russian media have increasingly spread staged videos about alleged “atrocities by the Ukrainian Armed Forces” in the kursk region to discredit Ukraine’s military.

In particular, the Center for Countering Disinformation recorded another wave of disinformation around the following topics:

▫️ “Shooting of civilians”. Russians claim to have found video evidence of civilians being killed, allegedly filmed on a GoPro from a Ukrainian soldier’s helmet.  The propagandists show only a few seconds of the video shot in a dark room, making it impossible to verify the events or participants.

▫️ “Severed heads and hanging in a church”. Propagandists released videos featuring an elderly man claiming to be an “evacuated resident” of kursk. He did not restrain his imagination – he told about a man hanged in a church, a raped woman whose head was cut off, Polish and Georgian mercenaries who kidnapped people and kept them in the basement. The man did not provide any evidence.

▫️ “The battle for the harvest”. In order to further shock their audience and emphasize that “nothing is sacred” for the Ukrainian military, enemy propagandists spread fakes about the deliberate burning of fields with unharvested crops or about a man who allegedly died in his garden.

▫️ “Shelling of cars and burning of villages”. The propaganda spreads from women who claim that there have been massive cases of civilian cars being shot at and drone attacks on villages with incendiary munitions. Notably, the people who share such stories have not seen any of this with their own eyes. They sincerely admit that these are gossip stories they heard from their friends.