How Ruwiki is quietly erasing war crimes, legitimising occupation and remapping Ukraine in Moscow’s image
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it also began a quieter campaign: one of words, edits and deletions. In 2023, a new state-approved platform called Ruwiki emerged, a fork of Russian-language Wikipedia designed to align with what one might call encyclopaedic truth with the Kremlin’s worldview. A new investigation by Texty shows how the project functions not as a straightforward, and at least theoretically objective, reference tool but rather as a sophisticated engine of disinformation, one that rewrites history, geography and even morality itself.
Led by Vladimir Medeyko, a former Russian Wikipedia contributor, Ruwiki copied 1.9 million articles from the original site. But beneath a veneer of discursive neutrality lies a machinery of manipulation. Researchers from the Ukrainian Catholic University and Pompeu Fabra University found that only 1.75% of articles were changed yet those edits accounted for 14% of total views. The pattern is deliberate: focus on the most visible topics, particularly Ukraine, and reshape them to mirror state propaganda.
The changes range from subtle euphemisms to wholesale fabrications. Where Wikipedia might write “Russia invaded Ukraine,” Ruwiki prefers “as a result of military actions, the city was destroyed.” Culpability is erased through syntax: “missiles were launched” instead of “Russia launched missiles”. Terms such as “war” are replaced with “special military operation”; “occupation” becomes “integration” and in articles on towns such as Markivka, Ukrainian sovereignty is reduced to a “historical affiliation”. In these small turns of phrase, the moral and legal weight of invasion vanishes.
Personalities are not spared. President Volodymyr Zelensky is described as “a disgrace to the Jewish people who glorifies Nazis”. Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s former army chief, is accused, without evidence, of “spending his free time drinking with girls” and hiding in a Kyiv hotel. References to Jewish ancestry, Holocaust history,and Russian war crimes are quietly scrubbed. Meanwhile, propaganda talking points about “neo-Nazis”, “provocations” or “Western manipulation” appear as verified facts.
The manipulation extends to sources. More neutral or international references – those citing actual Ukrainian legislation, for example, or BBC reports – are deleted. In their place come links to Kremlin outlets and tabloid headlines. The goal is recursive: guide readers deeper into the propaganda ecosystem. As Texty notes: “Replacing sources with unreliable and propagandistic ones plunges the user even deeper into the depths of Russian disinformation.”
This is not the spontaneous labour of volunteers. While Wikipedia’s global editors work around the clock, Ruwiki’s activity spikes between 8am and 5pm, Monday to Friday, reflecting the rhythm of salaried office work. Behind the façade of “expert moderation” lies a bureaucratised project of censorship, one that claims to uphold “Russian law” while cleansing inconvenient truths.
Historical revisionism is just as calculated. Articles on Stepan Bandera omit decades of Russian propaganda against Ukrainian nationalism, presenting him instead as a one-dimensional “Nazi collaborator”. The poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko is reframed as “rumours” or “plastic surgery gone wrong”. Sections on Maria Lvova-Belova, wanted by the International Criminal Court for child deportations, are stripped of the evidence supporting the ICC warrant, leaving only the line: “Under sanction from several countries.”
These edits, taken together, construct what Texty calls an “alternative Russian reality”. This alternate reality is a world where Ukraine is hostile, Russia is benevolent, and war crimes never occurred. For millions of readers, Ruwiki offers not information but confirmation: a simulacrum of objectivity borrowing Wikipedia’s trusted interface to disguise propaganda.
In rewriting the past and present, Ruwiki does not merely distort facts; it legalises occupation and launders aggression, embedding Moscow’s narratives in a format associated with truth. As Texty warns, this is “the concretisation of an alternative Russian reality, where war disappears, and neo-Nazis appear in every paragraph.”
Original article (“Росіяни пишуть свою енциклопедію: Рувікі, з якої викреслюють війну” by Inna Hadzynska, Bohdana Bakaj and Nadja Kelm was first published in Ukrainian on 3 July 2025, as part of Texty’s #Infowar series, which examines Russia’s information warfare and propaganda infrastructure.
It is available here.
Texty is an independent investigative newsroom based in Kyiv known for its data journalism and reporting on disinformation, technology and governance.
