Russian propaganda spreads deepfake claiming Ukraine 'mobilizes' men with mental disorders

Russian Telegram channels and anonymous TikTok accounts are spreading a video showing a supposed Ukrainian soldier allegedly displaying signs of mental health issues, while voices off-camera appear to mock him. Accompanying captions claim that the Ukrainian Armed Forces "mobilized" a man unfit for service without conducting any medical examination.

This is fake. The video is staged and has been manipulated using artificial intelligence (AI). The audio track was AI-generated, and the person's face was altered with deepfake technology. This has been confirmed by an analysis conducted using the DeepFack-o-meter, a service designed to detect AI-generated content in videos.

The platform employs several AI-trained bots that analyze hundreds of thousands of fake video, audio, and image samples to identify manipulated content:

AVSRDD bot, which detects AI-generated audio, determined with 99.9% certainty that the soundtrack in this video is fake.

AltFreezing bot, which identifies pixel inconsistencies typical of manipulated videos, confirmed the video's falsification with 89.8% probability.

DSP-FWA bot, which specializes in detecting facial deepfakes, established that the video was forged with 91.6% certainty.

Additionally, the origin of the video raises further suspicion: it was posted by an anonymous TikTok account masquerading as Ukrainian. The account contains only four neutral videos about Ukraine, plus the fake clip in question, and all posts appeared just two days ago.

This is part of Russia's ongoing effort to discredit the Ukrainian Armed Forces and undermine Ukraine's mobilization process.

As Ukrinform previously reported, Russian propaganda had also spread a fake claim suggesting that Ukrainian schools were allegedly naming first-grade classes after military units.

Andriy Olenin