Russians fake news: Ukrainian children are forced to kneel during moment of silence

To spread disinformation, propagandists generated videos and images using AI.

Russian social media users are circulating a video allegedly filmed in a Ukrainian school, showing a teacher supposedly "forcing" children to kneel in a corridor during a moment of silence.

This is fake news. The video was generated using artificial intelligence. The children in the clip appear unnaturally motionless, with repetitive, "looped" movements. This is a common sign of using a static image overlaid with AI animation layers or "puppet-style" animation to create the illusion of breathing or slight swaying. In addition, the video contains repeated elements, such as identical clothing and hairstyles among the children.

The "teacher's" voice in the video also shows signs of being generated: it sounds like a studio recording, without echo or ambient corridor noise. The children do not react in any way to her remarks, and the final words in the clip have incorrect stress, which is characteristic of AI-generated audio tracks.

The fake nature of the video is confirmed by DeepFace-o-Meter, a tool for detecting AI-generated content. In particular, the AVSRDD bot, designed to verify the authenticity of audio tracks, determined that the voice in the video is fake with a probability of 99.9%. The AltFreezing and SBI bots verified that the video itself was edited or generated by a neural network with probabilities of 76% and 70%, respectively.

In addition, Russian propaganda Telegram channels are spreading a photo of a locker allegedly from a kindergarten in Kryvyi Rih, with the inscription "dad is AWOL" on one of the lockers.

This is also a fake. The image was generated by AI, specifically by Google's Gemini chatbot. Such images contain an embedded digital watermark, SynthID, which is also indicated when verification is attempted in Gemini.

In this way, Russia is promoting a false narrative that Ukraine allegedly imposes patriotic education on children in schools and kindergartens in a harsh and coercive manner. The aim is to provoke internal conflicts within the country and portray Ukraine as a "savage state."

At the start of Russia's full-scale aggression against Ukraine, on March 16, 2022, President Volodymyr Zelensky signed Decree No. 143/2022 "On a nationwide moment of silence for those killed as a result of the armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine." Under this decree, every day at 09:00, citizens are to remember the soldiers who gave their lives, as well as civilians killed by Russia. However, there is no requirement to kneel during the moment of silence.

Russian propaganda had earlier spread a fake story about "Kremlin chimes" during a farewell ceremony in the Kyiv region.

Andriy Olenin