One of the clips was used by the Russian Defense Ministry in October to confirm the capture of Dobropillya in the Donetsk region. The ministry said the footage was shot from a drone. In it, a serviceman waves a Russian flag first from one window of a private house, then from another. Between the two episodes the tricolor unfurls in the opposite direction, as if it had been attached to the flagpole from the other side, ISW noted.
In other videos, the analysts found soldiers with unnatural body proportions, as well as people and flags that suddenly dissolve into the grass. Ruslan Leviev, an analyst at the Conflict Intelligence Team, told the FT that current AI models can produce videos without such artifacts.
According to Daniel Miley, head of ISW's geospatial intelligence team, the videos bearing AI traces appear because of the self-interest of military units and the Z-bloggers associated with them, rather than as part of a centralized Defense Ministry campaign. The goal is "shaping a narrative or cognitive warfare aimed at asserting Russia's inevitable victory in Ukraine," Miley said.
FT sources close to the Kremlin explain the falsifications differently: Vladimir Putin's determination to win the war pushed commanders to inflate their gains. "When someone announces the capture of a settlement, he boasts about it to a colonel, that one to a general, the general to a lieutenant general, that one to the General Staff, and that one to the commander-in-chief. By the time they finish reporting, they are already retreating. Then the next orders come, based on the fact that we must hold the position and try to capture the next one, even if we are no longer there," one of them said.
In the Z milieu, the use of AI for reports on the capture of settlements is also criticized. In September, the Rybar channel wrote about servicemen in the Lyman direction who, because of failures at the front, had begun lying about taking control of new territories. Videos processed by neural networks are called there "neural flag-waving," and villages, in the channel's phrasing, are now "liberated with the help of neural networks."