Graves of soldiers who have died since 2022 in the war in Ukraine lie in a cemetery in Kursk, Russia, on April 23. Photo / Francesca Ebel, The Washington Post
A man in a gleaming silver wedding suit presses his lips softly to his bride’s.
In the next frame, he is clad in military fatigues, climbing a white, curved stairway through gates into the clouds as he waves goodbye.
The video is not real and the man in it is long gone.
He was a Russian Army officer, killed in the summer of 2022 on the Ukrainian front lines.
What appears to be his final farewell is in fact a digital apparition generated at the request of his wife by an AI editor using their wedding photos and a few stills of him in uniform.
In Russia, artificial intelligence is being used to give the deceased a haunting kind of second life.
Social media is rife with short videos of relatives saying goodbye to their dead children, spouses and parents who are resurrected for some 60 seconds - eyes blinking, lips moving, arms locked in an embrace that never really happened.
The trend of “digital resurrection” gained traction in English-speaking corners of the internet this northern summer, sparking debate about mourning in the digital age.
In Russia the practice carries a darker weight, as the service is especially popular among wives and mothers of soldiers killed during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine over three years ago.
Among Ukrainians the videos have evoked blistering criticism on social media from those who see the depiction of Russian soldiers ascending to heaven as a glorification of the very war that has taken their lives and that of many Ukrainians.
For about US$30, grief-stricken relatives can send a photo of their loved one to an editor on a Telegram bot or a page on VKontakte, Russia’s version of Facebook, and receive a short, animated clip.
For another US$30, the dead can speak again through a simulation of their voice adapted from old recordings, to recite scripted farewells.
For Yelena Kirghizova, the widow of the officer in the video, the AI-made video was about closure.
In an obituary she wrote to accompany the clip, she explained that his body was never returned to the family.
It’s a problem that has long plagued the Russian Army, which often fails to track down missing soldiers and leaves relatives searching for answers for months.
“For a long time, everything was shrouded in mystery. His body was never returned to us, there was no funeral, no opportunity to say goodbye,” Yelena said.
She recalled how their son had to give DNA samples twice in the hope of finding a match with remains recovered from the battlefield.
“I searched for eyewitnesses and carried out my own investigation to uncover the truth,” she wrote.
Anna Korableva, the founder of a VKontakte page called “Final Meeting” that made the trend go viral in Russia, began tinkering with AI about a year ago.
At first she made videos of people superimposed into childhood photos so they can appear to meet and embrace their younger selves.
In the spring, she received a message from a woman who asked her to create an animation of her embracing her brother who was killed in the war.
Korableva did it for free in exchange for permission to post it on her page. In two weeks, the clip went viral and orders began pouring in by the hundreds, with up to 500 requests per day.
In May, she created the “Final Meeting” page and continues to work through the orders she received that month, while others have to sign up for the waiting list.
She described the project as “therapy” that helps people to deal with grief.
One video takes her about two days to make, she said, as she interviews the subjects and tries to improve the quality of submitted photos, which is often lacking.
The project is taxing, Korableva said, because of both the stories she hears from people who request the videos and the hate messages she said she receives on her pages.
“People usually don’t value what they have in life enough, they don’t say they love each other enough, they don’t embrace enough,” Korableva said.
“From the feedback I get, they feel lighter when they see it on video, they get to talk one more time.
“I’ve received a lot of requests from women who said I did not get to say goodbye before [their husband] left, or that they quarrelled and then he died.”
Most clips follow a similar pattern - a soldier embracing his wife or parents before going to heaven, set to a popular ballad - but different projects offer add-ons, such as adding angel wings or turning the deceased into white birds flying away.
While the vast majority of requests come from mothers and wives of soldiers, the services are not limited to fallen soldiers. Some families have used it to say farewell to beloved pets or deceased parents.
In one viral Instagram video that garnered 13 million views, a Russian influencer used black-and-white photos from her 86-year-old grandmother’s youth to create a mini-film bringing her long-lost family back to life using a paid Telegram bot that operates on several Western AI models, including GPT-5, Claude, Google Gemini and Perplexity.
Much like AI itself, such “resurrection videos” have proved divisive.
On Russian social media, some found them unsettling and eerie, while others countered that the videos bring comfort and likened them to medium seances or prayers.
People have long used tools like audio and video recordings to preserve the memory of the deceased, so Korableva sees using AI as just another step in the same direction.
“I think AI is a powerful tool and it’s important to use it responsibly and for good,” she said.
“I know there are a lot of opinions. I’ve received a lot of abuse and curses in my private messages … but I think if these videos help someone, it’s worth doing.”
- Natalia Abbakumova contributed to this report.
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