Russia using AI to promote tolerance of domestic violence

Russian media outlets, Telegram channels, and bots on the social network X are spreading a fabricated newsletter allegedly intended for wives of Ukrainian servicemen. It contains so-called "rules" encouraging women to tolerate domestic violence from their husbands.

This is a fake. The newsletter was created by Russians themselves and is being circulated to discredit Ukrainian soldiers.

The "advice" text contains spelling errors uncharacteristic of Ukrainian. For example, in the word "побої" ("beatings"), the Ukrainian letter "ї" is incorrectly replaced with the Russian "и."

Russian Telegram channels have also circulated a screenshot of a Ukrainian media article reporting that police registered 420 residents of the Bohunskyi district of Zhytomyr. The post accompanying the image falsely claims that many of them were servicemen from the 95th Air Assault Brigade.

This is another fake. The original article, published on July 28, 2025, by Zhytomyr-Online, contains no mention of any of the 420 men being military personnel.

In addition, Russian media have been spreading an image allegedly showing a wounded Ukrainian soldier in a hospital holding a photo of his wife. The accompanying caption claims he wants her back, but she left because of domestic violence.

This is fake as well — the image was created using artificial intelligence.

It first appeared in the Ukrainian segment of Facebook with a completely different narrative: posts claimed the soldier, named Andrii, had lost his memory due to injury and was holding a photo of his beloved, with authors urging users to share the post to help find her. Such posts are a common clickbait tactic — designed to boost account reach and later monetize through advertising or by selling the popular page.

In this way, Russian propaganda has launched a campaign aimed at discrediting Ukrainian soldiers. Meanwhile, according to the Russian outlet Verstka (designated a foreign agent in Russia), since the start of the full-scale invasion, the number of recorded domestic violence cases in Russia has increased 3.5-fold. Most perpetrators of such crimes are Russian soldiers returning from the front, who in most cases either avoid punishment altogether or receive only small fines — up to 5,000 rubles (about 2,600 hryvnias).

Ukrinform reported that Russian propaganda had earlier spread a false claim that Ukrainians killed 12 Territorial Recruitment Center staff members after Russian shelling of such facilities.

Andriy Olenin