BRUSSELS — DII-Global Europe today published Before the Oval Office, a media intelligence briefing examining what the American information space said about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the week before his 28 July meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House.
The study analysed 7,709 English-language records collected between 20 and 27 July 2026 across the open web, X, Telegram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and VK — 28.1 million views and 1.52 million interactions in total.
Its central finding concerns the composition of the freely accessible web. Of the 1,049 web articles about Zelensky reaching US audiences in the capture, 844 (80.5%) originated in Kremlin-aligned infrastructure or in a syndication ring republishing RT copy under American local-newspaper mastheads. Only 116 articles (11.1%) came from American newsrooms of any political orientation — a ratio of more than seven to one.
Two structures account for the imbalance. The first is the Pravda network, also known to researchers as Portal Kombat: 688 articles from just four subdomains — usa.news-pravda.com, trump.news-pravda.com, nato.news-pravda.com and canada.news-pravda.com — content farms built to saturate search indexes and machine retrieval rather than to attract human readers.
The second is less documented and, the briefing argues, more deceptive: 118 articles across 27 domains dressed as American city newspapers — Sacramento Sun, Milwaukee Sun, Nashville Herald, Knoxville Times, Austin Globe, Pittsburgh Star, Los Angeles Herald and others. This tier is the most negative in the entire dataset at 92.4%, and it produces no original journalism: 91 of its 118 items use the Russified form "Vladimir Zelensky," and identical RT ledes appear verbatim across as many as ten look-alike mastheads within hours.
"These domains are not opinion sites and they are not badly-run local papers. They are one wire in twenty-seven American disguises. Any reader, any search engine and any AI system that treats them as local US journalism is being deceived by design — and they are trivially detectable, because the same sentence appears on ten mastheads in the same afternoon." Vitaliy Syzov, Chair, DII-Global Europe
Other findings
- Tone hardened every day into the meeting. Across scored records, 74.3% were negative against 4.4% positive, rising from 65.8% on 20 July to 79.0% on 27 July.
- The visit itself was barely the story. Only 7.8% of the conversation mentioned Washington, the White House or the Oval Office — yet that small share carried 550,227 interactions, the highest engagement intensity in the dataset. The briefing describes this as a narrative vacuum: there is no incumbent storyline for the meeting's outcome to displace.
- Commentary shifted from solidarity to conditionality. The week's most consequential reporting for Kyiv concerned Anglo-American backchannel pressure to maintain Ukraine's anti-corruption drive after the dismissal of Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov. Legitimacy framing ran at 93% negative, corruption framing at 91%.
- The MAGA realignment is measurable. The repositioning of parts of the American right on Ukraine — crystallised by influencer Laura Loomer's visit to Kyiv and interview with Zelensky — accounted for 837 records and 209,654 interactions, and produced the single most-engaged item in the corpus.
- American audiences frame the coming meeting through the last one. References to the February 2025 Oval Office confrontation were the most uniformly hostile theme measured, at 90.4% negative.
- Coordination is measurable. 49 clusters of five or more identical posts were identified. Most did not dispute facts; they arrived carrying facts with pre-fitted conclusions — isolation, entanglement, personal corruption.
An important caveat
The briefing states prominently that paywalled American titles — the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, the Financial Times, Politico and Axios — are structurally absent from crawl-based collection, and that their absence reflects access, not editorial neglect.
"The correct conclusion is not that American journalism failed," Syzov said. "It is that in the freely crawlable layer of the internet — the layer search engines and AI systems actually learn from — hostile infrastructure out-publishes American journalism about Ukraine's president by a factor of seven. That is an information-security problem, not a media-criticism problem."
Recommendations
The briefing sets out six recommendations for European and transatlantic decision-makers, including: never computing "US media sentiment" from unverified open-web data; classifying hostility by its target rather than its tone; treating licensed access to authoritative news feeds as information-security infrastructure; and publishing an exclusion list of the local-paper front domains identified in the study. All 27 domains are named in the annex to the briefing.
Available today
Media contact
DII-Global Europe (VZW / ASBL) · Brussels · Enterprise No. 1000 847 483
Email office@diiglobal.eu · or use the contact form on our homepage.
Interviews with Vitaliy Syzov available in English, Ukrainian and Russian.
About DII-Global Europe
DII-Global Europe (VZW/ASBL) is a Brussels-based non-profit and the European continuation of the Donetsk Institute of Information, which has operated since 2009. Through its Transatlantic Truth Lab it monitors foreign information manipulation targeting Ukraine, the EU and the transatlantic relationship, publishes sourced research and rebuttals, and convenes policymakers and journalists around verified facts.