At first, Kurayan’s captors portrayed him as a patriot, releasing old photos from when he ran supplies to Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines in the Donbass, where Russian-backed separatists have been fighting the Ukrainian government since 2014.
Then strange videos started surfacing. In one, Kurayan looked frail and ashen, flanked by two armed, masked men holding the blue and yellow flag of Ukraine and a red and black flag associated with the Ukrainian nationalist movement. He said Kherson was occupied and the gatherings were pointless, adding that the Territorial Defense there had been disbanded. In another, he denounced the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and called on his countrymen to surrender.
“I think further resistance is useless,” Kurayan said in the clip, which was shared on his social media accounts and aired on Russian state television. Standing in front of a weapons cache, his hands bound, he said he had been part of a plot to attack Russian soldiers and freedom activists but had resigned, adding: “I suggest all Territorial Defense fighters surrender their weapons.”
“They started using my father’s social media. They saw he was active on Facebook… They recorded him on TikTok — my dad doesn’t even know what TikTok is,” said Kurayan’s daughter Karyna, a 23-year-old journalist who left from Ukraine after the war started, he told CNN. “They wanted to make him a puppet.”
Karyna provided the videos and screenshots of the posts made on her father’s original social media accounts to CNN. The posts, which he shared with Ukrainian authorities, were removed by Kurayan after his release from prison.
Kurayan, who was released in a prisoner exchange in late April after nearly a month in detention, is one of several Ukrainians abducted from occupied regions of the country’s southeast in recent months and then sucked into the Kremlin’s propaganda machine. Some of their social media pages have been used to promote pro-Kremlin talking points, while others have appeared in staged television interviews in support of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war.
Speaking to CNN in an encrypted video call, Kurayan said Russian soldiers alternated between torturing him for information — twisting his fingers with pliers and beating him bloody with a bat — and using his iPhone to access his media accounts social media, sharing images depicting him as a hero turned traitor. “They started using these photos to play their game,” Kourayan said, adding that the kidnappers showed him how to steal his accounts, taunting him. “They used my Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, which I didn’t have, they made a page there.”
“The Russians offered me to betray Ukraine, to cooperate with them. First they wanted to show, ‘look here he is a patriot, and then he betrayed his country,’” Kurayan added, describing how his captors had formulated the arc of their strategy . in his social media use. “They said, ‘you’re a very famous person in Kherson … we want to make you mayor.’
CNN has reached out to TikTok for comment about the account created under its name, which is still active. Nothing has been posted since April 24, four days before his release.
“They started using those photos to play their game… They used my Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, which I didn’t have, they made a page there.”
Igor Kurayan, who was kidnapped by Russian soldiers
As the war in Ukraine rages on, the battle for hearts and minds is entering a new phase. Moscow is shifting its strategy from the national to the local level, attempting to bring Ukrainians living in occupied territories to Russia’s side. But after struggling to find willing partners, it has resorted to new tactics.
“At the beginning, in the blitzkrieg phase, Russia’s propaganda machine worked at the national level – now these efforts have been detected, they are trying to convince the locals, especially in the occupied territories, that Ukraine has abandoned you,” said Mykola Balaban. The deputy head of the Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security (Stratcom Center UA) under the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine told CNN.
“In the case of Igor and many others, they use this content inside Russia as well, to show, ‘look this Ukrainian was an activist, pro-Ukrainian, but now he understands, we show him what the real situation is and now he is pro-Russian and he understands what are we fighting for”.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin has repeatedly accused the West of spreading lies, with Russia’s UN ambassador Vasily Nebenzia claiming in May that the self-proclaimed “community of democracies” is building a “cyber-totalitarianism” and, along with tech giants such as Meta, they brand any alternative view as “propaganda”.
Putin’s information warfare is changing
More than any other country, Ukraine has borne the brunt of Russia’s so-called “hybrid warfare” — an insidious mix of disinformation campaigns, cyber attacks and ground combat. Since the Euromaidan revolution in 2014, which transformed Ukraine’s political landscape and society, ushering in closer ties with the West, it has been Moscow’s main target.
The Internet Research Agency (IRA), the notorious Kremlin-linked troll factory that fueled discord in the 2016 US presidential election, has used Ukraine as a testing ground for its tactics for years. But in the wake of revelations of Russian election meddling, tech giants like Facebook and Twitter have stepped up efforts to crack down on coordinated inauthentic activity.
As a result, Russia has increasingly relied on what experts call “information laundering,” legitimizing false or double narratives through a network of pro-Kremlin actors, journalists, activists and other proxies — a practice known as “dzhynsa” in Ukrainian (referring to money kept in a jeans pocket for illegal transactions).
Since Russia’s invasion, hackers have broken into social media accounts and telecommunications networks of trusted sources in Ukraine—government officials, media, Ukrainian soldiers and civilians—to spread false messages that Ukrainian troops have surrendered and, more generally, to sow confusion. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, said in April that it traced a campaign targeting Ukrainian military personnel to a state-sponsored hacking group in Belarus known as Ghostwriter. It also said its systems detected and thwarted attempts by an IRA-linked network to return to Facebook.
“They can capture real people and do whatever they want with social media, this social mirror of that real person.”
Mykola Balaban, deputy head of Stratcom Center UA also counters. In May, a UK-funded investigation claimed that a new Russian troll farm allegedly operated from an arms factory in St Petersburg – with suspected links to Yevgeny Prigozhin, a key Putin ally and the man believed to be behind by the IRA – piracy. on social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter and TikTok, targeting accounts of world leaders and promoting pro-war messages. The British government said it had alerted the platforms to the activity and that the evidence would help root out Russian-influenced operations.
In this context, Russia must find new strategies. Now her powers are looking for real people to push their narratives — whether they want to or not.
“They can capture real people and do whatever they want with social media, this social mirror of that real person,” said Balaban, who has been watching Russia’s disinformation strategies for years — first as a historian, then as a soldier and now as a government official. “Of course, when you talk about resources, it’s much more expensive and complicated, because you need special people to work with these captives, like Igor Kurayan, it’s not as simple as fake accounts and bot farms.”
Balaban’s Stratcom Center UA works closely with fact-checking and civil society groups to monitor Ukrainian social accounts at risk of hijacking, business influence and hacking. As part of this work, the center also manages a database of official Ukrainian sources, which it regularly shares with Meta and other social networks for monitoring purposes.
CNN has identified at least five kidnapped Ukrainians whose Facebook accounts were used to spread pro-Russian war messages or appeared themselves in propaganda videos shared on social networks. All were public figures — prominent local activists, officials and veterans. All but Kurayan are still missing, according to their friends and families.
The cases, while concerning, do not appear to be a trend, according to Meta.
The company announced several security features for users in Ukraine in response to the war and encouraged those who might be targeted to install two-factor authentication.
“Russian media is 100% lies”
As it turned out, Russian propaganda saved Kurayan. After being transferred from a basement in Kherson to a barracks in Sevastopol, Crimea, Kurayan was filmed in a report on Ukrainian prisoners of war. In it, he appears for a moment, sitting among other prisoners gathered in a room to watch Russian state television. Many avoid looking at the film crew, some with their heads in their hands. The video was broadcast on several Russian channels, including state-run NTV, which described “good conditions” in the barracks and claimed that the prisoners “want the war to end, to live in peace.” Days later, in a surreal scene, Kurayan said he was in the same screening room when he saw himself appear on the screen. “When I was in Sevastopol, I saw these…
