A Baltic hoax with an African address
Why was the lie written in French?
A disinformation narrative built for a European political crisis has been deliberately repackaged for audiences much farther south. According to the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), pro-Kremlin sources spent this spring pushing a fabricated claim that Latvia, Estonia and other Baltic states had opened their airspace to allow Ukraine strike Russian targets — and the story did not stay in Europe.
The fabrication was anchored in two real but minor events: Ukrainian drones bound for Russia crashed in Latvia and Estonia on 25 March, and more crashed in Latvia on 7 May. Pro-Russian outlets then inflated the May incident into an invented atrocity, falsely claiming the drones had hit a passenger train and a residential building and killed five people. None of that happened, though the genuine incident was serious enough to cost Latvia its defence minister and prime minister.
The African relevance is in the distribution. DFRLab found the hostile, anti-Ukraine and anti-NATO content was produced disproportionately not in Russian but in Spanish, Portuguese and French — languages chosen to travel beyond Europe. The French-language material targeted francophone audiences in Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire and Algeria. Some of it, including content carried by Cameroonian outlets, was later echoed by Chinese state media — a laundering pattern DFRLab reads as Russian and Chinese actors cooperating to scrub Russian fingerprints from messaging aimed at BRICS states and the wider Global South.