Putin’s Arctic wildlife metaphor for the invasion of Ukraine appears to come from AI slop, a zoologist says — orcas attacking polar bears is a staple of fake clips flooding social media

On August 29, at a meeting with teachers, Russian President Vladimir Putin came up with a new metaphor that he believes explains why Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Killer whales, he said, “eat bears like minnows,” attacking them in packs. Children should be taught this in school, according to the Russian president, so they understand “why we’re carrying out a special military operation” — the Kremlin’s term for the war. Hardly anyone could tell what exactly Putin meant, but the strange remark set off a wave of jokes on social media. Meduza rounds up the funniest memes that followed and checks how much truth there is to the scenario he described.

Ahead of Knowledge Day — the September 1 holiday that marks the start of the Russian school year — Putin went to Moscow Pedagogical State University, where he met with teachers and students in teacher-training programs. At one point in the meeting, Dmitry Balanchukov, a Chinese-language teacher from the Belgorod region, took the floor. He mentioned that he had returned from the North Pole two weeks earlier — a detail that caught the president’s interest.

Putin first asked Balanchukov whether he had seen any polar bears on the trip (he had). Then he came out with that metaphor. Here is the exact quote, as published on the Kremlin’s website:

First, seriously: is what Putin said about killer whales and bears true?

Back in early July, the magazine BBC Wildlife published an article titled “Can any animals kill a polar bear? 6 contenders that could just be brave enough to take on the deadliest, most powerful bear on the planet.”

The article weighs the theoretical odds that various animals — other bears, walruses, wolverines, and yes, killer whales — could win such a fight, though it says upfront that polar bears are formidable hunters with no natural predators.

It rates killer whales’ chances as fairly good: they are highly intelligent, they do hunt in pods, and they even kill blue whales. A male killer whale can outweigh the average polar bear by a factor of 10 or more. Transient killer whales — also known as Bigg’s killer whales, after the Canadian scientist Michael Bigg — swim into the Arctic and hunt mammals there.

But the article says this is only speculation. There is no confirmed evidence that killer whales hunt polar bears — only fake, AI-generated videos on the subject. Nor is there any evidence that polar bears hunt killer whales and eat their meat, something explained in part by differences in habitat: bears spend more time on ice floes, killer whales more time in the water.

Zoologists interviewed by the outlet Kedr after Putin’s remarks agree that such a clash is unlikely. “You could imagine a killer whale’s carcass washing up on shore and polar bears eating it. But that’s about it,” one scientist said. A killer whale attacking a bear, he stressed, simply doesn’t happen. A second expert confirmed this:

One of the outlet’s sources suggested that Putin may have picked up the false information about killer whales and bears from those very AI videos. “AI fans have churned out this storyline and are dumping it online. They upload a lot of that kind of nonsense — killer whales rescuing seals on their backs, or the reverse, magically pulling someone out of nowhere,” the zoologist said.

Here is what Meduza’s Explainers desk says about the likelihood of a confrontation between a killer whale and a polar bear:

So what are these AI videos everyone’s writing about?

Social media is indeed full of videos showing killer whales attacking polar bears. They’re on TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook. All of them are AI-generated, naturally, and the creators often don’t even try to hide it.

Some show a whole pod of killer whales chasing down a hapless bear — exactly as Putin described it! But a glance at the AI-disclosure label, or at the comments, confirms that this doesn’t happen in real life.

Most of the videos follow the same script: a killer whale attacks a polar bear, sometimes one with a cub; the bears try to escape; and now and then a human swoops in to save them. That rescuer, incidentally, is always unnaturally close to the action, and the animals don’t always seem to notice him. The reverse scenario also turns up — in one video, a killer whale saves a seal pup from a bear.

What grabs people about these videos, above all, is how implausible they are. Some viewers may also find the content “inspiring”: a supposedly defenseless animal owes its survival to a human. Mostly, though, people just write about how sick they are of this endless, low-quality AI slop.

And how did people react to all this on social media?

It’s still unclear what exactly Putin meant by invoking a made-up story about killer whales and polar bears, or what children are supposed to take away from this “knowledge.” He didn’t explain the metaphor himself. Perhaps the pod of killer whales stands for the NATO countries that, in the Russian president’s view, threaten the existence of the bear — that is, Russia. But that’s only a guess.

Social media users were just as puzzled, but that didn’t stop them from turning out hundreds of memes based on Putin’s remarks. This, perhaps, is roughly how the president pictures the scene he described.

Or maybe it works the other way around, and the killer whale is Russia? Apparently not: in the AI videos, it’s usually the bear who plays the unjustly wronged victim.

Either way, Russia’s Education Ministry has the hardest job ahead. After remarks like these, officials will have to not only rewrite all the textbooks but also try to explain what the author of the quote meant — and somehow tie it all to a justification for the war.

United Russia, the country’s ruling party — whose logo is a bear — is feeling the strain too: an unexpected rebranding now looms, with only weeks to go before the State Duma elections.

Or maybe we simply misheard, and Putin wasn’t talking about polar bears (medvedi) at all but about Dmitry Medvedev? A threat to the deputy chair of Russia’s Security Council — now that’s serious!

Then again, it’s not always worth looking for meaning in remarks like these from Putin. Sometimes nonsense and gibberish are just nonsense and gibberish.

With statements like these, the Russian president has built an entire multiverse with room for everyone — from the Polovtsians and Pechenegs, the medieval nomads he has invoked before, to bears and killer whales. Who wins this battle? Only Putin knows.

There is, though, one other person the Russian president might find common ground with. Putin wasn’t the only one making zoological discoveries this past weekend: on August 29, U.S. President Donald Trump posted an AI video on Truth Social showing combat ducks defending “Lake America” — which, under an executive order from Trump, is what Lake Ontario is now called for Americans.