Could technology help me accept I will never hug my son again? No. It's an illusion.
In the long human story of mourning, the living have always sought ways to keep the dead present — in portraits, in rituals, in the stories told at gravesides. Now, in Russia, where tens of thousands of families have lost soldiers in Ukraine, artificial intelligence has become the newest instrument of that ancient longing. Grieving relatives are commissioning deepfake videos that animate the dead — returning them home, lifting them toward heaven — while the destruction that caused their deaths remains carefully out of frame. The technology does not resolve grief so much as it reshapes it, and in doing so, it raises questions that no algorithm can answer: what we owe the dead, what we owe the truth, and whether an illusion of presence is a form of healing or a deeper wound.
- With at least 225,000 Russian soldiers verified dead in Ukraine, a vast and largely unacknowledged wave of grief has created demand for something the living cannot provide — one more moment with the lost.
- AI creators have stepped into that void, building a cottage industry of deepfake resurrection videos that portray fallen soldiers as heroes ascending to heaven, erasing the war's destruction in favor of the narrative the Russian state prefers.
- Ukrainian observers encountering the videos online have responded with fury, calling the sanitized portrayals of soldiers who killed their children a form of moral obscenity dressed in cinematic light.
- Researchers warn that the psychological impact of AI-generated mourning remains almost entirely unstudied, even as some families report the videos bring no comfort while others cling to them as their only remaining form of closeness.
- What began as private grief has become a market — with creators earning double the average Russian wage — raising accusations that loss itself is being monetized, and that technology is conducting an uncontrolled experiment on the bereaved.
In the spring of 2025, a Russian blogger named Katya Jin posted a video to Instagram showing a snowy Moscow street and a woman in an elegant coat embracing a man in military uniform. The couple appeared to be modeled on Jin and her own husband — who had disappeared at the front months earlier. The video was not a memory. It was generated by artificial intelligence.
What Jin created became part of a widening phenomenon: families of soldiers killed in Ukraine commissioning AI deepfakes to resurrect their dead. Since mid-2025, these videos have spread across Instagram and TikTok, almost always portraying soldiers as heroes — returning home, ascending to heaven, embracing their families one final time. Ukraine itself, and the destruction wrought by the invasion, rarely appears. Jin, who had millions of followers, did not simply mourn through these videos — she monetized them, offering commissions to other grieving families for fees ranging from roughly two pounds to one hundred pounds. When the BBC reported on her work, she removed the content without comment.
Anna Korableva, from a town east of Yekaterinburg, launched a similar project she called "Farewell video," framing it as a service for people struggling with unfinished goodbyes. She told the BBC she wept almost daily in the early months, eventually learning to separate her emotions from the technical work. Another creator, Ulyana Lebed, earns roughly double the average Russian wage from the practice. Critics have not been quiet. "Be careful that loss doesn't come knocking at your door," one commenter wrote. "You just wanted to make money."
The videos follow predictable patterns — a soldier in uniform walks slowly up a staircase into a blue sky, surrounded by angels, or reaches from heaven to embrace the living. Quality varies wildly; some feature distorted faces or missing limbs, artifacts of imperfect generation. Yet they accumulate views from Russians seeking connection to their dead and from Ukrainians who encounter them with rage. "You should be ashamed to show your 'heroes' who went to kill our children," one Ukrainian commenter wrote.
Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, a researcher at the University of Cambridge's Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, describes the practice as ethically complex and, given the political context, deeply problematic. Whether AI visualizations help people process grief or deepen it remains almost entirely unstudied. Some families who commissioned the videos found little comfort. "Could technology help me accept that I will never hug my son again? No. It's an illusion," one woman said. Others found a different kind of value. "Thank you, AI, for this opportunity to be with my loved one," another wrote. What began as a way to hold the dead close has become something more complicated — a market, a narrative instrument, and an uncontrolled experiment conducted in real time on the bereaved.
In the spring of 2025, a Russian blogger named Katya Jin posted a fifteen-second video to Instagram that showed a snowy Moscow street lined with billboards announcing the end of the war in Ukraine. In the clip, a woman in an elegant coat turns to embrace a man in military uniform, tears streaming down her face. The couple appeared to be modeled on Jin and her own husband. Except her husband had disappeared at the front months earlier, his fate unknown. The video was not a memory. It was a fabrication, generated by artificial intelligence.
What Jin created that day became part of a widening phenomenon across Russian social media: families of soldiers killed in Ukraine commissioning AI-generated deepfakes to resurrect their dead. Since mid-2025, these videos have proliferated on Instagram and TikTok, most often posted by relatives of servicemen fighting in the war. In nearly every case, the soldiers are portrayed as heroes—returning home, ascending to heaven surrounded by angels, or embracing their families one final time. Ukraine itself, and the destruction wrought by the invasion, rarely appears. The videos are exercises in selective memory, grief channeled through technology into narratives the Russian state prefers to tell.
Katya Jin, who had ten million TikTok followers and fifty thousand on Instagram, did not simply mourn her husband through these videos. She monetized the format. She offered tutorials on how to create similar content and began accepting commissions from other grieving families. Viewers could submit photographs of themselves and their deceased relatives, and Jin's team would animate them according to specific requests: a couple in a particular setting, cinematic lighting, perhaps a farewell letter placed in the hands of the dead. The cost ranged from two hundred roubles—about two pounds—to ten thousand roubles, roughly one hundred pounds. When the BBC first reported on her work, Jin removed her AI-generated content from both platforms, though she did not respond to requests for comment.
Anna Korableva, from a town east of Yekaterinburg, began making similar videos with her sister in May 2025. She called her project "Farewell video" and framed it as a service for people struggling with what she termed "unfinished farewells." In the early months, she told the BBC, she wept almost daily while working on the videos. Over time, she learned to separate her emotions from the technical work, focusing instead on making each video beautiful enough to honor the dead. Most of her requests came from families of soldiers killed on the battlefield since Russia's full-scale invasion began in 2022. The BBC, working with the Russian news outlet Mediazona and a team of volunteers, has verified at least two hundred twenty-five thousand Russian military deaths in the war. The actual figure is believed to be substantially higher.
Ulyana Lebed, another AI creator and the wife of a Russian serviceman, told the BBC she earns between one hundred fifty thousand and two hundred thousand roubles per month—roughly double the average Russian wage. The production costs are minimal, which means the margins are substantial. Some online observers have called this profiteering from grief, a cashing-in on loss. "Be careful that loss doesn't come knocking at your door," one user wrote beneath a video of a dead soldier. "Some subjects should not be touched—but you just wanted to make money."
The videos themselves follow predictable patterns. A man in uniform embraces his family, then walks slowly up a staircase into a blue sky, often surrounded by angels. In others, the ghost of the dead soldier appears to embrace his living relatives from heaven. The quality varies wildly. Some videos feature figures without limbs or grotesquely distorted faces, the artifacts of rushed or imperfect AI generation. Yet they circulate nonetheless, accumulating views and comments from both Russians seeking connection to their dead and Ukrainians who encounter them online with fury. "You should be ashamed to show your 'heroes' who went to earn blood money by killing our children," one Ukrainian commenter wrote.
Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, a researcher at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, describes the practice as "extremely complex and ethically difficult to assess in a clear-cut way." She notes that AI-generated digital afterlives are already being used in museums, courtrooms, and political campaigns globally. During wartime, when death and loss dominate, it is perhaps unsurprising that the technology becomes more prevalent. Yet the political context—soldiers portrayed as defenders and angels while the destruction they caused is erased—makes the videos "deeply problematic," she says. Whether AI visualizations actually help people process grief or deepen it remains unknown. Very little research exists on the long-term psychological impact.
Some families who commissioned these videos reported that they provided little comfort. "Could technology help me accept that I will never hug my son again? No. It's an illusion," one woman said. Another, who had purchased an AI-generated photo of her late husband for his headstone, said the image did not help her psychologically. Yet she hung two other AI-generated images in her bedroom. Others found a different kind of value in the digital illusions. "Thank you, AI, for this opportunity to be with my loved one," one Russian woman wrote beneath a farewell video of her husband. "Soon, it will be two years since you've been gone." What began as a way to process unresolved grief has become something more complicated: a market, a narrative tool, a technological experiment conducted in real time on the bereaved.
Notable Quotes
In the first months of working on these videos, I cried almost every day. Over time, I learned to separate my emotions from work.— Anna Korableva, AI video creator
Creating 'deadbots' of Russian soldiers or deepfakes of fallen Russian soldiers returning from Ukraine is extremely complex and ethically difficult to assess in a clear-cut way.— Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
Why do you think these videos became so popular so suddenly, starting in mid-2025?
The timing matters. By then, the scale of Russian losses had become undeniable to families, even if the government wouldn't acknowledge it. International AI tools were blocked in Russia, so people turned to local creators who could deliver what they needed. And there was no cultural framework yet for saying this was wrong.
Is it fair to call this grief, or is it something else?
It's grief, but grief that's been shaped by the war's propaganda. These families are genuinely mourning. But the videos they're commissioning don't show their sons or husbands as they were—they show them as the state wants them remembered. That's not healing. That's collaboration with erasure.
The creators say they're helping people. Do you believe them?
Some probably do believe it. Anna Korableva cried while making these videos. But belief and harm aren't mutually exclusive. You can sincerely want to help someone and still be part of something that deepens their delusion instead of helping them face reality.
What about the women who said the videos didn't help them?
They're the ones being honest about what technology can't do. You can't simulate acceptance. You can't fake your way through grief. The video might feel like connection for a moment, but it's a moment built on nothing. When it ends, the loss is still there, unchanged.
Do you think this will continue?
Unless something shifts—either in how Russians understand the war or in how they're allowed to understand it—yes. As long as families are desperate and creators can profit, the market will exist. The real question is what it costs them, psychologically, to live in these fabricated moments.