Before the war, Ihor Kurayan was just a 55-year-old Ukrainian from Kherson who was engaged in gardening and posted what he did on social networks.

On February 25, a day after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Ihor posted a selfie with a rifle on Instagram, saying that he volunteered to defend his country, CNN writes.

Kherson soon passed to the Russians. On Facebook, Instagram, and recently on Tik Tok, strange posts began to appear for those who knew him.

In one video, Kurayan appeared surrounded by two masked armed men holding a blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag and a red-and-black flag associated with the Ukrainian nationalist movement. He noted that Kherson is occupied and the protests are pointless, adding that the territorial defense there has been disbanded. In another, he condemned the government and called on his countrymen to surrender. “I believe that further resistance is unnecessary,” Kurayan said.

However, everything had little explanation. The Ukrainian was captured by the Russians, who used his social media accounts for propaganda. They also created a Tik Tok account for him to spread false information.

Everything became known, paradoxically, also through Russian propaganda.

Ihor was staged in a barracks in Crimea when the Kremlin came to report on the good conditions of detention of Ukrainian prisoners of war. In the report, he also appears among the prisoners who watch TV. The material was broadcast on several Russian channels, it was seen by some of the man’s relatives, who took screenshots and sent it to his daughter, a journalist who left the country at the beginning of the war.

She turned to the Ukrainian authorities.

Finally, Igor was released as a result of the exchange of prisoners.

He told how the Russians initially asked him to cooperate with them, they even said that he was a well-known person in the city and that they wanted to make him the mayor of Kherson. When they refused, they beat and tortured him, using his social media accounts for their propaganda.

This is a tactic of the Russians, who use prisoners’ phones to control social media accounts.

Troll farms are well known.

Facebook recently removed a network of Instagram accounts run by a St. Petersburg-based “troll farm” that sought to create favorable online perception and support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the social media giant said in a report.

Petersburg troll farms are suspected of having ties to Yevhen Prigozhin, the founder of the Internet Research Agency, who is accused of meddling in the 2016 US presidential election in favor of Donald Trump.

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