Deepfake: Arestovych "spoke" about how military framed President's Office in Russian Il-76 story

On January 24, an Il-76 military transport plane crashed in Russia. The Russian Defense Ministry reported that there were 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war on board the plane and they were flying for a prisoner swap. Russia did not provide any reliable evidence of this but started an active information campaign to promote its own version and already known narratives. For example, a video was posted on TikTok in which Oleksiy Arestovych, a former adviser of the Office of the President of Ukraine, allegedly says that there were prisoners of war from the Azov regiment on the plane and that the Ukrainian military deliberately framed the President's Office.

This is a fake video that was created using neural networks. The video clearly shows a complete mismatch of lip movements with words. There are also visual inconsistencies in the video, including flickering and pixelation, which indicate that the video is a deepfake. This is done so that a low-quality fake is more difficult to recognize with the naked eye.

In addition, according to an examination carried out by the Aiornot service, the audio track used in this video was most likely created with the help of artificial intelligence.

Using the Il-76 plane crash, propagandists are once again trying to advance the narrative of the conflict between President Volodymyr Zelensky and Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Valerii Zaluzhnyi. The objective of this is to destabilize the situation in Ukraine and try to divide Ukrainians into two camps.

Earlier, Ukrinform explained how propagandists use "positive" fakes to discredit the head of the National Bank of Ukraine, Andriy Pyshnyy.

Dmytro Badrak