Putin is regularly shown AI videos from the so-called Russia's successes on the front

FT interlocutors close to the Russian president claim that the pressure to achieve successes on the battlefield encourages commanders to exaggerate the scale of territorial gains.

One of the sources described the mechanism in which the report on the occupation of a town is passed through subsequent levels of command - from the colonel through generals to the General Staff and the commander-in-chief. However, before the information reaches the top, Russian troops may withdraw from the declared position.

According to the source, the result will be orders to attack subsequent points, issued on the basis of false data about previous conquests. This, in turn, is expected to increase losses on both sides.

That's why Stalin sentenced people to death for this, the source said.

Dozens of questionable recordings

The Financial Times reports that there are dozens of recordings suggesting the occupation of Ukrainian towns that could have been created using AI. Initially, they were supposed to appear in the channels of Russian bloggers supporting the war, but later they also began to appear in official communications.

In mid-October, the Russian Ministry of Defense published a video showing a soldier waving a Russian flag from the window of a damaged building in Dobropol in the Donetsk Oblast. The head of the Conflict Intelligence Team, Ruslan Leviev, told the FT that the material had to be edited. He pointed to a sudden change in the position of the flag, which - in his opinion - cannot be explained by file compression or image noise.

Analysts from the American Institute for the Study of War (ISW) from June to August identified at least 35 recordings that could have been fabricated using artificial intelligence. Ten of them were considered false with a high probability.

ISW noted that the actual number of such materials may be higher because tools for detecting AI-generated content have limited effectiveness.

One example was supposed to be a film about the alleged occupation of Świętogórsk. The information contained in the recording was allegedly denied by the commander of the 3rd Army Corps of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, General Andriy Biletsky, who arrived in the city, as well as by representatives of the Russian community of war bloggers.

Differences in assessments of Russia's progress

In September, Putin stated on Russian television that since the beginning of the year, the Russian army has occupied 6,500 square kilometers of the territory of Ukraine. According to OSINT analyzes cited by the FT, the area controlled by Russia increased by approximately 1,500 square kilometers at most during this time. square kilometers

ISW estimated, however, that after taking into account the areas retaken by Ukraine, from January to October, Russia's net territorial gain amounted to 119 square kilometers.