French prosecutors have effectively confirmed one of the biggest concerns facing the Olympics with the arrest of a Russian accused of plotting to destabilise the Games.
The detention of the unnamed 40-year-old man came on the eve of the first events of the Summer Games returning to the French capital after a century.
No specific details of the indictment were announced by prosecutors apart from fears of an alleged intention to “organise events likely to cause destabilisation” during the Games.
Russia is banned from competing in Paris as a national team over the full-scale invasion of Ukraine – extending the country’s pariah status in the Olympics.
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Russia was previously banned from three editions of Summer or Winter Games over a far-reaching state-sponsored doping scheme.
Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Centre last month warned that Russia was “ramping up malign disinformation campaigns” against Paris 2024 by exploiting artificial intelligence to denigrate the reputation of Olympic organisers and create the expectation of violence at the Games.
They highlighted a fake film called Olympics Has Fallen featuring Tom Cruise’s AI voice generator, mimicking the actual Olympus Has Fallen blockbuster from 2013.
Russians were also blamed by Microsoft experts with fabricating threats against Israelis attending the Paris Olympics linked to the ongoing war with Hamas in Gaza to spread public fear.
Calling Russia out publicly for attempting to sow unrest reinforces concerns of governments and even sports organisers.
Just hours before news of the indictment in France emerged, the boss of the Olympics had been asked by Sky News about concerns in Paris over Russia’s malign motivations to undermine confidence in the Games.
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“There are clearly fake threats and we are living this for months now,” IOC President Thomas Bach said. “That is a very deplorable situation.”
While Mr Bach said the International Olympic Committee “remain vigilant”, there are growing challenges assessing the validity and credibility of malign activities.
“It’s about threats, it’s about defamation, it’s about trying to create insecurity among participants, potential spectators,” he said.
“But so far we have to say that these different attempts were not really successful.
“The people have realised what is going on there – for political propaganda purposes.”
It was suggested Russia responded to the doping punishment by attempting to sabotage the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea with cyber attacks.
British and American authorities blamed Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU, with infecting devices with malware and deploying data-deletion software that even prevented opening ceremony tickets being printed.
There were further hacking attempts on Tokyo 2020 preparations by the GRU – allegations widely denied by Russia.
Moscow’s aim is to fan fears around Paris 2024 where the only Russians competing are as neutrals if they are not linked to the war in Ukraine or military machine.
The IOC has said it is a “huge target” for cyber attacks while insisting they have a “huge amount of safeguards in place” after going through an unwitting rehearsal last week with Paris IT systems impacted by the CrowdStrike outage.
