In mid-October, Russian military commanders boasted to Vladimir Putin that they had conquered the key frontline town of Dobropillia in Ukraine.
Shortly after the briefing with the Russian president, the Defense Ministry released a montage of drone footage showing the ruins of Dobropillia. The video included several sequences showing soldiers waving Russian flags amid the ruins of the allegedly captured city.
The montage was intended to demonstrate Moscow’s control over the city. But at least one of the sequences was likely altered using artificial intelligence.
The video, showing a soldier waving a Russian tricolor from the window of a damaged building, is one of dozens of likely Russian deepfakes that analysts say have allowed Moscow to inflate claims about its success on the battlefield — and perhaps even give Putin unwarranted confidence in the advances of its forces.
“The flag in the video abruptly changes its orientation, as if it were suddenly attached to the flagpole from the opposite edge,” said Ruslan Leviev, head of the Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT), an open source investigative group. “This type of problem cannot be explained by compression or camera sensor artifacts. There is no doubt that this segment was manipulated.”
According to military analysts, Russia planned to use Dobropillia as a base to encircle Ukraine’s “fortress belt.” However, in mid-September a successful Ukrainian operation disrupted the plan. Nearly three weeks after Putin hailed its capture, Ukrainian forces still occupy positions in Dobropillia.
After slow but steady progress in 2024 and 2025, the Russian army’s pace of advance came to a halt in 2026 amid mounting losses and a series of Ukrainian counterattacks on several parts of the front line.
“The videos are part of a larger narrative or cognitive warfare campaign to assert that a Russian victory in Ukraine is inevitable,” said Daniel Mealie, head of the geospatial intelligence team at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War. “The Kremlin seeks to create a false narrative that the Ukrainian front line is collapsing and the West should surrender.”
The ISW identified 35 videos posted by Russian units and pro-war military bloggers that were likely generated or modified by artificial intelligence.
Many clips contain glaring anomalies, such as soldiers of improbable physical proportions or people and flags abruptly disappearing into the foliage.
The videos appear to be the work of several opportunistic military units and associated pro-war bloggers rather than a centrally organized effort, Mealie said. Who initially produced or edited the Dobropillia footage remains unclear.
But the phenomenon has led Russian state media and even the Defense Ministry to amplify some videos, despite often clear signs that they have been altered.
“With the right approach, an AI model can already generate a video without defects,” Leviev said.
Russian military bloggers have also made unconfirmed claims about the use of AI in videos released by Ukrainian troops.
In December 2025, Ukrainian war monitoring group DeepState accused one of the country’s military units of using AI to bolster its claims of presence inside Pokrovsk, a major stronghold that was then slowly being overrun by Russian forces. DeepState said the 425th Assault Regiment posted a photo on its X page of Russian soldiers holding a Russian flag inside Pokrovsk, edited to show Ukrainian soldiers and a yellow and blue flag instead.
Putin’s determination to win his nearly five-year-old battlefield invasion has given his commanders the impetus to tout legendary conquests, according to people who know the Russian president.
“When someone says they have captured a colony, they show it to the colonel, they show it to the general, the general shows it to the lieutenant general, who shows it to the general staff, who shows it to the commander in chief. By the time they finish reporting, they have already retreated,” one of the people said.
“Then the next orders that come in are based on us holding on to it and trying to take the next one, even if we’re not there already. So a lot of casualties on both sides come from that,” the person added. “That’s why Stalin had people shot for it.”
The Russian military has been widely mocked, even by its own supporters, for grossly inflating claims of its own success throughout the full-scale invasion it launched in 2022.
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Over the past two years, advances in drone warfare have created a “kill zone” that makes the frontline significantly more fluid, giving rise to a phenomenon known as the “kill zone.” flagor “flag”.
The practice has drawn derision from Russia’s pro-war blogging community, who call AI-edited videos a “neural flag.” Rybar, a major pro-war channel, complained that villages are now being “liberated with the help of neural networks.”
Some of the units accused of using AI to bolster their claims did so while apparently under pressure due to their poor performance on the battlefield.
Units that create the videos could use them to convince commanders that they met Kremlin deadlines or to make exaggerated claims on the battlefield more credible, analysts say.
A flag-waving soldier shown outside Bilyi Kolodyaz, a village in the Kharkiv region, appeared unusually tall before abruptly disappearing in a video posted by military blogger Divgen on July 27.
The unit that allegedly took the village, the 127th Motorized Rifle Regiment, was already undergoing a performance evaluation by its division leadership, according to Severniy Kanal, a military blog that reports on developments on the front line in northern Ukraine.
A week later, on August 3, the Russian Defense Ministry announced that it had “liberated” Bilyi Kolodyaz, even though the Ukrainian army claimed that Russian forces remained 10 km from the village. Battlefield mappers have reported repeated changes in control of parts of the village, which now appears to be in kyiv’s hands.
The Russian Defense Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment, while military blogger Divgen declined to comment.
Moscow will likely continue to tout its fictitious successes, said Dara Massicot, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The gaps between the claims (and reality) are widening. The Kremlin feels no pressure domestically to give accurate accounts or correct these claims,” she said.
To illustrate this gap, Putin used the same October 16 television briefing to claim that his forces had conquered 6,500 km² since January. Independent analysts have offered a much less optimistic assessment, estimating Russia’s gains over the same period at no more than 1,500 km², even by the most generous estimate.
On October 20, Ukraine denied Russia’s capture of Dobropillia, accusing the Russian commander of misleading Putin.
The same day, US President Donald Trump said: “Russia is a big machine – it just keeps moving forward. »
Additional reporting by Max Seddon in Berlin, Chris Cook in London and Fabrice Deprez in kyiv. Map by Steven Bernard
Gn world
