‘Fallout’-Style Cartoons Meant to Train Russian Soldiers Are Spreading on Telegram

A cartoon allegedly meant to train Russian troops for the war in Ukraine is circulating on Russian and Ukrainian social media channels. The cartoon uses internet memes, and references to video games and films including The Mask and Deadpool,  to teach incoming soldiers about cover, how to handle grenades, and how to stay alive on the battlefield.

One of the cartoons details how to win a firefight by showing off a gun battle between the titular film characters, The Mask and Deadpool. The instructor tells the soldiers to fire first, seek cover, and keep moving. He says that a car is a bad place to take cover, because bullets will go right through it, but notes that the solid engine block may offer better protection. To illustrate the point, the cartoon shows Deadpool’s body with his torso blown away, his gorey spine revealed after he sought shelter behind a car.

The cartoon is titled The ABCs of Special Military Operations and is framed as a Russian veteran of the Syrian war training young soldiers how to survive in Ukraine. Motherboard found five different videos on social media channels, each running about a minute long, and each covering a different aspect of combat.

Another cartoon teaches troops how to properly dig trenches on the battlefield, giving the exact specifications for width and depth. It suggests troops use wood to reinforce the sides of the trench and even dig holes into the side where they can hide from improvised explosives dropped by small drones. It tells the soldiers that they have to take care of themselves and that they can’t wait for their fellow soldier to do a job for them. To reinforce them, it replicates the Spider-Man pointing meme with Russian soldiers. 

The source of the training videos is unclear. They appeared on Russian and Ukrainian Telegram channels on April 24 before making their way onto 4chan, then Reddit and Twitter. The videos are in Russian and appear to be for a Russian audience but Motherboard was unable to confirm the original source. Some Ukrainian news outlets have reported that the source is the Russian military, who is using the cartoons to help train soldiers, but that’s unconfirmed. The narrator appears to be voiced by and modeled after Russian filmmaker and Kremlin propagandist Ivan Okhlobystin, but that’s also unconfirmed.

The videos are also drenched in the iconography of Russia’s war in Ukraine and play to the specific fears of the Russian soldier. A gunfight between a Russian and Ukrainian soldier plays out in a sunflower field, the national flower of Ukraine. The zoomed-in face of a Ukrainian soldier reveals that his helmet has an SS symbol on it. Putin has long claimed that his war is about fighting Nazis in Ukraine. The Russian soldiers wear Z’s. 

Moscow’s training of the soldiers it's sending to Ukraine is famously bad. Troops sometimes end up on the frontline days after they’ve been recruited. Russian casualty rates are high and the Kremlin is desperate to fill the ranks, resorting to conscripting thousands of prisoners and snatching men off the street. Laws in the country once required draft notices to be delivered in person, but Putin signed a law earlier this month that made conscription legally binding the moment they’re electronically registered. 

As more poorly-trained Russian soldiers hit the frontlines in anticipation of a Ukrainian counter-offensive, it makes sense that someone in Russia—if not the Russian government itself—would create a cheap cartoon to get them up to speed on the basics. Several of the minute-long videos use imagery from video games, including an inventory selection screen, an aim-bot style outline of soldiers, and an electronic ammunition counter. The animation style itself is reminiscent of the tongue-in-cheek cartoon tutorials in the Fallout series. But the video enforces that war isn’t a game, that these tips can mean the difference between life and death, and that your gun won't have a readout telling you how many bullets you have left.

This wouldn’t be the first time a military has used cartoons to help train soldiers. During World War II, the Pentagon commissioned several cartoons starring Private Snafu. In the cartoons, Private Snafu would screw up, and often die. He’d dig his trench wrong and get run over by a tank, or leave his gas mask behind and die in an attack. The idea was that whatever Snafu did, the U.S. soldier should do the opposite.