inherently anti-Russian. This narrative uses the Olympics as a global megaphone to maintain a single interpretive lens: Russia versus a hostile West.
One version ties the Games to economic anxiety. Claims argued that the Olympics would suffer from a lack of investment and that Italy’s economy is in a dramatic situation because of the rupture with Russia (and China), presenting sanctions not as a policy choice but as self-harm.
A second version, always circulated by channels of the Pravda Network, focuses on alleged Western moral bigotry, framing the Olympics as "Russophobic" and delegitimising any restriction to the Russian delegation as prejudice rather than consequence. One notorious example involves Russian and Belarusian athletes not receiving special Samsung phones due to sanctions prohibiting the distribution of luxury goods. This incident was portrayed not as a consequence of policy, but as a deliberate mistreatment orchestrated by the IOC.
Together, these variants serve two audiences at once: externally, they paint European choices as irrational prejudice; internally, they reinforce the idea of Western hostility. The Olympics aren’t the subject, but the amplifier.
The third playbook wasn’t only “about” the Olympics. The Olympics were simply the stage. Here, the content plugs into a globalised culture-war repertoire, portable narratives that can attach to any high-salience event.
One cluster cast the Games as infiltrated by a “satanic agenda,” with versions circulating on pro-Kremlin republisher sites and then amplified via X accounts that translate the claim into memetic outrage. A second cluster framed the Olympics as a tool for indoctrination into “liberal/globalist/LGBT ideology.” This wasn’t new: it echoed the culture-war narratives that surfaced around the 2024 Olympics, and it dovetailed with Kremlin-friendly rhetoric portraying the EU as decadent, morally corrupted, and on the verge of civilisational collapse. In practice, a single claim can bounce across ecosystems, from sites circulating pro-Kremlin adversarial narratives to a broader anglophone culture-war circuit and onward to MAGA-adjacent amplification and similar accounts. A third cluster generalised the frame further by circulating the “globalists are infiltrating the Olympics” narrative functionally across multiple channels as a template that can be reused for elections, migration, climate policy, or public health. Even one-off “outrage hooks”, like content accusing the “West” of neo-Nazi abuse of disabled athletes, fit the same manipulative logic: moral shock first, verification later.
This is the key evolution: once these frames enter a European information environment, they don’t require a single command-and-control centre. They spread because they are ideologically compatible, algorithmically rewarded, and endlessly reusable.
Milano-Cortina also reflected a wider operational trend: hostile information activity increasingly coincides with cyber pressure and disruption. Public reporting described Russian cyber activity around Olympics-related targets, including DDoS campaigns affecting Italy (and other European targets) by known actors such as NoName057 and Z-Pentest. In some instances, these attacks were accompanied by alleged hacking of CCTVs and other physical devices. Despite these specific hacker groups having a documented history of overstating their technical capabilities, hijacking attacks remain effective for intimidating their targets.
Not every narrative “causes” every outage. The point is operational. During major events, adversaries can engineer hybrid confusion: sensational claims in the foreground, disruption in the background, and spoofed “news-like” packaging in between, nudging audiences toward the same conclusion that authorities are not in control.
Milano-Cortina 2026 reinforces a core lesson: information manipulation is not just a matter of content, it’s an issue of infrastructure and incentives. These playbooks don’t spread by accident; they circulate because the ecosystem makes them easy to package, inexpensive to amplify, and often profitable to host.
That is where GDI’s work is most needed. GDI maps the risk infrastructure behind harmful narratives: where they first surface, how they jump languages and platforms, how they are packaged to appear credible, and, crucially, which ad-funded sites and accounts profit from their amplification. That evidence base helps turn transparency requirements into accountability and supports policymakers, platforms, and advertisers who want to disrupt monetisation models that sustain these operations.
The next major global event is already in view. The playbooks will travel with it. The question is whether there is a will to disrupt the incentive structure before the next opening ceremony.
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(Photo by Glen Carrie)