[Paper] Friend or Foe? Language as an ideological switch in open-weight LLMs under Russian disinformation stress
Source: arXiv - 2606.08512v1
Overview
As Russia’s war against Ukraine extends into generative AI, large language models (LLMs) adapted for local post-Soviet languages are deployed in contested information environments. Policy and industry discourse assumes that culturally aligned adaptation encodes the political orientation of the target community: a Ukrainian-oriented model will resist Russian narratives, a Russian-oriented one will reinforce them. Does it? This article systematically disconfirms that assumption. We run a controlled audit of four openly available LLMs sharing a common base model but fine-tuned for different linguistic communities, querying them in Ukrainian, Russian and English across ten contested wartime narratives: Crimea, “denazification”, the “one people” thesis, and atrocity denial at Bucha and Mariupol. The result is a Fine-Tuning Paradox: the Ukrainian-oriented model shows the weakest resistance to Russian disinformation in Russian, while the Russian-oriented one exhibits the strongest rejection. Corpus composition, language coverage and prompt format prove more decisive than nominal cultural provenance. We situate these findings within debates on hybrid warfare, digital sovereignty and post-imperial information orders, arguing that the principal threat to regional information sovereignty is not adversarial fine-tuning but the untested assumption that cultural alignment guarantees resilience.
Key Contributions
This paper presents research in the following areas:
- cs.CY
- cs.CL
Methodology
Please refer to the full paper for detailed methodology.
Practical Implications
This research contributes to the advancement of cs.CY.
Authors
- Anna Małgorzata Kamińska
- Tetiana Klynina
Paper Information
- arXiv ID: 2606.08512v1
- Categories: cs.CY, cs.CL
- Published: June 7, 2026
- PDF: Download PDF