A Wartime Information Operation, Quantified
On August 12, 2026, Ukraine's Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD), a working body of the National Security and Defense Council (NSDC), presented findings from a study covering January 1 through August 11, 2026: more than 94,000 publications from nearly 24,000 sources, with a combined reach of 419 million views (Ukrinform). The subject was not generic war propaganda but something more targeted: coordinated narratives about prisoners of war, missing persons, and prisoner exchanges — the single most emotionally exposed category of wartime information for any society with soldiers in Russian captivity.
Kyrylo Viktorov, head of the CCD's Department for Countering Information Threats, laid out four narrative clusters at a press briefing: that Ukraine obstructs its own POW exchanges; that the "missing persons" designation is used to hide casualties or dodge compensation; that captured Ukrainian soldiers, in staged videos, prefer captivity to return; and that Russia treats prisoners humanely while Ukraine abuses Russian POWs. As Viktorov put it, "Russia often does not need to invent the event itself. It is enough to use a real event and impose the desired interpretation of it on the audience" (Ukrinform). His sharper point was procedural: "A person who is being held captive cannot be considered a free participant in information communication, especially when we are talking about Russian captivity" — a reminder that footage of a POW praising his captors is not evidence of anything except that he is a hostage.
The Case for the CCD's Approach
It is worth stating the strongest version of what the CCD is doing here, because it is easy to reflexively distrust any government body with "disinformation" in its name. Families of missing soldiers are a uniquely vulnerable audience: they are searching obsessively for any signal about a loved one's fate, which makes them more susceptible to manipulated content than almost any other population. A coordinated campaign that convinces those families the state is lying to them, or convinces soldiers that surrender guarantees better treatment than continued resistance, is not abstract mischief — it degrades morale and complicates the actual mechanics of negotiated exchanges. Independent Ukrainian monitors corroborate that this is a live, evolving tactic rather than a one-off: Detector Media, which has tracked the Ukrainian and Russian information space continuously since February 2022, documents the same pattern of fabricated claims about prisoners being redirected into combat roles or held under false pretenses, cited to the CCD's own reporting.
Given that reality, publishing a methodical, numbers-based account of the narrative ecosystem — sources, reach, thematic clustering — is close to the least restrictive intervention a state can make. It doesn't touch a single account, doesn't compel a platform to remove anything, and doesn't criminalize speech. It counters propaganda with more speech: naming the pattern so journalists, platforms, and the public can recognize it themselves. That is the version of "countering disinformation" that a pro-speech publication should want more of, not less.
Where the Same Agency Has Overreached
The CCD's institutional record complicates a clean endorsement. It was created by NSDC decision and formalized under Presidential Decree No. 106 of March 19, 2021, giving it a direct line to Ukraine's national-security apparatus rather than to any court or independent regulator (RNBO/NSDC). In July 2022, the same body moved from description to designation: it published a list naming individuals it judged to be promoting Russian propaganda, including U.S. Senator Rand Paul, then-Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, military analyst Edward Luttwak, political scientist John Mearsheimer, and journalist Glenn Greenwald (UnHerd). Greenwald called it "standard McCarthyite idiocy"; Mearsheimer noted that when critics "cannot counter your argument with facts and logic, they smear you." Luttwak — an outspoken advocate for arming Ukraine from day one of the invasion — pointed out that being placed on a Kremlin-asset list while lobbying NATO capitals for weapons shipments was self-evidently absurd.
That episode is the cautionary case for exactly the kind of institution issuing this month's report: a body with the analytical capacity to be genuinely useful can also decide, on its own authority and without judicial review, who counts as a legitimate voice and who counts as an enemy asset. The August 2026 POW report doesn't repeat that mistake — it names narratives and information-space patterns, not people to be sanctioned or blocked. That distinction is the one regulators and legislators everywhere should hold onto as Kyiv continues to develop platform-facing rules under its EU-accession-linked media law reforms: attribution and public reporting are proportionate tools even in wartime; compiling enforcement lists of individual speakers is not, and blurs the line between countering a hostile state's information operation and policing domestic and foreign dissent.
The Standard Worth Exporting
Democracies watching Russia's hybrid-war playbook — the EU's own East StratCom Task Force and national election-security units among them — will be tempted to build CCD-style bodies of their own. The lesson from Ukraine's four years of experience is not that such bodies are illegitimate, but that their mandate has to be architecturally narrow: publish evidence, name patterns, decline to compile blacklists. The August 12 report clears that bar. The 2022 list did not. Any government replicating this model should write the second constraint into statute before the first success tempts them to skip it.
"Russia supposedly treats Ukrainian prisoners of war humanely, while Ukraine, on the contrary, allegedly treats Russians brutally" — the inverted narrative Viktorov says the four campaigns are built to produce.