At the beginning of January 2024, a video began to circulate on social networks in which the head of the Security Service of Ukraine Vasily Malyuk addresses his compatriots who publish videos of air defense work on social networks. On the recording, he promises to personally come to every offender. We decided to check if this video is true.

In the 30-second video, a person who looks like the head of the SBU says the following text: “I would like to appeal to those inquisitive guys and girls who shoot videos of the arrivals and work of our air defense. You know, I've been very interested in your work lately. I'm so carried away that I'm looking for each of the authors of these videos. When I ring your doorbell, I hope that you will look at the screen of your intercom with the same fucking persistence with which you shoot these videos of yours.” This video was reported by such Telegram channels as “Uncle Slava"(215,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Ukraine 24/7 – news"(204,000), Voblya (155,000) and "Ukraine.ru"(132,000).

There is nothing substantively surprising in the call not to stop air defense operations. Ukrainian officials regularly remind us of this, and in the spring of 2022 they added a direct ban on such filming to the criminal code. In Article 114-2 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine indicated, that “dissemination of information about the movement, movement or location of the Armed Forces of Ukraine or other military formations formed in accordance with the laws of Ukraine, if possible, to identify them on the ground, if such information was not placed in the public domain by the General Staff, the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine or other authorized government bodies, committed under conditions of martial law or a state of emergency” is punishable by up to imprisonment for a term of five to eight years in prison.

However, the video distributed on social networks with calls from the head of the SBU is not on website service, nor in its social networks. In the video, in the upper left corner of the viral video, the inscription “Base, tse Houston” is placed.

There is a Telegram channel with this name, his logo is used in the video with Malyuk. “The artificial intelligence Bandera GPT comments on the news, we teach it to be Ukrainian,” the description states. The channel’s authors do not hide the fact that their videos are deepfakes based on real news. The video with an appeal allegedly from the head of the SBU was first published by the Telegram channel “Base, Houston» On January 2, 2024 at 22:41 Moscow time, it collected 1.6 million views.

Thus, Vasily Malyuk’s appeal, in which he promises to come to everyone who publishes a video of air defense work, was created by artificial intelligence. The authors of the video did not hide this - the appeal was posted in a thematic Telegram channel, but then the video began to be distributed on social networks as genuine.

Cover photo: screenshot “Verified”