# Videos circulating since late 2025 that appear to show Ukrainian soldiers weeping, apologizing to the Russian people, and surrendering en masse are authentic front-line footage **Verdict: Contradicted.** The claim rated here is that a body of videos spreading since early November 2025, showing Ukrainian soldiers crying for their mothers, blaming their own government, and surrendering to Russian forces in large numbers, is genuine footage from the front. It is not. NBC News reviewed 21 of them and published its findings on 13 December 2025. In at least half, the corner watermark of OpenAI's Sora 2 was still visible. The clips that appeared to come from other AI platforms carried subtler errors instead, notably uniforms and helmets rendered in incorrect or simplified versions of what Ukrainian soldiers wear. A third tell was obvious to Ukrainians and invisible to everyone else: most of the soldiers were speaking Russian, and only eight of the 21 videos featured personnel speaking Ukrainian. Some clips used the face of Aleksei Gubanov, a Russian livestreamer who left Russia over his criticism of Vladimir Putin and now lives in New York. Two things need separating. Ukrainian soldiers have surrendered, been captured, and died in this war, and real footage of prisoners exists; none of that is in question and none of it is diminished here. What this file rates is the authenticity of these specific clips, which is debunked. Attribution is a genuinely open question: who produced and posted them has not been established, and this file names no perpetrator. Category: Government & Intelligence · Era: 2020s · First circulated: Began spreading in early November 2025 across YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and X; examined by NBC News in a review of 21 videos published on 13 December 2025, and cited by NBC again in January 2026 as an example of AI deception that had fooled officials · Believed by: Circulated heavily through pro-Russian and war-commentary accounts, and picked up by ordinary viewers on autoplay feeds who had no reason to inspect a short clip of soldiers in a trench. The videos were not aimed only at Russian-speaking audiences; they spread in English-language feeds too, where uniform details that would look wrong to a Ukrainian viewer meant nothing. URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/ukraine-surrender-deepfakes ## Summary In early November 2025, videos began circulating that appeared to show Ukrainian soldiers at their lowest: weeping, calling for their mothers, apologizing to the Russian people, blaming their own government for the war, and in some clips surrendering to Russian forces in groups. The footage was ultrarealistic and it traveled fast across YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and X. It was also generated. NBC News reviewed 21 of the videos and reported on 13 December 2025 that in at least half the giveaway was not subtle at all: Sora 2 stamps a small logo on downloaded video, and it was still there. Clips that appeared to come from other generators carried quieter errors instead, principally uniforms and helmets that were incorrect or simplified versions of real Ukrainian kit. A third signal was plain to Ukrainian viewers and meaningless to everyone else: most of the soldiers spoke Russian, and only eight of the 21 clips featured anyone speaking Ukrainian. One recurring face belonged to Aleksei Gubanov, a livestreamer who had fled Russia over his opposition to Putin and recognized himself in a uniform he had never worn. This file separates the real war, in which soldiers genuinely are captured and killed, from the rated claim that these particular videos document it. That claim is debunked. Who made and seeded them has not been established. ## The claim That videos circulating from November 2025 onward, showing Ukrainian soldiers weeping, apologizing to Russians, denouncing their own government, or surrendering in large numbers, are authentic recordings of real Ukrainian servicemen, and therefore evidence of collapsing morale and mass capitulation at the front. ## Origin and timeline - 2022-03: The technique has a precedent early in the full-scale invasion. A crude deepfake of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appearing to tell Ukrainian troops to lay down their arms circulates and is debunked within hours; it is poorly made and widely mocked. The idea of manufacturing a surrender is established years before the tools can execute it convincingly. - 2025-09-30: OpenAI releases Sora 2 alongside an invite-only iOS app, sharply lowering the cost and skill needed to produce short, photorealistic video from a text prompt. Downloaded video carries a visible moving watermark plus C2PA provenance metadata. - 2025-11: The videos appear. Clips spread showing Ukrainian soldiers weeping, calling for their mothers, apologizing to the Russian people, and blaming Kyiv for the war, alongside footage of groups appearing to surrender to Russian forces. They circulate on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and X. - 2025-11: One of the faces recognizes itself. Aleksei Gubanov, a Russian livestreamer who left Russia over his criticism of Vladimir Putin and now lives in New York, sees his own likeness in uniform, speaking lines he never said. He has never served in any army. 'At first I didn't take it seriously,' he later tells NBC News, 'but soon I noticed how quickly the view count was growing and, even worse, how many people believed these videos were real.' - 2025-12-13: NBC News publishes a review of 21 of the videos, and the findings are specific. In at least half, the Sora 2 watermark is still in the corner. Those that appear to come from other AI platforms carry subtler errors instead, notably incorrect or simplified versions of the uniforms and helmets Ukrainian soldiers wear. And most of the soldiers are speaking Russian: only eight of the 21 clips feature personnel speaking Ukrainian, an inconsistency obvious to a Ukrainian viewer and invisible to a foreign one. - 2025-12-13: Attribution stalls, and stays stalled. The reporting establishes what the videos are and where they spread, but not who generated or seeded them. NBC states plainly that it is not clear who created or posted them, and this file adopts that position rather than filling the gap. - 2026-01-09: The episode is cited as a benchmark case. In an NBC News report on what experts describe as a collapse of trust online, the Ukrainian surrender videos are listed among the AI fabrications that had fooled officials, alongside AI-generated material around the US operation in Venezuela and AI-generated evidence reaching courtrooms. - 2026-08: State of the record. No clip in this body of material has been authenticated as genuine footage. The war continues and real prisoners and real casualties are separately documented through conventional reporting, which is where evidence about the front actually comes from. ## The evidence, claim by claim - Claim: The footage looks completely real, so it must have been filmed at the front. Evidence: Photorealism stopped being evidence of provenance in 2025. These clips came from Sora 2, released at the end of September 2025 with a consumer app, and their realism is the product rather than a sign of authenticity. The decisive point is that the model labelled its own work: NBC News found the Sora watermark still present in at least half the circulating videos. A fabrication can be indistinguishable from footage at a glance and still be identifiable by where it came from. - Claim: The watermark argument only covers the ones with a watermark. The rest could be real. Evidence: The unwatermarked clips were not left unexamined; they simply failed different checks. NBC found that videos which appeared to come from other AI platforms carried consistent errors in the kit, uniforms and helmets rendered in incorrect or simplified versions of what Ukrainian forces wear, the sort of approximation a generator produces for equipment it has seen little of. A second inconsistency ran across the whole sample: most of the soldiers were speaking Russian, and only eight of the 21 videos featured anyone speaking Ukrainian, which is a strange property for footage of the Ukrainian army. Several clips also reused the face of a Russian livestreamer who has never served in any military. A batch sharing a period, a distribution pattern and a set of characteristic errors is assessed as a batch, not clip by clip in isolation. - Claim: Ukrainian soldiers really do surrender and really are captured, so these videos are showing something true even if some clips are synthetic. Evidence: The premise is correct and the conclusion does not follow. Soldiers on both sides have surrendered, been captured, and been killed; that is documented through conventional reporting, prisoner-exchange records, and international monitoring. A real underlying phenomenon is what makes a fabrication credible, not what makes it true. The specific claim these videos carry, mass capitulation and collective apology to Russia, is not established by clips that were generated, and treating a synthetic clip as approximate evidence of a real trend hands the fabricator exactly the outcome they wanted. - Claim: Calling them fake is itself propaganda; every inconvenient video now gets dismissed as AI. Evidence: That reflex is real and this site covers it as the liar's dividend, so the objection deserves a straight answer rather than a dismissal. The answer is that these clips were not waved away on vibes. They carry the generating model's own watermark in half the sample, contain a consistent class of equipment errors, and in places reuse identifiable faces from elsewhere. That is positive evidence of fabrication, not an absence of evidence for authenticity. The difference between a debunk and a dismissal is whether anything was checked. - Claim: If Russia made these, someone would have proved it by now. Evidence: Nobody has, and this file does not assert it. The content is plainly aligned with Russian messaging aims, and NBC frames it as a disinformation salvo intended to warp perceptions of the war, but alignment of interest is not evidence of authorship. Generative tools are available to states, to freelance propagandists, and to engagement farmers who care only about views. The honest statement is that the videos are fabricated and their origin is unestablished, and no amount of confidence about who benefits converts into a finding about who acted. ## Why people believe it - The war is real, long, and grinding, and exhaustion at the front is genuine and widely reported. A clip showing an exhausted soldier is not asking a viewer to believe anything implausible. - Video of prisoners and surrenders exists legitimately from this conflict, so the genre is familiar. The fabrications imitate a category of footage viewers have already seen authentic examples of. - Most people encountered these on autoplay in a feed, at small size, for a few seconds. Uniform and helmet errors are invisible under those conditions, and are meaningless to anyone not familiar with Ukrainian kit. - The emotional register does the work. A man crying for his mother short-circuits scrutiny in a way a policy claim never would, and the clips were built to be affecting rather than informative. - The Sora watermark is small, moves, and looks like the platform branding people are used to scrolling past. Its presence did not register as a disclosure to most viewers, which is a real limitation of watermarking as a public defense. ## Open questions - Who produced and seeded the videos is unresolved. Reporting has not established authorship, and this file makes no attribution; the possibility that different clips have different origins has not been excluded either. - How much of the material was ever believed, as opposed to knowingly shared by accounts pushing a line, is unmeasured. Reach figures do not distinguish between persuasion and participation. - Whether visible watermarking helps in practice is genuinely in doubt after this case. The mark was present in about half the sample and still did not stop circulation, which suggests the constraint is viewer attention rather than technical provenance. - Whether platform enforcement improved after the episode has not been independently assessed. The clips spread across four major platforms simultaneously, and no public accounting of what was removed, or how quickly, has been published. ## Latest developments - 2026-08-02T01:40Z: Opening entry, with the state of the record as of early August 2026. No clip from this body of material has been authenticated, and no authorship has been established; the file names nobody and will not until someone publishes evidence rather than inference. The thread most worth following is what this case says about watermarking as a defense. Sora's mark was present in roughly half the circulating videos and did not stop them spreading, which points at viewer attention rather than technical provenance as the binding constraint. If provenance signals are going to work, they will have to be surfaced by the platforms rather than left in the corner of the frame for people to notice. (source: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/openai-sora-realistic-ai-videos-ukrainian-soldiers-rcna247696) ## Sources - As war with Russia drags on, ultrarealistic AI videos attempt to portray Ukrainian soldiers in peril, NBC News (2025): https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/openai-sora-realistic-ai-videos-ukrainian-soldiers-rcna247696 - AI is intensifying a 'collapse' of trust online, experts say, NBC News (2026): https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/experts-warn-collapse-trust-online-ai-deepfakes-venezuela-rcna252472 - AI videos of Ukrainian soldiers surrendering to Russia is the war's latest disinformation salvo, AOL (NBC News syndication) (2025): https://www.aol.com/articles/war-russia-drags-ultrarealistic-ai-103000682.html - Those videos of Ukrainian soldiers crying for their mothers and apologizing? They're AI-generated deepfakes, Cybernews (2025): https://cybernews.com/ai-news/ukraine-russia-soldiers-ai-generated-deepfakes/ - As war with Russia drags on, ultrarealistic AI videos attempt to portray Ukrainian soldiers in peril, Yahoo News (NBC News syndication) (2025): https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/war-russia-drags-ultrarealistic-ai-103000047.html Rated by The Conspiratory, a neutral, sourced encyclopedia of conspiracy theories. Full page: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/ukraine-surrender-deepfakes