Top PsyOps of the Week (July 6 – July 12, 2026): How Info Scammers Targeted Kharkiv Teens and Budapest’s "Black Screen"

The Ram stops, breathes heavily, his eyes squint in different directions, and blurs out:

— Well, the comrade major told me that if I report the successful capture of the fence, they will allow me to paint that Sea of Azov green and will give me a free ticket to a Kobzon concert!

This absurd image of a ram blindly hitting a wall for the sake of fabricated reports perfectly illustrates the logic of many modern enemy PsyOps. They are often built so detached from reality that they border on an anecdote, but their goal remains entirely serious — to sow panic, distort facts, and distract attention from real failures.

The "Young Saboteur School" Fake Targeting Kharkiv Teens

Russian propaganda, amplified by collaborator Vitaliy Ganchev, launched a fake narrative claiming that schoolchildren in the Kharkiv region are being forcefully trained as "saboteurs" and sent straight to the front lines. In reality, this was a completely distorted spin on a standard, open-source 5-day civilian defense course for 10th and 11th graders under the school subject "Defense of Ukraine".

The actual curriculum focuses purely on survival and safety skills: mine awareness, first aid, basic drone operation, and topography. To boost this panic-inducing fake, propagandists used AI to generate a low-quality deepfake of Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov, who absurdly claims that teens don't need real military training because they already possess all necessary skills "thanks to playing video games like Counter-Strike."

The Russian Olympic Committee's Legal Self-Sabotage

The Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) attempted a sneaky legal maneuver to bypass international sanctions imposed for annexing sports organizations in occupied Ukrainian territories.

They quietly rewrote their charter, removed references to "regional Olympic councils" on occupied lands, and asked the IOC to lift the restrictions. However, Russian Minister of Sports Mikhail Degtyarev immediately ruined the deception by bragging to domestic media that Russia "did not give up any territories."

He revealed that the ROC merely shifted all real sports oprations in the occupied territories to the Russian Ministry of Sports—which Degtyarev also heads. This blunder serves as a blatant, official admission that Moscow's promises to the IOC are a deliberate fraud.

The Sudden Collapse of Hungary's Pro-Kremlin M1 Channel

Following the recent elections, Hungary's new Prime Minister, Péter Magyar, fulfilled his promise to dismantle the state-run "lies factory." On July 7, at 16:00, the broadcasting of the M1 channel—which had long served as an unfiltered amplifier of Kremlin propaganda (spreading fakes about Ukraine mobilizing ethnic Hungarians, anti-LGBT/Soros conspiracies, and xenophobic fake news)—was completely halted.

Instead, viewers saw a black screen with an apology text: "Public media has no right to lie. We apologize for doing it anyway for years."

When broadcasting resumed at the symbolic time of 19:56 (commemorating the 1956 anti-communist uprising), the channel aired the iconic satirical film The Witness (A tanú), which mocks the stupidity of totalitarian regimes. This shift cuts off a vital legal platform used by Russian intelligence to legitimize disinformation within the EU.

Patriotic Scams: How Trash Pages Profit from Ukrainian Emotions

Anonymous Facebook pages and "trash bins" are exploiting the emotional vulnerability of Ukrainians in wartime by fabricating sensationalized headlines (e.g., "Ukrainian 'Flamingo' missiles destroyed Moscow's defenses").

These pages blend names of real Ukrainian military projects with Hollywood-style fictions to bypass critical thinking. Their ultimate goal is purely financial: the final line always urges users to watch "the video in the comments," which leads to a private Telegram channel requiring a join request.

This traffic-draining scheme builds audiences to later resell the channels or monetize them via shady ads like online casinos, crypto scams, or phishing links. A more sophisticated variation is the resource "Україна online" (with Latin spelling), which uses a legitimate-looking news website as a shield, but relies heavily on aggressive clickbait and distorted contexts to monetize public anxiety.

EU Cracks Down on Meta's Addictive Algorithms

While Russian networks deploy low-grade deepfakes, the European Commission is striking at the very digital infrastructure that makes them viral. The EU has challenged Meta for violating the Digital Services Act (DSA), finding that platforms like Facebook and Instagram are intentionally designed to cause addiction (via infinite scrolling, auto-playing videos, and highly personalized recommendations).

These algorithms trap users—especially teenagers—in feedback loops of extreme or addictive content, which creates the perfect breeding ground for viral PsyOps. If the EU enforces changes (Meta faces fines up to 6% of global turnover), turning off infinite scroll and autoplay by default will disrupt the mechanics of "emotional contagion," giving users a critical buffer of time to think critically before consuming or sharing disinformation.

Read more in the Ukrainian edition....