The Battle for Uman: How Russian Propaganda Is Targeting a Sacred Jewish Pilgrimage

In the quiet town of Uman, nestled along the banks of the Syomukha River in central Ukraine, something extraordinary happens every autumn. Tens of thousands of Hasidic Jews from across the globe pack their bags, bid farewell to their families, and undertake a journey that for many represents the spiritual anchor of their entire year. They come not for business, not for politics, but for something far more profound: to stand at the grave of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, the charismatic 18th-century mystical teacher whose final request was that his followers visit his resting place on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Rabbi Nachman, who died in 1810 at the impossibly young age of 38, understood something about human longing and the need for pilgrimage. He told his disciples that even the most righteous among them, even those who had committed terrible sins, could be redeemed by the simple act of being present with him in Uman during the Days of Awe. For over two centuries, that tradition has endured through wars, revolutions, plagues, and political upheavals. And this year, as has been true since the full-scale Russian invasion began in February 2022, the pilgrimage has taken on an even deeper resonance. These are not merely religious pilgrims traveling to a holy site; they are witnesses to a nation under siege, choosing to affirm life and tradition in a place where death has cast such a long shadow. The streets of Uman, normally a sleepy provincial town, transform into a living tapestry of prayer shawls, festive hats, and the unmistakable melodies of Hasidic niggunim. The air fills with the aroma of challah and the sound of shofars echoing off weathered walls. It is a scene of profound faith, but this year, it is also a battlefield of a different kind — a battle for hearts and minds, fought with algorithms, artificial intelligence, and the weapons of deceit.

Against this backdrop of genuine spiritual longing, the Russian propaganda machine has launched a cynical and calculated disinformation campaign, one so brazen that it prompted the Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD) of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council to issue a formal warning. According to the CCD, Russian-controlled information resources have been massively disseminating manipulative publications that paint a picture of Hasidic Jews receiving a hallowed, “privileged position” in Ukraine, supposedly elevated above the local population. The narrative is as predictable as it is malicious: wealthy, entitled foreigners receive special treatment, red-carpet welcomes, and preferential security arrangements, while ordinary Ukrainian citizens — many of whom have been displaced, wounded, or bereaved by the war — are left to fend for themselves. To make this fiction more compelling, the propagandists have deployed a modern arsenal of tools, including fake photographs generated by artificial intelligence. These fabricated images are crafted to look like authentic photojournalism, depicting scenes of Jewish pilgrims being pampered, or of Ukrainian police and soldiers deferring obsequiously to foreign visitors, reinforcing the insidious idea that Ukraine’s government cares more about pleasing international religious tourists than about protecting its own people. The CCD points out, with the weary expertise of those who have watched this playbook unfold repeatedly, that these materials follow classic templates of Russian psychological operations. They are not random or spontaneous outputs; they are deliberately engineered artifacts designed to exploit existing societal fault lines and amplify them into open ruptures.

To understand the full scope of this information attack, one must appreciate the depth of craft and malevolent intent behind it. Russian psychological operations, as developed and refined over decades — from Soviet-era “active measures” to the modern weaponization of social media — are built on a simple but devastating premise: find the divisions within a society, widen them, and let the tension do the rest. In the case of Uman, the CCD identifies the specific aims with clinical precision. The first objective is to destabilize the internal situation in Ukraine by injecting a poison of resentment into the relationship between local residents and pilgrims. The second is to artificially fuel antisemitic sentiment, a toxin that has, tragically, been present in parts of Ukrainian society historically, and which Russia has long attempted to exploit as a wedge issue. And the third is to provoke concrete conflicts — small arguments, street confrontations, or even larger disturbances — that can be filmed, clipped, and circulated to the world as “proof” that Ukraine is irreparably fractured and unworthy of Western support. This is a classic destabilization operation disguised as a news cycle. By attacking the Uman pilgrimage, the Kremlin is not merely trying to make life difficult for a few thousand tourists. It is attempting to strike at the very heart of Ukraine’s social fabric, to undermine the country’s legitimacy as a tolerant, civilized European nation, and to create a self-fulfilling prophecy of intercommunal violence that can be exploited in next week’s propaganda bulletin. The fact that this is being attempted during Rosh Hashanah — a holiday celebrating creation, renewal, and the sweetness of a new year — is not lost on those watching. The symbolism is as dark as it is deliberate.

The historical context here adds another layer of poignancy and urgency. Uman is not a random choice for the pilgrimage’s focal point. Rabbi Nachman chose it as his final resting place in part because it was a modest, unglamorous location, far from the great centers of Jewish learning like Vilna or Lublin. He wanted a place that would be accessible to the common person, a place where the barriers between the learned and the unlearned, the wealthy and the poor, would dissolve in the shared experience of prayer. The Breslov community that grew up around his grave has been a fixture of Ukrainian life for centuries, surviving pogroms, the Holocaust, and the oppression of the Soviet era, when religious practice was ruthlessly suppressed. The fact that the Soviet regime — the ideological ancestor of today’s Kremlin — systematically crushed Jewish religious life in Uman makes the current Russian campaign particularly galling. The very same state apparatus that once forbade these pilgrims from practicing their faith now pretends to care about their welfare, using them as pawns in a propaganda game. Meanwhile, modern Ukraine, in a profound historical irony, has extended genuine welcome to these pilgrims. Despite the war, despite the strain on resources, Ukrainian authorities have gone to considerable lengths to facilitate the pilgrimage. Special border crossing arrangements were made as tens of thousands of Hasidic Jews arrived, with the largest flows recorded through Poland, Romania, and Moldova — indirect routes born of wartime necessity, as direct air travel to Ukraine remains impossible during the ongoing conflict. A checkpoint regime has been established in Uman, with both foot and vehicle patrols keeping watch around the clock. The security presence is substantial: a visible, armed, and unambiguously protective force whose mission is to keep these visitors safe from the very real threats of missile strikes, drones, and Russian sabotage. This is a far cry from the “privileged treatment” narrative pushed by Moscow’s propagandists; it is, in truth, the behavior of a nation that understands the value of every life, regardless of faith or nationality.

Yet what the Kremlin’s propagandists refuse to acknowledge is the human reality unfolding in Uman during these sacred days. The pilgrims themselves are not the faceless caricatures depicted in AI-generated fakes. They are parents holding children’s hands, elderly scholars leaning on canes, young people discovering their heritage for the first time. They come carrying the names of ancestors who once lived in these very towns before the Holocaust erased entire communities. Their tears at the graveside are not merely religious ecstasy; they are grief and memory and a defiant determination to ensure that the Jewish presence in this land is not reduced to a historical footnote. And the local Ukrainian residents of Uman, the soldiers and police officers standing guard, and the ordinary citizens who have chosen to remain in a war zone — they are not the resentful locals the propaganda dreams up. They are people who understand something about persecution, displacement, and the desperate need to maintain one’s identity in the face of annihilation. In any town that has witnessed Russian aggression — the so-called “peacekeepers” who arrived with artillery, the “liberators” who leave only rubble — there is a visceral recognition of what it means to be targeted simply for who you are. When a Breslov pilgrim arrives at the cemetery gates and a Ukrainian soldier nods in greeting, sharing a moment of silent understanding about what it costs to keep faith alive in dark times, that is the reality the propaganda seeks to conceal. The sacred and the secular, the ancient and the wartime-modern, are not in conflict in Uman; they are, for these few days at least, intertwined in a fragile but genuine coexistence that is the very antithesis of the Kremlin’s divisive narrative.

In the end, the battle for Uman is not merely about a town, a pilgrimage, or even about Ukraine itself. It is about the fundamental question of whether truth can survive in an age of generative AI, algorithmically amplified outrage, and cynical geopolitical warfare. The CCD’s warning serves as a necessary call to vigilance — but it also reveals something more hopeful. The fact that Ukrainian state institutions can identify, analyze, and publicly expose these disinformation campaigns with such clarity demonstrates a resilience that the Kremlin, for all its sophisticated tools, cannot counterfeit. The propaganda narrative about “privileged Jews” is so transparently absurd to anyone who has walked the streets of wartime Uman, so at odds with the lived experience of pilgrims patting down Ukrainian soldiers’ shoulders and praying for their safety, that its very grotesqueness becomes its own rebuttal. The AI-generated photographs may fool a distant undecided commenter in some far-off country for a moment, but they cannot withstand the testimony of thousands of real pilgrims who will return home and tell their communities of the welcome they received. As the shofar sounds to close out Rosh Hashanah and the pilgrims begin their long journeys home, they carry with them a story that is not the one Moscow wants told. They carry the story of a Ukrainian town that chose life and faith over fear, of a government that spent scarce wartime resources to protect visitors, of soldiers who guarded synagogues and cemeteries with rifles and reverence alike. That story, repeated in the quiet conversations of millions of diaspora Jews in the coming months, is a form of counter-propaganda far more powerful than any official statement could be. The Russians may generate a thousand fake images, but they cannot generate a single genuine act of kindness and respect between a Ukrainian resident and a Jewish pilgrim in the shadow of war. That moment, that human bond — forged not despite the war, but in defiance of it — is the one unbendable truth that no disinformation campaign can ultimately twist into a lie.