Russian AI Deepfakes Posing as Polish Soldiers Rack Up…
Russian-aligned actors used AI-generated deepfake videos featuring fake Polish soldiers to spread anti-Ukraine propaganda across major social media platforms
- Incident date
- Jul 2026
- Target
- Poland
In July 2026, a coordinated disinformation campaign surfaced across social media platforms including YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, utilizing AI-generated deepfakes to target Poland. The campaign aimed to undermine support for Ukraine and discredit its allies by presenting fabricated interviews with individuals dressed in military uniforms.
What happened
The operation involved the distribution of AI-generated clips featuring figures who harshly criticized Ukraine and promoted false claims regarding rising crime rates attributed to Ukrainian refugees. These videos also referenced the historical Volhynia massacres to exploit existing diplomatic tensions between Kyiv and Warsaw.
Investigations by Poland's state cybersecurity institute, NASK, revealed technical indicators of the campaign's origin, including literal translations from Russian into Polish and the inadvertent inclusion of Cyrillic characters. Furthermore, researchers noted that the uniforms worn by the AI figures more closely resembled Russian and Belarusian military gear rather than those of the Polish Armed Forces.
The impact of the campaign was significant, with the most widely viewed clip accumulating nearly 300,000 views. Polish fact-checking outlets DemagogPL and Konkret24 identified that one specific YouTube account had published over 50 of these deepfake videos before the platform intervened. While several accounts spreading the content have since been removed, the incident highlights the ongoing threat of hybrid warfare facing Poland, which has been identified as a primary target for politically motivated cyberattacks from Russian-aligned actors since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.