The digital battlefield has become as critical as the physical one in the war in Ukraine, with disinformation serving as a constant and powerful weapon since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022. According to ongoing monitoring by the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO), this campaign of deception, alongside narratives about migration, has consistently topped the list of disinformation trends targeting the European Union. This isn’t a haphazard series of isolated hoaxes; it is a systematic, multi-layered effort to shape perceptions, sow discord, and undermine support for Ukraine. The core narratives are persistent and carefully crafted to tap into existing societal fractures and historical grievances. They paint a picture of a Ukrainian government and military riddled with corruption and extremist ideology, often resurrecting the false and pernicious trope of a pro-Nazi regime in Kyiv. Simultaneously, they work to demonize Ukrainian refugees, portraying them as violent, ungrateful, or parasitic, and fueling resentment by claiming they receive preferential treatment over the citizens of host countries. The leadership under President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a prime target, depicted as drug-addled and self-serving, while the war itself is framed not as an unprovoked act of aggression, but as a conflict entirely provoked by an expansionist NATO and a warmongering West desperate for escalation. This is the foundational layer of the information war, designed to confuse, demoralize, and fracture the unity of the international coalition.
Within this broader informational assault, war propaganda and disinformation form a particularly potent and ancient strand. Its function is brutally simple: to boost the morale of one’s own side while simultaneously undermining the will and confidence of the enemy. This is not a novel phenomenon; every conflict in history has seen its share of heroic tales and tales of enemy atrocities, both real and invented. Both sides in the Russia-Ukraine war engage in this practice to some degree, but the scale, coordination, and technological sophistication on the Russian side are what set it apart. The goal is to feed a domestic audience a narrative of inevitable victory and justified action, while also attempting to convince Ukrainian soldiers that their cause is lost, their leadership is incompetent, and their sacrifices are in vain. This psychological warfare has been a constant companion to the kinetic warfare on the ground, with the ebb and flow of the front lines often mirrored by the surge and retreat of specific disinformation themes.
What has fundamentally changed the landscape of this conflict in the last two years, however, is the proliferation of Artificial Intelligence as a tool for creating compelling visual propaganda. This marks a significant technological escalation in the information war, moving beyond static images and text-based claims to a new frontier of short-form video. These clips, typically lasting between five and fifteen seconds, are engineered to be just realistic enough to appear credible to a casual viewer, even if they are not always technically perfect “deepfakes” that swap a person’s face onto another’s body. Instead, they often involve the entirely AI-generated creation of scenes, faces, and scenarios that depict exactly what the propaganda machine wishes were true. This new wave of AI-generated content is a powerful and dangerous development, as it blurs the line between reality and fabrication in an unprecedentedly accessible way. The scenes these videos depict are not accidental; they are meticulously crafted to fulfill a specific psychological purpose: to demoralize the Ukrainian military and public while bolstering the Russian narrative of inevitable success. For instance, a significant wave of these videos, detected by EDMO in late 2025, capitalized on the Russian offensive against Pokrovsk by depicting Ukrainian soldiers in humiliating scenarios, surrendering en masse or breaking down in tears, painting a picture of a defeated and broken army.
This tactic has continued and evolved, with a new wave of pro-Russian AI-generated videos detected in September of the following year. This new batch focused intensely on the sensitive topic of Ukrainian military mobilization. The videos and images, circulated widely by pro-Russian accounts, showed heart-wrenching scenes of soldiers in handcuffs being loaded onto buses, promising a narrative of a nation forcibly dragging its unwilling citizens to the slaughter. The timing of this particular surge is crucial and highly suspicious. It comes not at a moment of Ukrainian defeat, but rather alongside significant successes by the Ukrainian armed forces, particularly in the Donbas area, where they liberated several towns as part of Operation Vivaldi. This simultaneous occurrence is likely not a coincidence. The Kremlin’s playbook often involves using disinformation to counter or distract from bad news on the battlefield. As reports intensified of a possible new mobilization within Russia itself, a move that is always unpopular domestically, the release of these videos serves a dual purpose. For the Russian audience, it frames the Ukrainian military as a brutal, coercive force, contrasting it implicitly with their own (mythical) patriotic volunteers. For the Western audience, it aims to paint Ukraine as a corrupt and oppressive state, thereby questioning whether it is a worthy and democratic ally, and to cast doubt on the legitimacy of its war effort.
The intended audience for these sophisticated disinformation campaigns is not a single, monolithic group. Instead, the campaigns are carefully targeted at several distinct audiences, each with a different objective. The first is the Russian public, to keep them compliant and supportive of the war and to shield them from the true costs of the conflict, both in terms of casualties and economic hardship. The second is the Ukrainian public and military, to break their morale, create distrust in their leadership, and convince them that resistance is futile. The third, and arguably most critical for the long-term outcome of the war, is the public opinion in European countries allied with Kyiv. The aim here is to erode political support for continued military and financial aid to Ukraine, to foster apathy, and to encourage divisions within the alliance. The fact that these AI-generated videos are being deliberately recirculated in several European countries, often with subtitles in local languages, is clear evidence of this targeted approach. It is a concerted effort to weaponize information directly against the democratic societies that are Ukraine’s most vital supporters, hoping to influence elections and sway public sentiment towards neutrality or even opposition to the war effort.
Perhaps the most insidious aspect of this new wave is how it is being integrated with older, more established disinformation tactics. The AI-generated videos are not the only tools in the arsenal; they are being used to reinforce and amplify a broader campaign that also relies on the classic technique of “context manipulation.” This involves taking real videos or images, stripping them of their original context, and pairing them with false or misleading captions to fabricate a completely different story. A perfect example of this is the circulation of videos and images from a protest in Kyiv against the cutting down of trees. In reality, this was a local environmental protest. However, pro-Russian disinformation networks captured the imagery of crowds and police and falsely claimed they showed Ukrainian civilians being forcibly conscripted and dragged away by soldiers because they were trying to disrupt a recruitment operation. This blending of the authentic with the wholly fabricated is incredibly potent. It lends an air of legitimacy to the false narrative and makes it much harder for the average person to discern the truth, as they are conditioned to believe that some elements of the story must be real because they can see real footage. This synergy between AI-generated content and manipulated real-world events creates a very dense fog of war, making it extraordinarily difficult for even well-intentioned observers to navigate the flow of information.
The most concerning element of this entire development is the remarkably low technical quality and limited coordination observed in these current operations. The fact that even with such relatively crude tools, the disinformation is still able to achieve significant impact and reach is deeply worrying. It suggests that these are likely just the first, crude experiments in a new era of AI-driven propaganda. The current videos might have inconsistencies in lighting, or facial animations that are slightly off, but they are clearly good enough to fool a significant portion of the public, particularly those who may already be predisposed to believe the narrative being pushed. This represents a low bar for entry that has already proven successful. The potential for technical and tactical improvement is, to put it simply, enormous. As AI generation technology becomes more sophisticated, cheaper, and more accessible, the videos will become increasingly seamless and indistinguishable from reality. We are on the cusp of a future where creating a convincingly realistic video of any world leader saying or doing anything is trivially easy. If this current generation of AI content is already capable of causing real harm by being mistaken for genuine footage, by fueling public discord, and by undermining trust in democratic institutions, then the trajectory of this technology is genuinely chilling. We are not looking at a passing problem, but at the dawn of a permanent struggle for the very definition of truth itself, a struggle in which our cognitive defenses will be perpetually tested by increasingly sophisticated machines designed to deceive us.