On February 28, 2025, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited Washington, D.C., where he met with U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance at the White House. The plan was to sign an agreement on natural resources and discuss peace talks between Ukraine and Russia. However, the meeting turned tense, leading to the early conclusion of the negotiations and the cancellation of the joint press conference.
During a meeting between US President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a tense argument arose. Vance expressed concern about Ukraine’s human resources, saying: “You are losing people faster than you can mobilize them.” This remark angered Zelenskyy, who saw it as interference in Ukraine’s internal affairs.
American media widely covered this event. It was noted that the dispute erupted after Vance insisted on a diplomatic solution to the conflict, to which Zelenskyy responded:“What diplomacy are you talking about?” Most agreed that such heated exchanges, with the leaders shouting at each other, were unprecedented in the Oval Office, where diplomatic etiquette is usually observed.
This situation was also exacerbated by an unprecedented campaign to disseminate videos of individual cases of forced mobilization in Ukraine, which were presented as systemic and widespread. The research and analytical group InfoLight.UA research and analytical group was able to obtain data on the number of posts and the overall reach of these materials on the X network using special software.
This graph shows the number of posts that used words about mobilization in Ukraine in a negative context (red graph) and about the so-called “busification” (black graph).
This graph shows the number of views of relevant posts (in thousands).
We noticed that the peak of sharing and views occurred on March 3, three days after the talks, when organic reach and sharing should have been declining. So we assumed that there was a coordinated activity that triggered this process. And we found at least one of them.
Blogger Andriy Luhansky (Serebryansky) created two threads on the X network. In the first one , he addressed JD Vance and argued “What is “Busification” in Ukraine, and Why It’s a Crime Against Humanity”.
The thread provided videos with examples of forced mobilization and contained a link to a Google drive on which the NGO “Ukrainian Diaspora” had allegedly collected 321 videos.
The drive was created on February 3, 2025, by the user busifikace1. Later, American officials, opinion leaders, and journalists were tagged in the thread.
The second trend was about “the Zelenskyy regime has organized a safari on its people – Ukrainians are being killed trying to escape to freedom,” in other words, about the restrictions on travel to Ukraine during martial law.
Both threads were actively shared on other social networks among the blogger’s followers and supporters. We found many traces of this coordinated activity, here are just a few of them:
We see a proliferation of posts with absolutely identical text, links to the trades and the aforementioned Google video.
The videos on this disc also deserve special attention.
We selectively analyzed them and identified the dates of publication and sources:
The video highlighted in red is a case that happened in the Ternopil TCC in October 23, and the military who allowed it to happen were convicted.
The video of a civilian fighting with the military in Kyiv on Khreshchatyk Street is a video from June 2024, in which a deserter from one of the military units started a fight after being asked to provide documents. This was reported by Ukrainian media.
Some of the videos, such as this one, were filmed by an unknown person in an unknown location, with a man in a military uniform saying the narratives necessary for propaganda. Currently, it is impossible to identify each of the million soldiers in Ukraine and to say with certainty whether the person in the video is a soldier and whether he or she belongs to the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
At the same time, the InfoLight.UA Research and Analysis Group, which has been systematically and continuously monitoring Ukraine’s information space since May 2022, has repeatedly recorded malicious disinformation narratives aimed at disrupting mobilization in Ukraine and ending support for Ukraine by our allies, primarily the United States. A detailed analysis can be found at this (part one), this (part two), this (part three) and this (final part) links.
A fairly typical pattern was the dissemination of videos that could not be identified, or the repeated dissemination of the same videos, with different contexts and in different situations. The hope was that the reader/viewer would not remember the previous one.
We must admit that these efforts were mostly successful. And so there was a great danger that the organized distribution of videos with forced mobilization in Ukraine, targeting American politicians, media and stakeholders, could affect relations between the countries and the path to peace that has begun thanks to the efforts of the Trump administration.
Fortunately, at this point there is no reason to believe that this coordinated campaign has been successful. Of course, we can see that the organic growth in coverage is directly related to the coordinated one and is likely a direct result of it. However, the absence of further public statements and the fading of the spread suggests that this information threat has now disappeared.
The InfoLight.UA research and analysis group, in cooperation with analysts from the Ukrainian Security Club, has developed a draft reform of the mobilization system, which, according to sociologists, could attract 300 to 800 thousand volunteers to the Armed Forces of Ukraine. This will undoubtedly eliminate the need for any means of coercion and make it impossible to manipulate information around this issue. Such long-term strategic decisions are the key to solving the existing problems mentioned by U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance. Read more about the essence of the reform here.
The material was prepared as part of the project “Major Disinformation of the Month. Analysis and refutation”.
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