‘They will find your body when it snows’: Ukraine soldiers bombarded by ‘pinpoint propaganda’ texts

Television journalist Julia Kirienko was sheltering with Ukrainian soldiers and medics 3km from the front when their cellphones began buzzing over the noise of the shelling. Everyone got the same text message at the same time.

“Ukrainian soldiers,” it warned, “they’ll find your bodies when the snow melts.”

Text messages like the one Kirienko received have been sent periodically to Ukrainian forces fighting pro-Russian separatists in the eastern part of the country. The threats and disinformation represent a new form of information warfare, the 21st-century equivalent of dropping leaflets on the battlefield.

“This is pinpoint propaganda,” said Nancy Snow, a professor of public diplomacy at the Kyoto University of Foreign Studies.

The messages are almost certainly being sent through cell site simulators, surveillance tools long used by US law enforcement to track suspects’ cellphones. Photos, video, leaked documents and other clues gathered by Ukrainian journalists suggest the equipment may have been supplied by the Kremlin.

The texts have been arriving since 2014, shortly after the fighting erupted. The Associated Press documented nearly four dozen of them , including the one that Kirienko received on January 31 in Avdiivka, a battle-scarred town outside the principal rebel-held city of Donetsk.