Kyiv: Russia is spreading fake AI-generated images to claim the forced mobilisation of women

Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation announced on Saturday that Russian Telegram channels are distributing images created with artificial intelligence that claim Ukraine is forcibly mobilising women — a claim Kyiv calls an “information provocation” and dismisses as false.

As the New York Post reports, this week Russian Telegram channels began circulating falsified images, among them a photo showing a woman with an assault rifle and a baby, captioned “a real Ukrainian woman does these things in 40 seconds”. The image was presented as a recruitment advertisement of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in a Kyiv shopping centre.

One of the people who widely shared the photo was Russian television presenter Olesya Loseva, who wrote on Telegram on Tuesday about a “social advertisement in a Kyiv shopping centre next to a cosmetics store”, ironically noting that according to the Ukrainian authorities “baby nappies and assembling a machine gun are the same thing”. Other alleged images showed women in military uniform with the slogan “now it’s your turn, show your superpower”.

The Centre for Countering Disinformation stresses that women are not subject to forced mobilisation and that there is no plan to introduce it; women can join the Defence Forces only voluntarily. Ukrainian fact-checking experts report that the woman-and-baby image shows clear signs of AI generation — the Hive Moderation platform assesses a 99 percent likelihood that it was created artificially.

According to the government agency, “the enemy’s aim is to artificially create a sense of the inevitability of the forced mobilisation of women, to sow anxiety and to discredit voluntary recruitment into the Defence Forces”. The main source of the spread, it says further, is a network of Russian Telegram channels that systematically produces and distributes AI fakes to destabilise the situation in Ukraine. Russian channels also distributed altered images of “mobilisation summonses”, claiming that women in Kyiv and Kharkiv had been sent notices to report.

It is not the first time Russia has used manipulated photos: Russian disinformation media have previously circulated falsified screenshots of newspaper headlines such as those of the BBC, The Guardian, The Independent and Al Jazeera. On September 15, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov claimed during a roundtable in Moscow that there is “no doubt” Ukraine will be forced to mobilise women because of a shortage of manpower — a claim Kyiv dismisses, while it is precisely Russia that has suffered the greatest losses on the battlefield.