But the Canadian volunteer’s vivid descriptions of frontline action have been exposed as a fabrication by internet pundits who identify his weapons as nothing more than fake air guns. The story of “Canadian Ukrainian Volunteer” highlights the information war being waged on social media channels and how amateur online sleuths caught a fraudster they said was putting lives at risk. At the height of his fame, the Canadian Ukrainian Volunteer posted dozens of tweets a day to his 120,000 followers. They were typically robust and urgent, cut in a ‘boy’s own adventure’ style. In a memorable series of Tweets from April, the Canadian Ukrainian Volunteer boasted that he had infiltrated Russian-held Kherson in southern Ukraine on a bicycle disguised as a Russian soldier. “Our contact had warned us to stay in the shadows and not expose ourselves to prying eyes,” he wrote. “A window opening above us or a flicker of someone’s cigarette from the balcony, a dog barking in the background, all were enough to make us cling to the walls in the dark and hold our breath.” But by examining his social media posts, online conflict experts picked up a number of clues, leading to a surprising discovery about the alleged fighter’s true location. A social media user identified his rifle as a fake by carefully comparing the gun to replicas online.
