The AI-generated images resemble cheap cartoons, the floating passport covers are illegible and there is no evidence that their alleged holders even exist.
Nevertheless, an entirely fabricated story of three British military officers being “captured” in a Russian raid on a Ukrainian naval base has spread online in the past week – even being shared by two former British members of parliament and gaining traction from Norway to Pakistan.
DW takes a look at a narrative which bears all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation and the channels via which such stories spread.
Claim: “Russian Spetsnaz RAID and capture senior UK officers in Ochakov!”
DW Fact Check: False
A story appeared in Russian media last week that three British military officers – supposedly two colonels in the British Army and an officer from British military intelligence (MI6) – were captured in a Russian raid on a Ukrainian naval base in the small southern city of Ochakiv (known in Russian as Ochakov).
One of the most prominent social media posts (screenshot above) regurgitating the story has accrued almost 500,000 views on X (formerly Twitter), another has almost 400,000 and another has over 222,000.
The “colonels” were named as “psychological ops specialist Edward Blake” and “Richard Carroll – a Ministry of Defence official with Middle East experience” who were captured during a “lightning-fast” nighttime raid by elite spetsnaz (special forces) troops in an operation codenamed “Skat-12.”
A spectacular military and diplomatic coup were it true – which it’s not; it’s completely made up.
As Craig Langford from the specialist UK Defence Journal (UKDJ) analyzed, there is no trace of “Edward Blake” or “Richard Carroll” in any recent British Armed Forces or Ministry of Defence (MoD) records.
“In short, there is no proof these individuals exist, let alone that they were captured,” wrote Langford, while a spokesman for the MoD refused to even acknowledge the story when asked by DW.
Classic AI image errors
What’s more, four different images used to illustrate the story across various media outlets and social media channels don’t only depict six different men (who don’t exist); they have also demonstrably been generated using artificial intelligence.
The AI image detection tool SightEngine puts the probability of the four images being AI-generated at between 91% and 99%, but obvious visual errors suffice: cartoonish faces, oversized limbs, upside-down rifles, illegible passport covers, gibberish documents and an officer’s cap missing its peak.
“The uniforms worn by the kneeling men also reveal the image as a fake,” explained Langford for the UKDJ, referring to one of the main image at the top of this article, which appeared in some of the fake reporting.
“While the camouflage superficially resembles British Army patterns, the details are wrong. Military clothing follows strict patterns and standards, especially in operational environments, and these deviations suggest that the uniforms were generated based on visual approximations rather than real references.”
A typical Russian disinformation campaign
But this didn’t stop the story from appearing in several Russian outlets (here, here and here) before being reproduced in English on the Kremlin-controlled EurAsia Daily and Serbia’s state-owned B92. DW is banned in Russia but B92 didn’t respond to a request for comment on why they ran the story.
For Roman Osadchuk, Director of Threat Intelligence at LetsData and Non-Resident Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, the whole story is typical of a Russian disinformation operation.
“The Kremlin effectively has sub-contractors such as the Social Design Agency or Storm 15-16 who will have groups of people conceiving stories and drawing up options for dissemination,” he tells DW from Kyiv, Ukraine.
“The idea is simple: seed it on fringe or fake websites, forward it via Telegram channels until more outlets pick it up and begin to cite each other, a process known as media laundering. Then more mature Telegram channels with more followers will pick it up, and finally mainstream Russian media kick in, and the echo chamber grows. Then, there’s a chance that certain foreign actors will pick it up.”
Former British politicians spread fake news
Indeed, the story soon found mouthpieces in western Europe, including the Norwegian communist and conspiracy theorist Pal Steigan – who later retracted the story after recognizing that it was “poorly fact-checked on our part.”
In the United Kingdom, the story was amplified by former members of parliament George Galloway – who worked as a presenter on the Russian state-owned RT broadcaster for nine years until 2022 and has blamed NATO and the West for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – and Andrew Bridgen, who was expelled from the center-right Conservative Party in 2023 for tweeting that the use of COVID-19 vaccines was “the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust.”
While DW approached both Galloway (who has over 825,000 followers on X) and Bridgen (over 300,000) for comment, requests which have gone unanswered, the story even made it as far as Pakistan.
Who is the target audience for Russian propaganda?
According to Osadchuk, the target audience abroad is “disgruntled people who believe that ‘the mainstream media won’t publish this.'” But he thinks the bigger audience is actually inside Russia itself, “to show Russians how mighty the military is.”
This is supported by an element of the story which would likely strike a greater chord among Russian readers than elsewhere; the idea of the United Kingdom as a shadowy geopolitical operator.
“A key trope of Russian propaganda is that the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ are puppeteers conducting the war,” explains Osadchuk.
“It’s the trope of the external enemy. It’s not Ukraine resisting; the British must be behind it. The British in particular are often considered responsible for military intelligence and covert operations, hence the claim that they captured a ‘psychological operations officer’ specifically.”
Engage or ignore? How to deal with Russian disinformation
So, when confronted with intentionally erroneous stories such as this, how best to respond? Is it best to simply ignore them to prevent them spreading? Or does there come a point when some engagement is necessary?
“We can ignore disinformation until certain thresholds, which vary according to topic, platform and country,” advises Roman Osadchuk.
“If it’s just a crazy comment beneath a social media post with five views, then just ignore it. But if a story starts to be disseminated on multiple platforms or if, in this case, former members of a country’s parliament are sharing it, it starts to become more substantial and should be debunked.”
Edited by Andreas Illmer
