Russia wages an invisible war for minds, using AI

By Olha Chepil | 2025-07-07

You do not need tanks to wage war in the 21st century -- just a meme, a botnet and a deepfake. Russia has transformed its propaganda machine for the digital battlefield, using artificial intelligence, fake news and trolls to undermine trust in elections, medicine and democracy.

Once reliant on journalists and cameras in TV studios, the Kremlin now pushes influence through social media and artificial intelligence (AI)-generated content.

Authoritarian regimes are increasingly turning to these tools as weapons of foreign policy, say researchers.

"There is a battle going on between democracies, which are seeking to use AI to counter disinformation, and authoritarian regimes, which are weaponizing AI in their foreign policy. These are Iran, North Korea, China and of course Russia," said Olga Tokariuk, a senior analyst at Britain's Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD).

Attacking minds

After Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, it ramped up a sweeping propaganda campaign that has grown only more sophisticated. A central player has been the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency, which interfered in the 2016 US election. Today, the tools include deepfakes, neural networks and fake accounts posing as trusted sources.

"If you could previously recognize a Russian troll by a clumsy translation, now content generated and translated by AI makes it almost indistinguishable from the real thing," said Tokariuk.

Tokariuk warned of audio deepfakes targeting Ukrainians. In some cases, families have received fake voice messages from soldiers -- familiar voices asking for money or declaring, "we've been abandoned." Russia also has used AI to alter news clips.

"They [Russians] use AI to replace real voices, including in Western news reports. The original interview is altered to include a segment where a supposed Ukrainian refugee complains about 'dark-skinned people' in the US or the 'greed' of the Danes. It's a cheap but effective way of introducing racist and anti-European narratives supposedly from Ukrainians," Tokariuk added.

Russian propaganda exploits fear, panic and mistrust with alarming consistency, Andrey Tarasov, a historian at Kryvyi Rih State Pedagogical University, said.

"The key objective of any adversary is to sow distrust and despair. It permeates everything: 'Well, what can you do now?', 'It's all useless.' Any information attack has three pillars: distrust, fear and panic," he said.

Russian influence campaigns extend beyond war zones to elections and cultural narratives, he said.

"This is a classic: for example, you influence elections in Romania through funding and through media support for extreme views. In the Russian case, this is usually right-wing rhetoric," said Tarasov.

Truth as a lie

A new kind of manipulation targets algorithms rather than human beings.

Researchers at the ISD, including Tokariuk, have identified a network of Pravda-branded websites that publishes tens of thousands of articles daily in more than 50 languages, few of which anybody is actually reading.

"Our hypothesis is that these websites are not for people but for artificial intelligence. Russia is simply stuffing the [information] space with content in order to train Large Language Models and appear in chatbot responses. ChatGPT is already serving up links to these resources," said Tokariuk.

The content, she added, is not original. It recycles narratives from Russian state media, Telegram channels and fringe sites. Topics follow familiar Kremlin themes: "Ukrainian Nazis," "corruption," "Russia saving children" and "the West is collapsing," repeated across multiple languages with slightly altered headlines.

"I checked one topic: Ukrainian crime in Poland. I saw eight identical articles from Pravda in the ChatGPT results. They create the illusion of ubiquity, and this influences AI," said Tokariuk.

The material is beginning to surface in search results, Wikipedia entries and chatbot responses, she said.

"If this continues, we may end up with a generation that learns about war from toxic sources. And then history will be written not by facts but by algorithms that have been trained to lie," said Tokariuk.

The Russian world

Russia's propaganda has shifted decisively into the digital sphere, eschewing traditional media for social platforms, soft power and AI, say analysts.

"Russian propaganda no longer needs traditional media. [For the Russians] it's enough to push information on social networks," said Ruslan Sharipov, a Ukrainian screenwriter, presenter and documentary producer.

"A fake video of a Ukrainian woman with seven passports allegedly receiving benefits -- nobody verifies it, but it causes a wave of hatred. And that's all it takes: a conflict between Ukrainians and Poles is guaranteed."

Russia deploys similar tactics across Europe, targeted campaigns designed to demoralize and isolate Ukrainians, he said. Examples range from fake reports of a "Ukrainian virus" in Rzeszow, Poland, to deepfakes imitating Ukrainian commanders.

Propaganda spreads through cultural institutions like Russian Houses and Rossotrudnichestvo centers, ostensible cultural venues that promote Kremlin narratives. These entities are precisely what Sharipov investigated for his work.

"[Rossotrudnichestvo] is an old agency, from Soviet times. Today, it owns real estate in major European cities, from Berlin to Paris. Supposedly [admirers] are reading [19th century poet Alexander] Pushkin in these 'Russian Houses,'" he said.

"In reality, [Russian officials are creating the image of a peace-loving, cultured Russia that is no longer an aggressor but an educator," Sharipov explained.

He described the centers, which report directly to Russian President Vladimir Putin, as "propaganda breeding grounds" promoting ideology under the cover of cultural diplomacy and operating around Western sanctions.

"This is soft power, where no satellite or TV channel operates directly, but cultural venues abroad soften the image of an aggressive Russia. It is hybrid propaganda," he said.

"No one will say that Pushkin is propaganda. But it's precisely through him and [Soviet cosmonaut Yuri] Gagarin that the image of a decent and safe Russia gets presented."

Russia's propaganda efforts -- online and off -- are about present influence and long-term narrative control, say analysts.

"There is a risk that in 10–20 years the public will get its knowledge not from books, but from AI -- and if disinformation is not stopped now, the Russian version of the war may become the only one that 'remains in history books,'" said Tokariuk.