Imagine waking up in Kraków or Lublin and seeing a short video on your phone. A face, supposedly a Ukrainian council member from Lviv, appears with a caption that says something vicious about Poles. The words are crude. The profile picture looks official. The comments beneath it are already exploding with anger. Your first reaction is betrayal—after everything Poland has done for Ukraine, this is how they speak about us? You share the video. You tell your friends. You stop thinking of Ukrainians as neighbours and start thinking of them as enemies. That is exactly what the creators of the video wanted. But the video is not real. The face is a computer-generated fake. The profile was invented. The Ukrainian official never wrote those words. This is not a clumsy hoax; it is a carefully designed information operation. In recent weeks, an information campaign aimed at poisoning Ukrainian-Polish relations was uncovered on Polish social media platforms. The campaign uses artificially created short videos, posted on TikTok, Facebook, and X, to spread the false claim that local Ukrainian council members are posting messages offensive to Poles. According to the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation, none of these posts exist on the officials’ real pages. The avatars are fabricated, the images are manipulated, and the voices, if any, are generated by algorithms. The videos are tailored for each platform: on TikTok they appear as authentic screenshots, on X as angry threads, on Facebook as shared clips. The details change, but the emotional target remains the same—to make ordinary people in Poland and Ukraine feel that the other side despises them.
Polish fact-checkers from the Demagog association were the first to draw attention to this campaign. They noticed something strange: short, emotionally charged videos were popping up across social media, all claiming to show Ukrainian municipal deputies insulting Polish people. But when the fact-checkers checked the supposed officials’ pages, they found nothing. The profiles did not exist. The quotes were invented. The avatars were fake or stolen. In some cases, the faces were entirely computer-generated, the kind of artificial images that no reverse image search can trace to a real person. It is a technique that has become cheaper and more convincing in the age of artificial intelligence. AI can now produce endless variations of a lie—new faces, new voices, new captions—without a human ever making a phone call or writing a letter. That is what makes this campaign so difficult to fight: by the time a claim is debunked, a dozen new versions have already appeared. But there was another clue. According to the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation, the videos contain linguistic calques from Russian—phrases that are translated too literally, expressions that make sense in Russian but sound awkward in Polish or Ukrainian. These language errors are like fingerprints. They reveal that the people who created the videos are not Polish or Ukrainian natives, but probably Russian speakers. The Center also noted that the use of AI for manipulation, combined with these Russian linguistic traces, may indicate the involvement of Russian information agencies. The Kremlin has long understood that pandemics of distrust are easier to spread than vaccines of truth—and this campaign is exactly that: a virus designed to infect the relationship between two nations that have never been closer.
To understand why these fake videos can be so dangerous, one must understand the history beneath them. For decades, Polish-Ukrainian relations have been haunted by memory. The names Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych evoke powerful and opposite emotions. In Ukraine, many people see them as heroes—fighters for independence who resisted Soviet oppression and dreamed of a free Ukrainian state. For them, honoring these figures is an act of national pride, not a declaration of war against Poland. But in Poland, the same names are remembered in the shadow of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army’s wartime atrocities, especially the Volhynia massacre of the 1940s, when tens of thousands of Polish civilians were killed. It is a raw, open wound that has never fully healed. Polish families carry memories of grandparents who were driven from their homes or who escaped death by hiding in forests. For them, seeing Bandera and Shukhevych honored in official Ukrainian institutions is not a matter of abstract history; it feels like an insult to the dead. The result is a tragic asymmetry: what looks like liberation to one side looks like terror to the other. And this is precisely the gap that disinformation exploits. A fake video showing a Ukrainian official insulting Poles does not need to be true. It only needs to feel true. It lands on prepared ground. It does not invent the pain; it simply lights a match near gasoline. That is why an AI-generated lie, no matter how crude, can have real consequences—because it taps into sorrows that are already alive.
The political reactions in recent weeks have shown just how explosive these tensions can be. On August 24, Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Marcin Bosacki issued a warning: honoring Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych at the National Pantheon could complicate Ukraine’s European integration. He said this could worsen Kyiv’s relations not only with Warsaw, but with Europe as a whole. His tone was diplomatic, but his message was sharp—symbols have foreign policy consequences. Then came a more theatrical gesture. Marcin Sipniewski, a Polish Member of the European Parliament from the Confederation party, tore up portraits of Bandera and Shukhevych during a speech in the European Parliament. He did it in front of cameras, knowing full well that the images would spread like fire across the internet. He also called for an end to financial support for Ukraine. This was not a statement; it was a provocation, designed to enrage and divide. And then Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk weighed in. Tusk is not a fringe figure. He is one of Europe’s most experienced politicians and has generally supported Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression. Yet he said that the Lviv Regional Council’s decision to declare 2027 the Year of Roman Shukhevych, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, and Oleg Olzhych was harmful to Ukraine itself. It could be used, he warned, as an argument by opponents of Kyiv’s accession to the European Union. Tusk’s words were less dramatic than Sipniewski’s, but in some ways more damaging. When an enemy shouts, it is easy to dismiss. When a friend says “this is hurting you,” it cuts deeper.
The broader picture is troubling. Ukraine is fighting for its existence, and Poland has been one of its most important allies. Poland opened its borders to millions of refugees. It sent weapons. It offered medical care, school seats, and jobs. Polish volunteers packed supplies at train stations in the first days of the war. Polish cities renamed streets and lit their buildings in the colors of the Ukrainian flag. That solidarity is not just a matter of politics; it is a living connection between families and friends. It is also a strategic asset for the West. And that is exactly why there are powerful forces that want to destroy it. Russian information agencies have every reason to drive a wedge between Warsaw and Kyiv. If Poles begin to believe that Ukrainians despise them, they may pressure their government to stop providing aid. If Ukrainians believe that Poles are waiting for an excuse to abandon them, they may lose trust in their most reliable western neighbor. In both cases, the beneficiary is the same: the aggressor who wants a divided Europe, a weakened Ukraine, and a NATO alliance full of suspicion. The old strategy of divide and rule has not gone away. It has simply been modernized. AI makes it cheaper, faster, and harder to trace. But it still depends on ordinary people passing along lies. A deceptive video is a match. The fire only spreads when someone shares it, comments on it, or allows it to confirm their worst fears about another nation.
In the end, what matters is not just politics or algorithms, but the relationships between actual people. A Polish mother who took in a Ukrainian child. A Ukrainian soldier who exchanged messages with a Polish volunteer before a battle. A nurse in Warsaw and a teacher in Lviv who became friends through years of cooperation. None of these bonds can be destroyed by a single fake video, but they can be slowly eroded if lies are allowed to accumulate without resistance. That is why the exposure of this campaign is so important. Fact-checkers, vigilant citizens, honest politicians, and responsible platforms are the antidote to manufactured hatred. There will always be historical traumas between neighbors. Remembering them is not wrong. Pretending they do not exist is not the way forward. The tragedy would be to let someone else use those memories as weapons—to let a foreign hand turn grief into rage, and rage into war. The answer is not to forget Bandera or Volhynia, but to face them honestly, with courage and compassion. And the answer to fake videos is not to close your heart, but to open your eyes. When you see a post designed to make you angry, pause. Ask who made it, and why. Ask whether the face in the video belongs to a real person. Ask whether the words are real or simply a translation from Russian. The true enemy is not a Ukrainian council member or a Polish nationalist. It is the anonymous manipulator who profits from your fury. Poland and Ukraine deserve better. Their people—so alike in their stubborn love of freedom, their painful histories, and their hope for a European future—have far more in common than any foreign actor wants them to believe. That is the truth no algorithm can fake.