BANNER: Handout photo shows IAEA officials visiting a fresh fuel storage facility at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant on September 4, 2024. (Source: IAEA via ABACAPRESS.COM via Reuters)

Over the last three years since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, fearmongering about Ukraine attacking or otherwise weaponizing its nuclear power plants (NPPs) has played a recurring role in pro-Russian influence campaigns. A key location in this messaging has been the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) near the city of Enerhodar.

Since Russia’s occupation of the facility on March 12, 2022, ZNPP has been a point of contention, raising fears of possible nuclear escalation, with fighting regularly breaking out in the vicinity. Ukraine has prioritized ZNPP safety guarantees in any potential peace deal with Russia, making the facility a prominent target for propagandist fearmongering. This highlights the crucial need to understand the mechanisms and propagation channels employed by Kremlin-backed actors to instill themselves in mainstream discourse.

To establish these narratives, Russia uses a combination of official and unofficial sources. Russian regime figures, state media, and military bloggers periodically make flashy claims that a Ukrainian attack is imminent, but inauthentic social media accounts prime the information space by creating the impression of widespread fear or expectation that Ukraine is preparing to attack a nuclear plant.

In one case that began on August 10, 2024, the DFRLab observed fifty-five Facebook accounts posing as women from Ukraine posting a set of three identical comments expressing fear that Ukraine is preparing a provocation against the Zaporizhzhia NPP. The comments used linguistic markers consistent with native Ukrainian-language users in pro-Ukrainian communities. This is particularly evident in the expressions used to refer to Russians; the comments consistently use a lowercase “r” when talking about Russia – a common practice among both social media users and official Ukrainian accounts; and avoidance of using Russia’s proper name, instead employing a derogatory, colloquial Ukrainian term for the country. Yet while the text is in Ukrainian, it authentically employs Russified slang for speakers of Surzhyk, a pidgin of Ukrainian and Russian. For example, in the comment pictured below, the Russian word “олухи” (blockheads) is rendered in the correct Ukrainian spelling. To an average Facebook user who does not spend much time verifying the authenticity of the comments, it could pass as a legitimate message penned by a Ukrainian user.

The profiles of these accounts featured believable Ukrainian names but were void of content except for three posts that followed a consistent pattern: a dump of photos of the woman in the profile, a post announcing a new profile picture, and another photo post matching the person in the pictures, all posted on the same day. The formulaic profiles and repetitive commenting behavior strongly suggest that the accounts are inauthentic and centrally operated. Many of these accounts have been deleted since they first appeared in August 2024.

The accounts commented on posts from popular Ukrainian pages, ranging from verified government accounts to major news media. Notably, none of these comments were observed on pro-Russian channels. The targeting of groups frequented by pro-Ukrainian audiences and the authentic-sounding messages show an effort to tailor narratives in order to cultivate general unrest around matters of nuclear escalation within as many social groups as possible.

These comments were clustered around dates closely aligned with Zaporizhzhia entering the news cycle. On August 11, the day after the earliest observation of these comments, a fire broke out in a ZNPP cooling tower. Ukraine and Russia both accused each other of starting the fire, but the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) did not assign blame to either. After August 11, the comments stopped for a few days before resuming on August 17, the same day as a drone strike on the perimeter of the plant and the day after pro-Russian military bloggers and media channels pushed an accusation that the Ukrainian Armed Forces were preparing an imminent provocation against nuclear plants in Zaporizhzhia and Kursk.

On August 22, one day before the messages again resumed on August 23, the Ukrainian government reported a mass Russian attack against the Ukrainian electricity grid. These attacks against Ukraine’s power supply have been used regularly to disrupt the flow of everyday life in the country and sow uncertainty among the population. Adding alarmist messaging focused on a potential nuclear escalation contributes to the general sense of unease, potentially serving as an instrument of influence.

The initial battle for the Zaporizhzhia NPP, which included missiles being launched over the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, alarmed the international community, leading to regular assessments of the security situation by the IAEA, with the results of the first on-the-ground inspection published in September 2022.  Russian propaganda has regularly manipulated and misrepresented the findings of the IAEA presence around Enerhodar to paint Ukraine as the aggressor preventing regular inspections and plotting potential escalations.

The IAEA has confirmed an ongoing threat to the integrity of the power plant, acknowledging instances of drone warfare without placing concrete blame on any side of the conflict. Official Russian channels, however, have seized this opportunity to blame the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), exploiting IAEA statements to increase the credibility of claims. This is the same pattern of behavior the DFRLab previously observed in connection with the Kursk NPP, where Russian officials and state-affiliated media also used IAEA statements and visits to attempt to craft a narrative blaming Ukraine for potential escalations. The statements are either manipulated to twist the truth or, in some cases, used to create a false narrative claiming the IAEA is “aware of the truth” and is secretly on Russia’s side without the possibility to say so outright. The co-opting of messaging by a respected international agency supplemented with a claim implying insider knowledge works to further add validity to the propagandist messages.

The use of reputable international agencies to fabricate credibility, paired with increasing speculation about nuclear escalation and eventual catastrophe, is nothing new for Russian propaganda. Much of the existing Russian influence arsenal is tied to the ability to continue using and adapting a clear set of meta-narratives, allowing the malicious actors a better chance at crafting recognizable and memorable messages that resonate with audiences. However, the channels of narrative proliferation can change and be tailored to specific audiences.

As in the case of the Kursk NPP, nuclear escalation-related narratives around Zaporizhzhia follow a familiar distribution pattern: after emerging on Telegram channels or within other social media comments, mainstream media and government officials amplify these claims. The originators of these messages are often milblogger accounts or established commentators on Telegram, who might claim some access to “exclusive” or “private” information, attempting to boost interest in their claims. These accounts post primarily in Russian and generally target domestic audiences in Russia, those living in occupied territories, and Ukrainian citizens either close to the frontlines or interested in consuming Russian content. They rarely hide their pro-Russian inclinations and are easily identifiable as potentially malign actors, making the pickup of their content by Kremlin-aligned media and officials a natural next step.

As mentioned above, the DFRLab observed a clear example of this pattern in the context of Zaporizhzhia on August 16. RIA Novosti, a Russian state-owned news outlet, cited a pair of Telegram posts from the milblogger Marat Khairullin (@voenkorkhayrullin) as evidence that Ukraine was preparing to attack the Kursk and Zaporizhzhia NPPs. A series of other pro-Russian media sites and Telegram channels then cited the RIA article in their own content. This process of laundering and amplifying claims is a staple of anti-Ukrainian messaging originating from Russia.

What distinguishes this case of the Zaporizhzhia NPP-targeted narratives is the presence of an additional channel: superficially pro-Ukrainian comments from inauthentic accounts. By seeding concerns of intentional escalation by the Ukrainian armed forces in pro-Ukrainian contexts, Russian operators are attempting to prime the information space to more readily accept overt accusations of Ukrainian culpability for incidents involving the ZNPP.

Iryna Adam and Meredith Furbish, “Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant and cycles of nuclear hysteria,” Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), February 26, 2025, https://dfrlab.org/2025/02/26/zaporizhzhia-nuclear-power-plant-and-cycles-of-nuclear-hysteria/.