Russia clones Euromaidan Press site

TLDR

• Euromaidan Press says a copycat site carried a fake report blaming Ukraine for the 8 October Kramatorsk strike.¹
• Gnida Project flagged the campaign as Storm-1516 on 25 October, and NewsGuard attributes it to the same operation.¹²
• The outlet says the clone is now down; the attribution was not independently reviewed here.¹

Euromaidan Press, a Ukrainian news outlet, reported on 29 October that a look-alike site with a hyphen added to its name published a fabricated article claiming a Ukrainian drone killed civilians in Kramatorsk.¹ The real site is euromaidanpress.com, and the clone used euromaidan-press.com, according to Gnida Project, which posted the comparison on 25 October.¹² The fake cited unnamed "Ukrainian OSINT channels" and came with a video bearing a version of the outlet's logo that Euromaidan Press says was apparently made with AI.¹

Why it matters: the fake borrows the credibility of open-source investigation without naming a single channel or linking any evidence. The outlet's own checks were simple provenance ones: the spelling of the domain, its registration date, and whether the claim names a first source.¹

Driving the news:

• Euromaidan Press says the clone domain was registered on 15 October, per who.is data, and the fake appeared on 23 October. It began circulating on X on 24 October.¹
• The outlet says videos on the amplifying X accounts averaged 400,000 to 500,000 views, far more than the accounts' size would suggest. It calls this a likely sign of inauthentic amplification, which is its inference.¹
• The clone copied the outlet's real articles and placed the fabricated one among them, the outlet says.¹
• The outlet says it filed copyright and abuse complaints with the host, Namecheap, and a phishing report with Cloudflare, and pressed the registrar. It then published a four-step takedown procedure: block the scraper, send host notices, report to Google Safe Browsing, and escalate to the registrar.¹
• The strike itself: Euromaidan Press says a Russian aerial bomb hit two public buses in Kramatorsk on 8 October, killing 33 and wounding about 18.¹ Kramatorsk police told Suspilne Donbas on 26 October that 30 people died and 20 were injured, that some of the dead were still unidentified, and that the strike is being investigated as a war crime.⁴ The two death tolls differ.

The big picture: Euromaidan Press says NewsGuard counts about 906 fabricated reports impersonating 163 outlets in 21 countries since 2023, and describes Storm-1516 as one of several overlapping Russian operations alongside Doppelganger and Matryoshka.¹ An earlier case fits the same pattern. Propastop reported in August that a fake copy of The Defense Post, at thedefensepost.eu instead of thedefensepost.com, was registered three days before a false claim about damaged jets at Estonia's Ämari air base.³ Propastop says the fake's source code still held the original article, its author and the original site's Google Analytics ID, and that a September DFRLab study linked the case to Storm-1516, which it describes as publicly attributed to Russian military intelligence.³

The other side: the Storm-1516 attribution comes from Gnida Project, an anonymous monitoring project, and from NewsGuard as relayed by the outlet.¹² Euromaidan Press is both the impersonated party and the main source for the takedown and the view counts. No official Russian statement appears in the coverage reviewed, and the NewsGuard debunk itself could not be found at the time of writing.

Single-source note: the clone's registration date, the view counts, the NewsGuard attribution and the takedown all rest on Euromaidan Press's account of its own case. Gnida Project's post independently shows the fake domain and the attribution. The Kramatorsk casualty figures come from two sources that disagree. The clone is reported down, so it could not be checked here.