It begins with an image that feels almost cinematic: a group of Ukrainian servicewomen, members of a mobile air-defense unit nicknamed the “Fighting Witches,” standing in a snowy training field in Kyiv Oblast, rifles raised, eyes steady. They are not a propaganda symbol or a politician’s talking point. They are real women who chose to serve, who learned to operate weapons and drones, who defend their country not because the law compels them but because the invasion has made silence impossible. This is the human truth that gets lost when Russian disinformation turns women into pawns of a digital war. In recent months, a new wave of false stories has swept through Telegram channels and social media platforms, claiming that Ukraine is secretly drafting women, luring them with recruitment posters, or forcing them to choose between household chores and combat drones. These stories are carefully engineered to stoke fear, exploit cultural anxieties, and undermine trust in Ukraine’s military leadership. But they are built on lies. Behind every fabricated image and invented notice, there are millions of real Ukrainian women—doctors, teachers, engineers, mothers, and widows—who are not being dragged into service, who have not lost their right to choose, and who deserve more than to be reduced to a tool of foreign manipulation. To understand what is happening, one must look past the viral noise and examine the facts, the human motives, and the quiet resilience of a society that has learned to recognize falsehoods even as they multiply around it.
The latest disinformation campaign is particularly insidious because it uses artificial intelligence to create images that look almost real, at least to a hurried eye. In mid-September, a Telegram channel in Odesa shared what appeared to be a public service announcement featuring smiling women in military uniforms, accompanied by a caption that compared doing laundry to operating a first-person-view drone: “You figured out the washing machine — you’ll figure out FPVs too.” The same image, with slightly different framing, suddenly appeared in other channels claiming it had been spotted in Lutsk, a city hundreds of kilometers away. It was a classic disinformation move—spread one piece of fake content, attach different local labels, and let the audience believe it is happening everywhere. When analysts at LetsData, a company that monitors disinformation, examined the banners, they concluded that no such posters had ever existed. An AI verification tool confirmed what careful observers suspected: the images were entirely machine-generated. A week later, the Russian state television presenter Olesya Loseva posted another fabricated image, this time claiming it was a poster in a Kyiv shopping center. It showed a young woman leaning over a baby and a gun, with a caption in Ukrainian reading: “A real Ukrainian woman can do these things in 40 seconds!” The image was crude in its manipulation, designed to portray Ukrainian women as cold, violent, and unnatural. When independent fact-checkers ran it through a platform that detects synthetic media, the verdict was overwhelming—99.9 percent confidence that it was generated by artificial intelligence. Yet the damage had already been done. Thousands of people saw the image, shared it, commented on it. Some became angry, some frightened, some confused. The truth, as always, travels more slowly than the lie.
This is not an accident or a one-off mistake. Russian disinformation operations have long recognized that online fear is a weapon, and the use of AI has supercharged their ability to manufacture convincing falsehoods at scale. According to a report from the European Center of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, Russia-linked actors are increasingly using AI not to invent entirely new tactics but to amplify existing ones: generating inauthentic content more quickly, spreading it across broader networks, and deepening the polarization that already exists in societies exhausted by war. By the time fact-checkers debunk one fake image, another has already appeared elsewhere. By the time soldiers and civilians realize that women are not being forcibly conscripted, a fresh rumor begins circulating in another language, another city, another platform. The campaign is also deliberately recurring, as Roman Osadchuk, director of threat intelligence at LetsData, noted: it “comes and goes,” re-emerging with new tools and new details whenever the political climate shifts. It appeared in 2023, it appeared again in 2024, and it will almost certainly appear again in the future. The specifics change—the photographs become more realistic, the messages become more localized, the voices promoting them become more polished—but the underlying goal remains constant: to drive a wedge between Ukrainian citizens and their military, to make women fear their own government, and to convince the outside world that Ukraine’s war effort depends on coercion rather than conviction. This is a lie that cheapens the sacrifice of every genuine volunteer, every woman who has chosen to stand on the front lines, and every family that has sent a loved one off to war with pride and terror in equal measure.
What is the reality behind these terrifying rumors? Plainly and firmly: Ukraine has not instituted a mandatory draft for women. Since the full-scale invasion began in 2022, Ukraine has mobilized hundreds of thousands of military-age men to meet the demands of a brutal, grinding frontline. That mobilization has been difficult, controversial, and painful for many families, and it has been the subject of endless Russian propaganda. But women have not been included in that draft, and the government has repeatedly said that no such measure is being prepared. In August, the Center for Countering Disinformation, an official body within Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, issued a blunt statement: “There are no decisions to mobilize women in Ukraine.” The parliamentary committee responsible for national security, defense, and intelligence went further, confirming that there are no draft laws, no legislative initiatives, and no internal discussions about introducing such mobilization. None. This does not mean that women are absent from Ukraine’s military. In fact, the opposite is true. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian women have volunteered to serve—approximately 76,000 are currently part of the Armed Forces, and more than 57,000 of them serve in military roles, not just in support or medical positions but as combat medics, drone operators, artillery guides, snipers, and commanders. Many have been decorated for bravery. Many have died. They are not victims of a hidden conspiracy; they are citizens who made an informed choice, often after enormous personal sacrifice. The only way a woman can receive a summons in Ukraine is if she is already in the military register—a register that is mandatory only for women with medical or pharmaceutical education, and even then, being registered does not mean being mobilized. It simply means she may be asked to update her personal data or undergo a medical examination. That is the law. That is the reality. Everything else is smoke.
Why, then, did these rumors gain such traction in late summer and early autumn of 2024? The answer lies in a handful of ill-considered statements by public figures—statements that Russian propaganda seized upon and twisted into evidence of an impending female draft. In August, the former Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov suggested in an interview that requiring women to serve would “immediately double the mobilization pool.” His comment was speculative, personal, and not tied to any official plan, but it was gold for Russian propagandists. Then came Keith Kellogg, the former U.S. Special Envoy for Ukraine, who told an interviewer that he believed women should be mobilized to help solve Ukraine’s manpower problem, adding that women “fight no worse than men.” Kellogg is an American, not a Ukrainian lawmaker, and his remarks had no binding force, but they were repeated endlessly on pro-Kremlin Telegram channels as proof that Kyiv was preparing to send women to the slaughter. Ukrainian officials were forced to respond, and they did so with unusual clarity. The parliament issued a statement emphasizing that these comments “do not reflect the actual legislative work.” In other words, a former defense minister’s personal opinion and a foreign envoy’s suggestion were not policy documents. They were not draft laws. They were not decrees. They were the words of individuals who were not in a position to decide anything. But in an environment saturated with anxiety and war-weariness, even a careless phrase can ignite a fire. Russian propagandists simply threw fuel on it, creating fake images of women receiving summons papers, inventing posters that had never existed, and spreading the message across dozens of channels in both Ukrainian and Russian until it felt like a movement rather than a mirage.
In the end, the story of the “female mobilization” is not really about women, or even about mobilization. It is about the battle for perception that rages alongside the battle for territory. Russia has lost the military argument on the ground in many ways, so it fights in the digital space, where lies can be created cheaply and spread instantly. The weaponization of AI generation is a new chapter in an old war—a war of narratives, of half-truths, of fake images and stolen identities. But there is also a counter-narrative, one that is harder to forge: the testimony of actual Ukrainian women who chose to serve, who held weapons not because they were forced but because they believed in something greater than themselves. The “Fighting Witches” firing their rifles on that cold November morning are not AI simulations. They are real, with real stories, real fears, real families. They do not need to be defended by politicians who treat them as a “mobilization pool.” They need to be respected as autonomous human beings making heroic choices in impossible circumstances. And citizens who encounter these disinformation campaigns need to remember that a viral image is not proof, a sensational headline is not a fact, and a lie repeated a thousand times is still a lie. The best answer to artificial propaganda is a stubborn, humane commitment to truth—and the knowledge that Ukraine’s women, like Ukraine itself, will not be defined by the falsehoods of their enemies. They will be defined by what they have actually done, what they have endured, and what they have chosen to become. That may not fit neatly into a 40-second poster or a Telegram post, but it is the truth that matters.