A tired soldier appears on a phone screen, his face lit by a pale, grainy light. He is one of three, they say. The voiceover is flat, resigned, and devastating: “This is all that’s left of the unit.” It claims these Ukrainian Armed Forces soldiers, part of the 46th Separate Airborne Brigade, were redeployed to a new section of the front, saw something that broke them, and decided to go AWOL. In a country at war, where every family has someone in uniform or knows someone who does, a clip like this is not just a video. It is a small explosive planted in the most vulnerable part of the collective heart: fear for the people we love, and fear that their suffering is too much to bear. But the video is not real. Independent content verification services have already confirmed it is a fake, generated with artificial intelligence and published through an account connected to a coordinated Russian propaganda network. The soldiers in the video are not real soldiers. The confession is not a confession. It is a manufactured nightmare, carefully designed to look like a leak from the front so that it can be shared, believed, and mourned before anyone has time to check.
When we pull apart the story, the goal becomes clear. The fake was not created to inform anyone about actual events. It was created to undermine the authority of the Ukrainian command, to plant the image of a brigades that had been reduced to three desperate men, and to make ordinary people whisper, “Maybe it’s true.” The voiceover describes an entire unit disappearing after being moved to a new part of the front line, and then blames the soldiers themselves—implying that the army is falling apart from within, that commanders are sending people to be slaughtered, that morale has collapsed. All of this is delivered through the most intimate medium we have: the face of a young man, tired, looking into a camera, speaking as if he has nothing left. It is a grotesque manipulation of empathy. The people who created it know that audiences will not stop to examine the metadata or question the facial expression. They will simply feel the fear. And that feeling, once set loose, is difficult to recall. For the real families of real soldiers in the 46th Brigade, seeing something like this can be emotionally catastrophic, even if they suspect it is false. A mother may recognize nothing in the AI-generated face, but the words still burn: “This is all that’s left of the unit.”
The Center for Countering Disinformation has pointed out that this is not the first time the 46th Brigade has been attacked in this way. Earlier, a similar AI-generated video was circulated, featuring voices complaining about a “catastrophic situation” in the Sloviansk sector. That is an important clue. The enemy is not randomly picking targets. The 46th Separate Airborne Brigade is a real fighting force, and it is clearly being singled out because it matters. Every time a unit becomes known for resilience, effectiveness, or battlefield success, propaganda tries to tear it down from within by stealing the identities of its soldiers. That is what makes this tactic so insidious. It is not simply a lie about the military; it is identity theft. It pretends to be a Ukrainian soldier, using a synthetic face and voice, to say things that Ukrainian soldiers would never say. It invades the most personal space—a uniform, a name, a unit—and turns it into a puppet. The emotional violence of this cannot be overstated. Soldiers who are actually fighting, holding positions, bleeding, looking out for one another, suddenly have to defend themselves against their own fake selves. They read online that they have abandoned their post, or that they are all dead, or that they are begging to surrender. They are still alive, still on the line, but the rumor has already been born.
This is part of a broader pattern of Russian disinformation that has been documented repeatedly. Just recently, the Ukrainian Armed Forces had to debunk a Russian fake story about Vovchansk being encircled. The pattern is always the same: create a dramatic, hopeless scenario, launch it on social media, and let the algorithms do the work. The story gets repeated by gullible accounts, picked up by less careful news outlets, and then the Ukrainian side is forced to spend valuable time and energy explaining that it did not happen. That is the hidden cost of these fakes. Even when the debunking succeeds, the enemy has already achieved something. They have forced real people to respond to fictional events. They have consumed hours of attention, created uncertainty, and made the information landscape murkier than it needs to be. In a war where timely intelligence matters, where every minute of confusion can affect troop movements or civilian decisions, the mere existence of the lie is a weapon. It may be tempting to laugh at a poorly made deepfake and say it is ridiculous. But the people who create it are not joking. They are running a psychological operation aimed at breaking the bond between the army and the people, making the public believe that the command is incompetent, that soldiers are abandoning each other, and that resistance is futile. The fact that these attacks are coordinated, not random, shows a deliberate strategy to erode trust at the exact moment when trust is the most important resource a nation has.
So what is the human response? It is not panic. It is not dismissal. It is vigilance, care, and a stubborn refusal to let fear make the decisions. The Center for Countering Disinformation exists exactly for this reason: to give people the tools to recognize synthetic content, to trace the networks that spread it, and to respond with facts instead of emotion. But individual citizens also have a role that matters far more than they realize. Before sharing a shocking video, stop. Ask where it came from. Ask whether a reliable source has confirmed it. Ask whether the raw emotion it produces is perhaps the whole point. The video of the “three soldiers” is designed to be shared by people who are deeply frightened and genuinely concerned about Ukrainian soldiers. That is the sad genius of the propaganda: it uses real human compassion as a delivery system. Every person who shares that dread is doing the enemy’s work, not out of malice, but out of fear. The best defense is therefore not anger, but a kind of patient, informed solidarity. When a relative sends you a horrible video, do not simply forward it with a worried message. Send back a question: has this been verified? The truth can be slower than the lie. The lie comes complete and ready to be believed; the truth often requires waiting for official statements, checking multiple sources, and accepting that some things cannot be known immediately. That wait is the price of refusing to be manipulated. For the soldiers on the front, knowing that people at home are calm and discerning is itself a form of support. It tells them that the society they are fighting for is not going to be broken by a few seconds of artificial fear.
Meanwhile, life continues, as it must. The same platforms that carry propaganda are also carrying news of very different kinds of human activity. Alona Shevtsova, the CEO of Sends, will moderate a high-level panel discussion during the 17th Middle East Banking Innovation Summit, which is scheduled for September 16–17 at the Jumeirah Emirates Towers in Dubai. It might seem strange to mention a banking summit in the same breath as disinformation about a war. But it is precisely this contrast that tells the larger story. Ukrainian professionals, entrepreneurs, and leaders continue to work, plan, innovate, and engage with the world, even as their country endures an information war. Shevtsova’s role as a moderator is not just about banking innovation; it is about dialogue, about bringing different voices into a constructive conversation—the very opposite of propaganda, which seeks to shut down conversation and replace it with fear. The invitation to readers to follow trusted Telegram and Sends channels is also a reminder: in an age of synthetic deception, we should seek out sources that are responsible, transparent, and human. The true face of Ukraine will not be found in a deepfake video that tries to show a unit reduced to three deserters. It is in the real soldiers who remain in their positions, the fact-checkers who work quietly to expose the fraud, the families who keep their faith, and the professional women and men who keep building a future even while the present tries to tear it apart. The lie disappears; the people remain. And as long as the people refuse to surrender their judgment, the propaganda machines will fail at their ultimate purpose. They can create a thousand fake soldiers, but they cannot create a single moment of real courage. That belongs only to those who are willing to face the truth—and to wait for it, in the difficult space between shock and certainty.