Russia’s war against Ukraine extends far beyond missiles and trenches. This video explores the hidden information war that began in 2014, from fabricated atrocity stories and covert intelligence networks to propaganda campaigns designed to shape public opinion. Discover how Russia’s efforts to undermine Ukraine ultimately faltered, how Ukraine adapted and fought back, and why the battle for credibility, influence, and perception may be just as important as the fighting on the battlefield.
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00:00Russia has been fighting two wars against Ukraine.
00:03One is the war you can see, with all the missiles, the trenches, and the drone footage keeping it in
00:08the daily spotlight.
00:09But the other one is quieter, cheaper, and in many ways more ambitious.
00:14It's the war for what Ukrainians believe, and the war fought by people who carry no rank insignia and leave
00:20no official record.
00:21And that second war has been quietly testing Ukraine's will to fight, or at least it did until 2023.
00:28Today, that war has arguably failed, and the strategies that Russia used are now being turned against its own people.
00:36To understand where we are, you have to start with 2014, and an army that was never supposed to be
00:42there.
00:42In July 2014, Russian state television Channel 1 broadcasts what it described as a refugee testimony.
00:50A woman named Galina Pishniak, speaking from a camp in Russia's Rostov region,
00:55told viewers that Ukrainian soldiers had rounded up the residents of the city of Slovyansk.
01:00In the main square, where she dubbed Lenin Square, they had taken a three-year-old boy,
01:05the son of a local pro-Russian militiaman, and they had crucified him, nailing him to a board like a
01:10public execution.
01:12His mother, she said, was tied to a tank and dragged around the square until she lost consciousness.
01:17The segment ran on the most-watched channel in Russia, a state broadcaster that could feasibly reach 250 million viewers
01:24across the former Soviet countries.
01:27Within hours, the story was moving through Russian and Ukrainian social media.
01:32However, within a day, independent journalists had torn it apart.
01:36Investigative reporters from Novaya Gazeta and the independent TV channel Dost traveled to Slovyansk and found no witnesses,
01:44no physical evidence, and no audio or video of the alleged incident.
01:48This was entirely contradictory to what was expected, especially because Ukrainian army operations in that city were heavily documented at
01:56the time.
01:57BBC News pointed out a detail that should have stopped the story before it started.
02:01There is no Lenin Square in Slovyansk.
02:05The nearest equivalent is October Revolution Square, the location where the atrocity supposedly happened didn't even exist.
02:12Pychniak herself was not what she appeared to be either.
02:15Her husband was a former member of the Berkut, the Ukrainian special police unit dissolved after the Maiden.
02:22By that point, he had already joined the separatist forces operating under Igor Strolkov.
02:26So, she wasn't a refugee, but was the wife of an active combatant on the Russian backside,
02:33giving testimony from a Russian camp on Russian state television about an atrocity that no physical evidence,
02:39no other witness, and no geographic reality could support.
02:43And while the story turned out to be nonsense, investigators found it worthwhile to track its source and how it
02:49came into existence.
02:50It appeared to have been seeded by the Eurasianist philosopher Alexander Dugin,
02:55who published a version of it on his Facebook page on July 9, three days before the Channel 1 broadcast.
03:02Dugin has written at length about the power of what he calls archetypes,
03:06or foundational cultural images that can be deployed to assign guilt and innocence.
03:10The choice of a small defenseless child as victim and crucifixion as the method drew on the deepest imagery of
03:17Christian martyrdom
03:18and combined it with the oldest anti-Christian tropes in history.
03:22It was designed to define Ukrainians not as political opponents, but as something inhuman.
03:28Curiously, what was happening in Slovyansk that week is likely what caused the story to be broadcast in the first
03:34place.
03:34A week before the broadcast, Russian-backed separatists had been forced to withdraw from Slovyansk by advancing Ukrainian forces.
03:42And the day before the broadcast, the Russian army began shelling Ukrainian positions in the Donbass
03:47from the territory of the Russian Federation itself.
03:50Both of those events were invisible in the Russian media.
03:53The Crucified Boy replaced them.
03:55A military retreat and an act of cross-border aggression were laundered in real time by a fabricated atrocity story.
04:02So, instead of Russian people being aware that their military was actively conducting hostile operations in another country,
04:10all they saw was an attempt to vilify the people who were arguably closest to them in terms of culture
04:16and history.
04:17Channel 1 eventually issued something resembling a retraction on December 21st, 2014,
04:23a whopping five months after the broadcast, saying it merely relayed a purported eyewitness report.
04:29Note how that wasn't an apology for reporting a fake story.
04:33It took until 2021 when a Russian journalist named Masha Boznova tracked Pishniak down,
04:40where she said she regretted fabricating the story.
04:43But the damage had been done.
04:45When the Russian army formally invaded eastern Ukrainian force later in the summer of 2014,
04:51its soldiers gave reporters a reason for why they had come.
04:54According to journalists who interviewed returning volunteers from the Luhansk People's Republic in 2015,
05:00some of them cited the crucifixion story directly.
05:03They said they were in Ukraine for the children.
05:06The missiles Russia later fired at the Kramatorsk railway station in 2022,
05:11killing children, were labeled with the same phrase.
05:13A story debunked within 24 hours was still recruiting combatants a year later,
05:19and still providing moral cover eight years after that.
05:22It was the pinnacle of a successful disinformation campaign.
05:27Regardless of the story's validity,
05:29the people believed it long enough to produce consequences
05:32that would go on to reshape public opinion and even global geopolitics.
05:36The crucified boy was only the surface.
05:39Beneath it, Russia had been running a separate and far more operational campaign.
05:44Beginning in 2014, as part of the broader hybrid aggression
05:48that accompanied the seizure of Crimea and the manufactured uprising in Donbass,
05:53Russian intelligence services, mainly the FSB and the GRU,
05:56built and activated agent networks across southern and eastern Ukraine.
06:01The objective was to destabilize Ukraine by provoking inter-regional and inter-ethnic conflict,
06:07strengthening separatist forces and removing security structures.
06:11Ultimately, the measures would lay the groundwork for a political collapse
06:15that would make military intervention either unnecessary or trivially easy.
06:19It's partially what had already happened with the annexation of Crimea in early 2014,
06:25and what should have happened with Kiev in February 2022.
06:28Research published by the U.S. Army War College's journal Parameters
06:33suggested that GRU Spetnaz units were likely operating inside eastern Ukraine
06:38as early as mid-March 2014,
06:41roughly a month before the Donbass rebellion became full-blown.
06:44The unit of more than 50 militants that crossed the border
06:47and seized police and security buildings in Slovyansk and Kramatorsk
06:51on April 12, 2014, wore no insignia and was commanded by FSB colonel Igor Gherkin,
06:58known by his callsign Strolkov.
07:00Western analysis also detected personnel from GR Unit 29155 in February 2022,
07:08days before the special military operation.
07:10The unit was later flagged as responsible for the Salisbury poisonings,
07:15Arms Depot explosions across eastern Europe, and attempted political destabilization.
07:20The 2014 unrest in Odessa, which culminated in the trade union building fire that killed 48 people,
07:27was also described by Ukraine Security Service as the product of foreign interference,
07:32specifically groups from Moldova's Russian-controlled Transnistria region,
07:36working alongside Russian finance networks.
07:39So, in Ukraine, Russia had an undercover operation with reach, budget,
07:44and years of preparation behind it.
07:46And for a time, it worked.
07:48The Donbass was set alight.
07:50Ukrainian security forces were staggered in the early months
07:53and caught between a conventional military threat
07:55and an insurgency that blurred the line between local grievance
07:59and a directed Russian operation.
08:01But the machine had a fundamental flaw,
08:04which was only uncovered by Reuters' investigation into the FSB's covert network in Ukraine.
08:10As it turned out, the agents and their handlers believe Ukraine was weak,
08:14which was a total misconception, despite nearly a decade of undercover disinformation campaigns in the country.
08:21People the Kremlin counted on as its proxies inside Ukraine had overstated their own influence for years,
08:27and the FSB was receiving assessments that reflected what Moscow wanted to hear,
08:31not what Ukrainian society actually looked like on the ground.
08:35This is why, when the full-scale invasion came in February 2022,
08:40the plan to seize Kiev in 72 hours collapsed.
08:43The FSB had been tasked with preparing conditions for a swift political capitulation,
08:48including lists of friendly officials, pre-position agents,
08:51and the parts of the population expected to waver.
08:54What they found instead was a society they had spent eight years hardening.
08:58The covert preparation that was supposed to make the military operation easy had been entirely fabricated,
09:04and as soon as Russia made an overtly aggressive move, the campaigns collapsed.
09:09Months after the failure in February 2022,
09:12the FSB pivoted from the ambition of taking Kiev to occupying and converting the cities Russia had actually seized,
09:19like Maripol, Melitipol, and Kherson.
09:22It was a smaller, grimmer version of the same program.
09:25FSB officials swept in behind advancing artillery,
09:28trying to build a governance structure on rubble and fear, present but diminished.
09:33One Ukrainian intelligence official described the new situation as the FSB working as not with the same enthusiasm,
09:40but they continue.
09:41The reason for that is that the information front changed drastically between 2014 and 2022.
09:47In mid-May 2026, Andrey Youssef, who was the representative for Strategic Communications of Ukraine's Defense Intelligence,
09:56or HUR, appeared on stage at the Lviv Media Forum.
09:59His assessment of Russia was that the penetration of Russian fakes into the Ukrainian information space,
10:06and into the European one, has become much smaller than it was in 2014.
10:10He continued by saying,
10:12There is more critical reflex now.
10:14A great deal simply does not reach people, or it reaches them and does not catch.
10:19The reaction has become, this is obvious nonsense.
10:21Why would I even respond to it?
10:23This is a striking thing for a serving intelligence official to say.
10:27The enemy has stopped trying,
10:29but the attempts are no longer landing on the intended target's consciousnesses.
10:33Ukrainian society, after 12 years of hybrid aggression and 4 years of full-scale war,
10:39has developed a discerning eye for Russian propaganda, outright rejecting Russian claims.
10:44So what does a propaganda apparatus do when its primary target has become immune?
10:50It finds a different use for the machine.
10:52Russia's disinformation apparatus has now turned inward.
10:56A separate category of content is now being produced exclusively for the domestic Russian audience.
11:01In fact, there's an ongoing debate on how Russia has increasingly started looking like North Korea
11:07in terms of media coverage.
11:09Reports of the North Koreanization, as it was later dubbed, began back in 2022,
11:14when news outlets discussed the rate at which the Kremlin governed Russian media content
11:18and what was told to the public.
11:20With the failures of a disinformation campaign inside Ukraine,
11:24the renewed FSB efforts only accelerated that trend domestically.
11:28So, the crucified boy has come back with sequels.
11:32The original story is being revived with characters from a Soviet-era children's television program,
11:37the kind multiple generations of Russians grew up with.
11:41A supposed sister has been added to the narrative,
11:43and there's even a version with the mother tortured and killed by Ukrainians.
11:47The new detail is similar to how a TV series adds seasons,
11:51because for that domestic audience, that's exactly what it functions as.
11:55The Kremlin is basically outputting serialized content for people
11:58who need a continuous supply of Ukrainian villainy
12:01to justify what their country is doing and what their families are losing.
12:05And when the initial fabrication aimed outwards fails,
12:09the remaining tactic is to make existing problems seem much worse,
12:13starting with one thing Ukraine actually has trouble with, manpower.
12:16In the first 10 days of May 2026, more than 21,600 posts pushing an anti-migrant narrative
12:24flooded Ukrainian social media across roughly 14,000 sources,
12:28concentrated on Facebook and Telegram.
12:31Among the evidence circulating was a doctored video clip of a regional official
12:36edited to make him appear to promise migrants preferential benefits.
12:39Ukraine's state migration service issued only 675 migration permits
12:45in the first quarter of 2026, and then went back and canceled 445 of them.
12:51The intent behind the campaign was to abuse the fact that Ukraine is pushing heavily
12:55into bolstering its military forces with recruits.
12:58So Russia could then create an impression that Ukrainian cities
13:01are being flooded with foreign workers taking up the slag,
13:04with the underlying message being sent that Ukraine is fighting,
13:07but will become less culturally cohesive anyway.
13:10This campaign runs on two tracks simultaneously.
13:13The first is to destabilize Ukraine from within.
13:16The second is to damage Ukraine's reputation in front of Western partner societies,
13:21making the coalition support politically costly and slowing the flow of aid.
13:25But similarly to how Ukraine pushed back when Russia was launching missiles and drones
13:30with its own missiles and drones, it did so with intelligence campaigns.
13:34While Russia was building its covert networks and its propaganda architecture,
13:39Ukraine was constructing a smaller, less resource, but considerably more surgical device.
13:45But before we get into that, did you know we make daily videos
13:48that analyze all aspects of the war on Ukraine and recent developments?
13:52So make sure to hit the subscribe button to catch up and like the video
13:56if you want to see more of this topic.
13:58Back to Ukraine's efforts, its Special Operations Forces, or SSO,
14:03maintain what they call a resistance movement infrastructure inside Russian-occupied territories.
14:09And in a rare interview with the Ukrainian outlet Kromadskaya in September 2024,
14:15an SSO soldier using the callsign Sasha described how it works.
14:19Sasha had been fighting Russia since 2014 and had spent the war years preparing undercover agents
14:25operating behind enemy lines, who would then recruit resistance movement members
14:29for reconnaissance, sabotage, subversion, and guerrilla activities in the Russian-occupied territories.
14:35According to Sasha, one of the SSO's primary goals is to increase the level of dissatisfaction
14:41with the occupation authorities.
14:43The missions these agents carry out range from painting pro-Ukrainian graffiti in occupied cities
14:49to destroying bridges, derailing supply trains, and assassinating Russian soldiers and collaborators.
14:54The SSO even has the documentation to protect them when conditions eventually change.
15:00Until then, they're fully classed as independent,
15:02and only a limited circle within the SSO knows that they're actually working for Ukraine.
15:07One of the most active components of this resistance architecture is Ateş,
15:12a pro-Ukrainian intelligence network that originated in Crimea in September 2022,
15:18and expanded significantly into the Kherson, Donetsk, and Zaporizhia regions after that.
15:23Ateş specializes in rail infrastructure sabotage and targeting military vehicles,
15:29and has been responsible for more than half of all documented sabotage incidents in occupied territories
15:34in the first half of 2025.
15:37Luckily for them, Ukraine's resistance has something that Russia doesn't,
15:41the ability to go much farther into the opposing territory.
15:44While Russia ostensibly uses social media to conduct undercover operations,
15:49Ukraine has smuggled drones, resulting in the famous Operation Spiderweb.
15:53It used 117 FPV drones concealed inside wooden prefabricated structures that resembled modular housing,
16:01loaded onto ordinary commercial trucks.
16:04A Ukrainian national then moved to Chelyabinsk in October 2024,
16:08and opened a freight business.
16:09In December, he acquired several trucks.
16:12Over the following months, the operation quietly positioned its payload across five airbases,
16:17five oblasts, spanning 2,500 miles from the Murmansk region on the Arctic coast
16:22to Irkutsk in Siberia, deep beyond the Ural Mountains.
16:26And in June 2025, those drones began emerging to inflict as much damage as they could.
16:32The targets were Alionya, Diaghilevo, Ivanovo, Severny, Belaya, and Ukranka airbases.
16:39The aircraft destroyed or severely damaged included two 95 MS Strategic Bombers,
16:45two 22 M3 Long-Range Strike aircraft, and at least one A-50 Airborne Early Warning Jet,
16:51which exists in extremely limited numbers and is no longer in production.
16:55Ukrainian officials assessed 41 aircraft as destroyed or damaged.
16:59Open-source analysis estimated the cost to Russia was approximately $7 billion.
17:05Russian military bloggers described it as Russia's Pearl Harbor.
17:09The comparison is doubly important because it shattered the assumption that Russia could
17:13use the Far East to protect its most important assets.
17:17Russian authorities were even forced to massively militarize Moscow's Victory Day
17:21parade preparations in May 2026.
17:24The guest list shrank to its smallest in decades, with almost no heads of state invited.
17:28Instead of rolling tanks, the Kremlin simply showed military equipment on video,
17:33afraid they would get destroyed by Ukraine in the middle of Russia's capital city.
17:37The operation was also a demonstration that Ukraine's covert apparatus has become technically
17:43sophisticated enough to run an 18-month logistics chain inside hostile territory without detection.
17:49The same FSB that had been tasked with preparing Ukraine for Russian occupation failed to detect a
17:55117 drone infiltration network operating inside Russia for a year and a half.
18:00And here's what that failure is costing Russia, and why the propaganda machine now has to work so hard.
18:06The Russian economy entered the war with significant energy revenues, accumulated reserves, and the ability to run a short war
18:13before the bill came due.
18:15The bill is now overdue.
18:17According to analysis from the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, a German policy research institute,
18:23Russia's surge in GDP, driven by massive defense spending, stalled during 2024, while inflation remained.
18:31Russia enacted an increase in value-added tax from 20% to 22% starting January 2026,
18:38aiming to recoup a part of its government funding from the Russian economy itself.
18:42Meanwhile, the country is spending 40% of its budget on the military and national defense,
18:47and has even been forced to reduce the budget for 2026, in acknowledgement of not having enough money.
18:53Russia's arms export capacity has also collapsed in parallel.
18:58Exports dropped by 92% between 2021 and 2024, according to Jamestown Foundation analysis,
19:05as production was redirected toward domestic war consumption, and Western sanctions restricted access to components.
19:11Countries that used to buy Russian equipment have shifted toward alternatives.
19:16Russia is building weapons for itself, and even then, they don't seem to be enough.
19:21However, Russia needs to maintain the illusion that it's winning the war,
19:25and that's done through the same propaganda machine that's been running for the past four years.
19:30As Russia keeps losing assets, the FSB needs to work overtime.
19:34Yousof openly claimed that it's clear even to the FSB that Ukrainians and the Western media
19:39know that what Russia puts on display isn't the truth.
19:42But it has to try, and the more it does, the more it really starts looking like North Korea.
19:47The FSB's efforts might be a bit too shallow for the arguably most important people in the war,
19:52the soldiers on the front line.
19:54On the front lines, however, Ukraine has begun conducting effective psychological warfare.
19:59The I Want to Live project, run by Ukraine's coordination headquarters for the treatment of prisoners of war,
20:05alongside the defense ministry and military intelligence,
20:08gives Russian soldiers a route to surrender under the Geneva Conventions.
20:12The service runs through a 24-hour hotline, a Russian-language website, and a telegram chatbot.
20:19It's drawn tens of millions of visits, the vast majority of them from inside Russia.
20:23Moscow has repeatedly blocked access to it, but those blocks keep getting circumvented.
20:29A companion service, I want to find, lets Russian families trace relatives killed or captured in Ukraine.
20:35These are relatively small teams producing reach in the millions.
20:39They're also among the few Ukrainian information operations
20:42that have demonstrably penetrated the Russian domestic information space.
20:46The fact that Russia is constantly trying to block them is proof.
20:50So, where does that leave us?
20:52In 2022, a large part of Ukrainian society and many Western observers
20:57genuinely believe that Russians simply didn't know the truth,
21:01that the right video, the right phone call, the right evidence would reach them,
21:05and something would change.
21:06After years, it's clear that there's only so much you can achieve
21:09by trying to fight disinformation with information,
21:13especially when the former has been in effect for decades.
21:16So, Ukraine arguably no longer needs to try to convert Russians.
21:19The I want to live campaign helps, but it's ultimately an attempt to soften Russia's frontline a bit.
21:25The focal point of the information war now is about maintaining credibility toward the people who matter.
21:31For Ukraine, this is the rest of the world,
21:33because if it stays demonstrably credible, the public will keep supporting it.
21:38But for Russia, this has become its own population,
21:41because four years of war have left it as a geopolitical pariah.
21:45And even that might not be enough,
21:47because the Kremlin is slowly losing one of its biggest regions, the Far East.
21:52To learn more, check out this video,
21:54and make sure to subscribe to The Military Show for more news on daily geopolitics.
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