A Ukrainian nonprofit research group, Terrecon, has put together a list of 981 songs it believes were generated with AI and that celebrate Russia's war. Israel's Ynetnews reported the findings after a New York Times piece on the same research. The tracks run from wistful ballads and pop to rock and thrash metal, and they praise Russian soldiers while often insulting Ukrainians, at times with slurs. Terrecon is the group behind the catalogue, and the Ynet report presents it as a Ukrainian nonprofit that studies the phenomenon rather than as a single complaint about one song.
“Creating a real song requires considerable resources, including songwriters, production and musicians. Creating a song using an AI application is much easier, faster and cheaper.”
Terrecon researchers, as reported by Ynetnews · ynetnews.com ↗
Most of the songs date from after 2024, the period when generators such as Suno, Google's Flow Music, Mureka and Udio became widely available. The wave is recent and the reach is not small: some tracks have drawn audiences in the millions across Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and Deezer. One Suno-made track, "Power of Artillery", passed two million YouTube views in two years under an uploader named Sergei Vaseykin, and "A Soldier's Daughter" is a lament for a fallen soldier. The pop singer Shaman also released an AI-made video, "Mother Russia", built on digital likenesses of exiled opposition leaders. The head of an internet-development institute said it had backed more than 350 war-themed artistic projects.
Terrecon's researchers say cost is the draw: a conventional song needs writers, producers and musicians, while an AI tool makes the same job quicker and cheaper. They say it is unclear whether the Kremlin helps distribute these tracks, so the list shows how many exist and how far they spread, not who is directing them. The researchers frame this as a question of scale, since AI lowers the effort needed to turn out another song, and then another, in any style a listener might like.
AI-made illustration the outlet ran with its report on AI-generated songs
AI · Image: Ynetnews
The group also tested the generators themselves, asking for propaganda songs that included calls for violence. The tools partly went along, and the results were uploaded to YouTube Music and SoundCloud. According to the report, the filters respond to banned words and not to meaning, and automated moderation on both platforms failed to flag tracks whose titles openly described them as Russian war propaganda. Spotify only brought in AI labels and recommendation limits last September, and those do not always mean a song is taken down.
Asked about the findings, YouTube said its teams were reviewing them, which is the only next step the report names. SoundCloud did not respond to the reporters' questions.
Sources · 1