Donald Trump and his top advisers have spent the past four months under near constant scrutiny: Two congressional committees, the FBI and CIA—not to mention the entire news media—have launched separate investigations into the role Russia played in orchestrating his victory. Washington rarely sees such intense intrigue surrounding a sitting president in his first 100 days, a time traditionally devoted to policy initiatives, not police interrogations. But focusing on the election obscures the true extent of Russia’s influence: Today, months after Hillary Clinton’s emails were hacked, the Kremlin continues to deploy a host of digital tools to sow doubt and discord in the United States on an almost daily basis.

For years, the Russian propaganda machine—a loose network of hackers and state media outlets, Twitter bots and bloggers—has pumped out a steady stream of digital disinformation aimed at drumming up support at home and destabilizing enemies abroad. But since Trump’s election, experts report, the Kremlin has doubled down on its dissemination of fake news. Sometimes the stories are completely made up. More often they are simply misleading or biased, tidbits of real reporting repackaged to serve Russian goals.

One of the most recent battles in the propaganda war took place on January 4, less than a week after President Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats in retaliation for the Kremlin’s meddling in the U.S. election. The Donbass International News Agency, a small wire service in Eastern Ukraine, published a short article online headlined “MASSIVE NATO DEPLOYMENT UNDERWAY.” Some 2,000 American tanks were assembling on the Russian border, the agency reported. The United States was preparing to invade.

The story was a blatant fabrication. A brigade in the 4th Infantry Division had, in fact, been deployed from Germany to Poland. But the brigade, which is comprised of only 87 tanks, was on a routine tour. Even so, this nugget of fake news quickly went viral. It was shared 28,000 times on Facebook, and spawned posts on Kremlin-friendly blogs and web sites like therussophile.org, friendsofsyria.wordpress.com, and the Centre for Research on Globalization—a site that peddles conspiracy theories ranging from Hillary Clinton’s secret pedophilia cabal to the Defense Department’s poisonous aerosol program. Within days, the story made the leap from the shadowy recesses of the internet to the mainstream. One of the Kremlin’s official wire services cited the story, noting that the United States seemed to be preparing for “another cowboy-style geopolitical adventure.”

“This is a classic disinformation piece, trying to demonize the United States and NATO deployments with distorted figures,” says Ben Nimmo, a fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab run by the Atlantic Council. “It shows that there’s really a globalized market for fake stories. They don’t have to be credible or local—they just have to have the right tone.”