The Putin impersonation case

The recent incident of Russian President Vladimir Putin's image and voice being faked using deepfake technology has raised alarm bells about a new type of "weapon" in the conflict in Ukraine.

Russian President Vladmir Putin. (Source: Reuters)

On June 5, the Kremlin issued an urgent announcement stating that a video clip of Russian President Vladimir Putin broadcast on many radio and television stations in regions bordering Ukraine was a deepfake created by hackers.

Fake video, real impact

In the speech, the voice of Russian President Vladimir Putin created by deepfake technology said a state of emergency had been declared in Russia's Belgorod, Voronezh and Rostov regions due to impending attacks from Ukrainian forces. The fake Putin also asked residents in the regions to evacuate their homes and seek shelter deeper inside Russia.

Deepfake is a technology that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to take a person's image and voice and paste it into another person's video. Deepfake technology collects a subject's facial image and then replaces this face with another person's face in the video. For audio files, deepfake uses a real person's voice recording to train a computer to speak exactly like that person.

Radio Mir , one of the stations hit by the attack, said the incident lasted about 40 minutes. Meanwhile, TV clips of the fake Putin video have also begun to spread on social media. No individual or organization has yet claimed responsibility for the incident.

After the clip went viral, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov asserted that the declaration of martial law was the work of hackers.

"There is definitely no (declaration of martial law). There was indeed hacking in some regions. I was told that there was a hacking incident on Radio Mir and on some other channels. Now all the hackers have been eliminated and the information channels are under control again," Dmitry Peskov told Russia's TASS news agency.

The Kyiv Post also reported that the administrative center of the Belgorod region called the video message a deepfake aimed at "instilling fear in peaceful Belgorod residents."

Hanna Liubakova, a Belarusian journalist and non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council, shared a TV clip showing a fake image of Mr. Putin.

Assessing the incident, data scientist Arseny Khakhalin, an expert in artificial intelligence (AI), said that this hack could be typical of the use of deepfake to weaponize the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

However, this is not the first time deepfake technology has been used in this conflict. In the first weeks of Russia’s special military operation in February 2022, a deepfake video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was released. In the deepfake video, Mr. Zelensky appeared to urge his soldiers to lay down their weapons and surrender. The video was quickly removed, but it had already gone viral on social media.

In propaganda, deepfake technology has a convincing military or political effect, this is a weapon that can have a huge impact. (Source: socialmediasafety)

The new popular weapon

Colonel Philip Ingram, a former British military intelligence officer and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) policymaker, told Politico Europe about the Putin impersonation that deepfake posts purportedly created from real data are a growing risk in a world influenced by AI.

According to this person, in propaganda, deepfake technology brings convincing military or political effects, this is a weapon that can have a huge impact.

“I suspect this is a new weapon of mass production,” added Colonel Philip Ingram. He cited a fake photo of the Pentagon bombing that went viral on Twitter a few weeks ago, causing the stock market to plunge $500 billion before recovering.

Professor Hany Farid at the University of California, Berkeley (USA), an expert on digital media, warned that people should not be surprised by such things in the current context when people build and deploy tools to manipulate reality combined with media channels such as TV, radio, internet ... can immediately impact billions of dollars. Many agents with different purposes will abuse these technologies.

“This is especially true when our regulators have not sought to provide adequate protections for the tech sector, while Silicon Valley continues to grow fast and disrupt things,” Professor Hany Farid stressed.

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