A full version of this report is available through NewsGuard’s Reality Check.

By Eva Maitland and Madeline Roache | Published on Feb. 21, 2025

As the war in Ukraine approaches the three-year anniversary of the Russian invasion that launched the conflict, NewsGuard has now identified and debunked 302 false claims relating to the war, nearly all of them originating as Russian propaganda.  

These 302 claims appear in NewsGuard’s Misinformation Fingerprints proprietary database of viral false narratives that NewsGuard analysts have identified and debunked. NewsGuard analysts have identified 551 websites spreading these false claims. 

Both the content and tactics behind the Russian efforts have evolved since the Feb. 24, 2022, invasion, in both subtle and stark ways.

Among NewsGuard’s findings:

• As the war has gone on, Russian disinformation operatives have increasingly turned to artificial intelligence (AI), which has served as a force multiplier for Russian propagandists, both in the scale and persuasiveness of their campaigns. NewsGuard debunked 112 false claims in the first year of the war, one of which was AI, 71 in the second, five of which were AI, and 119 in the third, 16 of which were AI. AI has also facilitated the creation of fake news sites posing as credible media. Leading Russian propagandist John Mark Dougan has acknowledged to NewsGuard that he uses AI as a force multiplier. 
• In the early months of the war, Russian propaganda often focused on alleged claims about the prevalence of Nazism in Ukraine, along with denials that Russia targeted civilian targets. More recently, Russia has pushed baseless false claims about Ukrainian corruption, Zelensky’s supposedly declining domestic political support, and wasteful spending of Western dollars, with many of these accusations created and spread by Dougan. According to comments made by Russian television presenter Vladimir Solovyov on Russian state TV, one of these false claims – that Zelensky has only a four percent approval rating – may have come from a phone conversation that Russian President Vladimir Putin had with U.S. President Donald Trump. Solovyov said, “Many of the narratives being voiced [by Trump] largely materialized after their [Putin and Trump’s] conversation.”
• Russia’s propaganda efforts are often funded, unknowingly, by major American and global brands whose advertisements are fed onto Russian disinformation sites automatically as part of the programmatic advertising ecosystem through which ads will appear on low-quality websites if brands don’t take steps to prevent it.