Foreign countries are flooding social media with AI-manipulated videos to undermine western support for Ukraine, Yvette Cooper will warn on Tuesday.
The UK foreign secretary will urge other countries to help Britain fight what she calls “information warfare”, as officials warn Russia is using forged documents and deepfake material to advance its geopolitical goals.
The Foreign Office has previously warned that Russian agencies are operating a vast disinformation network known as Doppelgänger, which has spread false rumours about subjects including the health of the Princess of Wales and western financing of Israel.
Cooper will say: “Across Europe we are witnessing an escalation in hybrid threats – from physical through to cyber – designed to weaken critical national infrastructure, undermine our interests and interfere in our democracies all for the advantage of malign foreign states.”
The speech – which will mark 100 years of the Locarno treaties, signed after the first world war between the UK, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Poland and Czechoslovakia – comes at one of the most sensitive moments in the Ukraine war.
With Donald Trump making a renewed push for a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, both sides are battling to shape Washington’s thinking.
US and Ukrainian officials have spent the past few days locked in talks without an apparent breakthrough, prompting Trump to accuse the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, of not having read the proposals on the table.
Zelenskyy spent Monday in Downing Street, where Keir Starmer convened talks that also involved the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz. Cooper spent Monday in Washington, where she met the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio.
In remarks apparently aimed in Moscow’s direction, Cooper will say: “A hundred years ago, such malign actors or state-sponsored disrupters may have relied on expertly forged documents or carefully planted stories to manipulate public opinion, but today’s technology is lowering the barrier to entry – meaning more actors, with less skill, can work on behalf of regimes abroad.
“They can interfere with free and fair elections, so that western interests are weakened and lose allies on the global stage. By flooding social media with generative AI and manipulated videos, they can gradually undermine support for our major allies like Ukraine with lies – hitting our collective resolve to support Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s illegal invasion.”
She will say disinformation is being used not only to undermine Ukraine directly but also to exacerbate social divisions on issues such as gender and migration.
“This isn’t about legitimate debate on contentious issues. Plenty of people in the UK have strong views on migration, gender and climate. But they are our debates to have – not those for foreign states to use as their playground, trying to sow division to advance their own interests.”
Officials point to disinformation campaigns around the world, which they say were carried out by hostile states.
They include the creation of fake websites during the Moldovan elections in September that looked as if they belonged to the PAS party and contained fabricated policies such as raising the retirement age and increasing the length of military service.
