Russia’s fakes stopped reaching Ukraine. So it changed the target

For most of the past 12 years, the test of a Russian fake was simple: did it travel inside Ukraine? In 2014, around the annexation of Crimea and the attack on Donbas, it usually did.

The 2014 “crucified boy” story—a staged eyewitness on state-owned Channel One who claimed Ukrainian troops had nailed a three-year-old to a board on a square in Sloviansk and then dragged his mother behind a tank—moved through Russian and Ukrainian feeds before journalists at Novaya Gazeta took it apart within a day, and before anyone noted that the square it described does not exist in that city. The story was false, but it still worked, because Ukrainian society had not yet built the reflex to stop it.

On the stage of the Lviv Media Forum on 15 May 2026, a serving Ukrainian intelligence official described a machine that has largely given up on doing that—not because it was defeated, but because it stopped working, and because Russia found other uses for it.

The speaker was Andrii Yusov, Representative for Strategic Communications of the Defense Intelligence of Ukraine (HUR), in a conversation with communications expert Yarema Dukh.

The fakes that no longer travel

This was an asymmetric war from the first day, Yusov said. Putin’s Russia had spent years preparing—first for hybrid aggression, then for full-scale war—and it arrived with more than artillery and missiles: networks of agents, budgets for information operations, and the experience of running them.

At the start of the hybrid aggression, Yusov argued, Russia’s fake machine overpowered Ukraine’s information space far more than that space could push back. Society’s critical resilience was lower. A fabrication could enter and travel. That has narrowed sharply since.

“The penetration of Russian fakes into the Ukrainian information space, and into the European one, has become much smaller than it was in 2014,” Yusov told the forum. “There is more critical reflex now. A great deal simply does not reach people, or it reaches them and does not catch. The reaction has become: this is obvious nonsense, why would I even respond to it?”

What that machine produces now, he said, is increasingly aimed inward. A separate category of fakes is forming, made exclusively for the domestic Russian audience—what he called a continuation of the North Korea-ization of Russia’s future. It is no longer built for Ukrainians or for Europeans.

“Even the FSB understands that Ukrainians will not consume this and Europeans will not consume it,” he said. “But the willingness of Russia’s own population to keep enduring, to keep suffering, to keep listening to Putin, to keep sending its children to his war—that has to be sustained with something. This is part of what sustains it.”

That is where the 2014 atrocity story comes back, with sequels. The crucified-boy theme has been revived, Yusov said, with characters from a Soviet-era children’s film—ones several generations grew up with—deployed to retell it: a supposed sister added, a mother said to have been tortured and killed by Ukrainians, fresh detail accreting the way a television series adds seasons, because for that audience, that is exactly what it is.

The honest reading of a large share of current Russian output, on his account, is that it is no longer an attempt to convince Ukraine of anything. It is maintenance work on the Russian public’s tolerance for the war.

From inventing to inflating

Producing original content that actually lands inside Ukrainian society has become harder and harder for Russia, Yusov said, and that constraint has changed the method. When fabrication from scratch stops working, what remains is to take a crisis phenomenon that already exists, scale it, and, where useful, attach stories that do not exist at all.

His example was the one running that week: a supposed migration crisis. Ukraine does not have a migrant problem, he said. No one has seen queues of people trying to enter. The economy has a real and continuing need for labor, but that is a question to be managed, not a crisis.

The monitoring matches that. A coordinated anti-migrant information wave surged across Ukrainian social media this spring, with Ukraine’s Center for Strategic Communications recording more than 21,600 posts pushing anti-migrant rhetoric across roughly 14,000 sources between 1 and 10 May, concentrated on Facebook and Telegram and amplified with anxiety-inducing images and video.

The official data tells a different story: in the first quarter of 2026, the State Migration Service issued only 675 migration permits and canceled 445, figures that describe a very limited inflow rather than a flood. Among the “evidence” circulated was a doctored clip of a former regional administration head, edited to make him appear to promise foreigners benefits and positions—a fabrication fact-checkers had already debunked.

The mechanism runs two objectives in parallel, Yusov said. The first is to destabilize the situation inside Ukraine as far as possible. If that fails, the fallback still pays off: discredit Ukrainian society and Ukraine’s military and political leadership in front of Western partner societies, so that coalition support weakens and aid slows. The migration theme, he noted, is one that Russian services have used for a long time in their hybrid war against the European Union, not only against Ukraine.

The danger, Yusov said, is that these subjects are genuinely sensitive and can be born inside Ukraine’s own society, not only injected from outside, which makes it hard to see who is acting in whose interest. The single real problem, he said, is Russia and the continuation of this war; everything else is a distraction.

The asymmetry and the offset

Given that head start, Dukh asked how the Ukrainian side had held the information line at all.

Because of the kind of war this is for Ukraine, Yusov answered—a just defensive war, a war for independence. The consolidation of society pulled an enormous number of people—the creative class, a new generation, civil society, and partners around the world—into the security and defense effort, helping with open-source analysis, information campaigns, and cybersecurity tool development. Ukraine resisted effectively, despite fewer resources, against a larger but more outdated apparatus.

There is also a difference that is hard to manufacture, he said. “At certain moments, we simply made Putin ridiculous. Ukrainians can take a frightening Russian army and frightening aggression and metabolize it with harsh, painful humor, and then send that back out to the world. We can also turn it very brutally on ourselves. Russians unlearned how to laugh at themselves a long time ago, because there you are jailed for it—and that makes a whole class of their operations harder to pull off.”

He pointed to concrete results. The “I Want to Live” project, run by Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War with the Defense Ministry and military intelligence, gives Russian soldiers a route to surrender under the Geneva Conventions through a 24-hour hotline, a Russian-language website, and a Telegram chatbot.

A companion service, “I Want to Find,” lets Russian families trace relatives taken prisoner or killed in Ukraine. The surrender site has drawn tens of millions of visits, the vast majority from inside Russia, and Russia has repeatedly blocked access to it. Yusov described reach in the millions, hundreds of cases, and dozens of blocks by the Russian communications regulator—work done, he noted, by relatively small teams.

None of that is grounds to relax. What the enemy probes for, every day, is resilience. The operations Russian services run are constant work, not episodes, Yusov said, and he reached for a proverb to describe the method: “Where it is thin, it tears.”

They search for the point where society’s resilience is weakest: which sensitive subject, even one as painful as prisoners of war, can be used to weaken Ukraine’s position, destabilize it from inside, or rehabilitate Russia abroad.

What Ukraine stopped believing

The clearest measure of how far this has moved, on Yusov’s telling, is not in Russia’s behavior but in Ukraine’s expectations.

In 2022, he said, many people in Ukraine genuinely believed Russians did not know the truth: that a call, a letter, the right video, would reach them and they would stop the army. By 2026, that belief is gone, and recognizing it does not make anything easier.

The question is no longer how to inform Russians. It is about extending influence over the small share of the world that actually decides things and about staying demonstrably more credible than the other side, because that contrast is itself the argument.

There is a difficulty built into even discussing acceptable outcomes for Russia, he added. The moment Ukraine says out loud what it wants to see change inside Russia, Russian propaganda answers that anyone acting on it is working for Ukrainian intelligence.

So the interest is stated plainly: a neighbor with a functioning democracy, an independent judiciary, the rule of law, and independent media. The moment those exist, Putin’s regime loses the conditions it depends on.

In Yusov’s view, any protest against that regime, inside Russia or beyond it, is good; the most effective form is armed struggle against it, which is why the Russian volunteers fighting inside Ukraine’s defense forces for a different vision of their country matter as proof that such a struggle is possible.

Toward a more credible society

What Yusov described is an information war turned inside out over 12 years: the stream aimed at Ukraine has thinned as Ukrainian society learned to refuse it, while the stream aimed at Russians has thickened because their endurance now has to be manufactured daily.

Against the West, Russia no longer invents so much as inflates real fault lines, hoping that partners tire of Ukraine on their own. The change Andrii Yusov kept returning to was the one on his own side: the 2022 conviction that the right message could end the war is gone, and what replaced it is slower and far less satisfying—being the more credible society for as long as the war continues.