Fake Nuclear Alerts Hit Russian and Ukrainian Emergency Apps as Kherson Truce Ends

Emergency warning apps in Russia and Ukraine were hacked on Sunday night, sending fake alerts of nuclear and chemical attacks to millions of people on both sides of the front line, according to authorities in both countries. The false alarms arrived within hours of the end of a rare six-day humanitarian truce in southern Ukraine, and hours before Russian strikes resumed on Ukrainian energy infrastructure and a Ukrainian city.

According to CNN, the first false warning reached users of Ukraine’s public air raid app at about 11pm on Sunday. It read: “Radiation threat declared in Kyiv.” Another message told users: “Hi! There will be a nuclear alert across Ukraine. Don’t worry, it’s Oreshnik [ballistic missile] flying.” A third warned of a chemical attack on the capital and told people not to go outside. Other messages claimed street fighting had broken out in Kyiv.

Ukraine’s air force said on Telegram that the app “appears to have been subjected to enemy influence” and urged the public to stay calm. “There is no radiation threat! Stay calm and follow our updates on our channel!” it said, according to CNN. The service was temporarily suspended and restored overnight.

Hours later, on Monday morning, Russia’s emergencies ministry said its own mobile app had been hit by a “massive cyberattack” that spread false information to the public, according to the state news agency TASS, quoted by CNN. Fake messages appeared on phones in the Moscow region and in areas across Russia, claiming that “NUCLEAR WARHEADS ON P1-SUN DELIVERY SYSTEMS have been launched across ALL regions of Russia” and telling people to stock up urgently on food for three weeks and hide. The messages also carried expletives.

It is not clear whether the hacking of the two apps is linked, CNN reported. No one has been credibly identified as responsible for either attack, and the claims of responsibility that have circulated online have not been independently verified. What is clear is that the two incidents, arriving almost simultaneously on the two countries’ official warning systems, turned the machinery of civil defence itself into a weapon of confusion — and that they came at the exact moment a fragile pause in the fighting expired.

What happened in Kyiv

Ukraine’s Air Alert app is not a minor piece of software. It is the system millions of Ukrainians rely on every day to know when Russian missiles and drones are heading their way, and it had recently been updated to show the movement of drones in real time, according to CNN. When it began pushing fabricated warnings late on Sunday, the danger was not only the panic a false nuclear alert can cause, but the damage it could do to trust in the real ones.

According to The Times, the first warning was received at about 11pm on Sunday. Yuriy Ignat, a spokesman for the Ukrainian air force, said the app had been hacked. There were no reports of widespread panic, The Times reported, and the messages raised suspicions quickly because they were written in Russian and some contained swear words. One read: “That’s it, f***, nuclear war!”

Ukraine’s Centre for Strategic Communication blamed Russia for the hack. “Unfortunately, Russians have hacked the ‘air alert’ app. This is evidenced by the appearance of several unusual alerts … If you see strange messages in the app, disregard,” it wrote on social media, according to The Times.

Air raid sirens were not affected by the hacks, The Times reported, which meant the physical warning network kept working even while the digital one was compromised. A woman in Kyiv told The Times that her friend in the west of the country had been alarmed by the messages but had calmed down quickly after she was told they were fake, and had not headed to the nearest shelter.

Stepan Tanasiychuk, who leads Ukraine’s Air Raid Alert project, said on Monday that the app was gradually being restored, with new yellow and red alert levels available on the map, according to CNN. “The team is taking additional measures to secure the app in order to prevent similar situations in the future,” he said on Instagram. “We realise how much unnecessary worry and inconvenience this has caused.”

The Ukrainian air force’s spokesman, Yurii Ihnat, said the cyberattack had no impact on Ukraine’s security and defence operations because the app is separate from military command systems, according to a report carried by the Eastern News agency. Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation reported the breach and urged users to monitor emergency channels on social media and rely on physical alerts while the attack was being addressed.

The fake messages mentioned a hacking group called Hitcore. Mash, a Russian Telegram channel with links to the security services, said it had spoken to representatives of Hitcore and that they had claimed responsibility for the attack. That claim could not be independently verified, the Eastern News report noted, and no official attribution has been made by either government for the Russian side of the incident.

The public reaction in Kyiv, according to CNN, was striking for how little panic there was. War-weary civilians quickly recognised the messages as fake, and some turned them into jokes. One resident of Kyiv responded to the alert about street fighting by posting: “Good thing our mayor is a boxer.” Another social media post invented a long list of additional threats, including: “Cat invasion — Cats are taking over the city. Hide the sausages. Pancake emergency — The city has run out of pancakes. Stay home. Clown attack — Clowns have been spotted in the city. Do not go outside without a mask. Alien invasion — UFOs are approaching Earth. Prepare for contact.”

What happened in Russia

Shortly after Ukrainians received the fake warnings, residents of some Russian regions, including Moscow, also received false alerts on their phones, The Times reported. Some featured profanities. “Take cover in your f**king shelter,” one read, telling people to “stock up urgently on food for three weeks and hide”.

Russia’s emergencies ministry said its app had been hit by a “massive cyberattack”, but it did not say who was to blame, The Times reported. The ministry said efforts to address the vulnerability and restore normal operation were under way, according to CNN, and it played down the significance of the incident, saying that alerts are distributed through regional and municipal systems such as sirens and loudspeakers, SMS messages and media broadcasts, and that the mobile app is only a supplementary channel.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov addressed the incident on Monday. “All electronic resources belonging to our government agencies are under constant threat of cyberattacks,” he said, according to CNN. “As technologies, including AI, continue to evolve, the threat of cyberattacks is growing.”

Alexander Kots, a pro-war Russian blogger, called the fake warnings “the first cyber shoot-out in history”, according to The Times.

Russian users reacted with a mixture of mockery and anger, CNN reported. Some said the fake alert “was written in such a way that it’s impossible to believe it’s real”, while others asked how the emergencies ministry had allowed itself to be hacked. One Russian user said they had deleted the Emercom app “and I won’t be installing anything like that again. How can they leave apps like this vulnerable? It’s complete nonsense, of course, but what if it weren’t?” Another wrote: “You wake up, open Threads and see tons of posts like this. BUT THANKFULLY IT’S FAKE!”

According to the New York Post, a bogus message reviewed by Reuters did not even attempt to come off as an official announcement, but was laced with colloquialisms and expletives and slammed Russia as a “swamp”. The Post reported that the hackers had plunged people across both countries into panic overnight, although both CNN and The Times found little evidence of widespread panic, and the dominant public response on both sides appears to have been scepticism, jokes and, in Russia’s case, a loss of trust in the official app.

The truce that had just ended

The cyberattacks came after a six-day truce to allow people to be evacuated from the Russian-occupied town of Oleshky in southern Ukraine ended late on Sunday, The Times reported. The ceasefire, the longest of the war, was arranged by Melania Trump, the US first lady, with the involvement of the Pope. Nearly 800 people were evacuated, the first lady wrote on X, adding: “I hope Oleshky serves as a foundation for lasting peace between both nations.”

The temporary humanitarian ceasefire expired at 22:59 Ukrainian time, or 21:00 GMT, on Sunday, according to the Munich Eye. The truce had reportedly been respected since it began the previous Tuesday, although fighting continued in other areas of the country. On Sunday alone, a further 167 people, including 22 children and 21 people with limited mobility, were evacuated before the deadline, Ukraine’s general staff said, according to a report carried by ASEAN Now.

Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine’s top human rights official, called the truce “an important step in our joint humanitarian efforts” with Russia, The Times reported. He said the oldest person evacuated from Oleshky was 94 and the youngest was just over a year old. “Everything unfolded without any incidents, and both sides noted the high level of organisation,” Yana Lantratova, Russia’s human rights ombudsman, said.

The town’s food supplies had almost run out and there is no electricity, gas or drinking water, The Times reported. There were no official figures on how many people had chosen to go to Russia or Ukraine, the two options offered to evacuees. However, Alex Salvi, a journalist with Newsmax, the only western media outlet allowed into Oleshky, said that 11 buses had left for Ukraine and four had departed for Russia. People travelling to Ukrainian-controlled territory were driven to Anapa in Russia’s Krasnodar region, where they boarded four planes to Belarus, and were then taken across the border into Ukraine.

A Ukrainian official said Russia refused to extend the arrangement, according to the ASEAN Now report. The regional governor, Olexander Prokudin, urged residents to stay alert and avoid areas near the Dnipro river, where officials said Russian drone and artillery fire remained intense.

Pope Leo XIV, speaking during his Sunday prayers, said: “I hope that the co-operation between the parties, which made this necessary humanitarian gesture possible, will strengthen their willingness to engage in dialogue and lead to fresh concrete initiatives for peace,” The Times reported.

Russian attacks resumed on Monday morning with a drone strike that injured two people in Kherson, the regional capital, Ukrainian officials said, according to The Times. There are concerns in Ukraine that Russia used the truce to prepare for a major new offensive on Kherson, which was liberated by Kyiv’s forces in November 2022 after eight months under occupation.

The war on the ground: power, fuel and retaliation

Even while the truce held around Oleshky, the war continued elsewhere. President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russian forces struck energy infrastructure in four Ukrainian regions overnight on Saturday, cutting power to hundreds of thousands of homes, according to the Munich Eye. Some electricity supplies were restored by Sunday, but repair crews were still working through the day, and in the Dnipropetrovsk region more than 60,000 customers remained without power into the evening, according to a BBC report carried by World Right Now.

Ukraine’s State Emergency Service reported that a separate overnight strike killed two people, including a 13-year-old girl, in the Vinnytsia region, the Munich Eye reported. Emergency power cuts have been introduced across the country after repeated attacks on energy facilities, affecting electricity and water supplies, including in the capital, Kyiv, where electricity is cut off for most of the day, according to the BBC report.

Zelensky said in a social media post that the intensity of Russian strikes over the past week had been extremely high, and that Russia was trying to take maximum advantage of a shortage of ballistic missile interceptors, the BBC report said. He urged Ukraine’s international partners to provide more air defence support, particularly Patriot missile systems.

Ukraine answered in kind. Zelensky said Ukrainian forces had struck a major missile fuel production facility in Russia’s Rostov region, sparking a fire and damaging four production sites, according to the Munich Eye. Ukrainian long-range drones also set fire to the Kstovo refinery in Nizhny Novgorod region, according to Russian state media cited in a Guardian briefing carried by JournalArta, following a major strike against another refinery in the Samara region owned by Rosneft.

The exchange of strikes on energy infrastructure has become the defining rhythm of the war as winter approaches: Russia hammering Ukraine’s power grid, Ukraine hitting the refineries and fuel plants that fund and supply the Russian war machine. Both sides are now openly bargaining over whether that exchange can be paused, and at what price.

Diplomacy: Patriots for a pause, and talks in Abu Dhabi

On Sunday, Zelensky said Ukraine was ready to stop attacking Russian oil refineries if the United States supplied Patriot interceptor missiles, according to AFP, cited by Stockbiz. Speaking to US media, Zelensky said Ukraine could not refrain from responding to Russian attacks on its energy, electricity and gas systems, and that if the US wanted Ukraine to stop attacking Russian oil-refining facilities, Moscow must also halt similar attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.

Zelensky put forward a specific proposal: the US would supply Patriot missile systems for one month, in exchange for Ukraine halting attacks on Russian oil refineries during the same period. He said Kyiv was ready to find the money to buy the missiles itself, rather than relying solely on aid, according to the AFP report.

“We said that if you want us not to attack Russia’s refineries, they have not to attack our energy system. Another alternative, give us Patriot missiles, we will find money, not just aid,” Zelensky said in the interview with Fox News, according to the Guardian briefing. The US State Department said the Trump administration had approved the sale of 500 Patriot missiles to Ukraine on 30 October, but Zelensky warned that delivery could take years, while Ukraine’s stockpile of interceptor missiles was dwindling.

The proposal comes as diplomatic efforts stir again. Zelensky said preparations for talks with the United States and Russia were under way after he met Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Istanbul on Saturday, with negotiators due to resume ceasefire discussions in Abu Dhabi in early November, according to the ASEAN Now report. Zelensky said he hoped a trilateral meeting between peace negotiators from Ukraine, Russia and the United States would take place in Abu Dhabi between 6 and 10 November, and that Kyiv wanted Europe to be involved in the talks on how to end the war, according to Devdiscourse.

Zelensky also said he was ready to meet Russian leader Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump in Istanbul to discuss the terms for ending the war, according to a report carried by EuropeSays, citing his interview with CNN Türk. “This war must end. We must unite to at least move this war from its active phase into a diplomatic one,” he said. He described the technical teams’ meeting in Abu Dhabi and a meeting of the leaders as “parallel processes”, with the technical teams discussing an energy ceasefire, a maritime ceasefire and prisoner exchanges, and the leaders’ meeting addressing an unconditional, comprehensive and complete ceasefire monitored through a robust mechanism, along with security guarantees, reconstruction and territorial questions.

US-brokered peace talks between Russia and Ukraine are due to restart this month in Abu Dhabi, The Times reported, but there are few hopes that they will lead to an end to the war, which will mark its fifth anniversary in February. President Putin has shown no signs of dropping his demand that Ukraine surrender territory, something Kyiv has rejected, while Moscow has also said it will not agree to a ceasefire across the entire front that leaves Zelensky’s government in power.

Tatiana Stanovaya, a Russian political analyst, wrote on X: “My growing conviction is that there will be no lasting settlement of the conflict. A ceasefire may be possible, but it is likely to be partial, fragile and tactical, doing little to bring about sustainable peace. Instead, we should prepare for a prolonged period of deterioration and escalation across multiple fronts.”

The weapon named in the fake alerts

The false Ukrainian alerts invoked the Oreshnik, Russia’s newest and most publicised missile, and the choice of that name was itself a piece of psychological warfare. The Oreshnik is an intermediate-range ballistic missile, derived from Russia’s RS-26 Rubezh programme, capable of travelling at more than Mach 10 and carrying six warheads, each reportedly containing submunitions, according to Wikipedia. Russia first used it in combat on 21 November 2024, striking the Ukrainian city of Dnipro, and has used it again since, including a strike on an aircraft repair plant in the Lviv region in January 2026, according to the Associated Press, cited by BusinessMirror.

President Vladimir Putin has said the missile streaks at 10 times the speed of sound, “like a meteorite”, and is immune to any missile defence system, the Associated Press reported. The Pentagon has described it as an experimental type of intermediate-range ballistic missile, and Western analysts have questioned claims about its invulnerability, noting that Russia likely holds only a limited number. The missile is described as capable of carrying nuclear warheads, but there has been no credible indication that a nuclear payload has ever been used in Ukraine, according to the Lviv Herald.

Russia said in December 2025 that the Oreshnik system had been placed on combat duty in Belarus, according to the Associated Press. The weapon’s power in the fake alerts was therefore not military but symbolic: a name that Ukrainian civilians already associate with a missile their air defences cannot intercept, deployed in a message designed to look like an official warning. Whoever wrote the false alerts understood exactly which words would frighten people most.

Analysis: Why It Matters

1. The warning system itself is now a front line

For nearly five years, Ukrainians have lived by the air raid app. It tells them when to take shelter and when it is safe to come out, and in a war of nightly drone and missile attacks, it is one of the most trusted instruments in daily life. The hack of that app, and of its Russian counterpart on the same night, shows that the warning system has itself become a target. The immediate damage was limited: sirens still worked, officials debunked the messages within minutes, and the public, hardened by years of war, mostly laughed. But the deeper damage is harder to measure. A warning system works only if people believe it, and every false alarm spends a little of that belief. The next time the app flashes a genuine nuclear or chemical warning, some users will hesitate, and a few seconds of hesitation in a real attack can be fatal. The attackers may have failed to cause panic, but they may have succeeded in planting doubt, and doubt is a slower, more durable weapon than fear.

2. This was psychological warfare, not a technical prank

The content of the false messages gives away their purpose. They were not random vandalism: they invoked radiation, chemical weapons, street fighting and the Oreshnik, the four things most likely to terrify a civilian population, and they were written in Russian, with swear words, in a way that made their origin obvious. On the Russian side, the messages told people that nuclear warheads had been launched across all regions and ordered them to stockpile food for three weeks. The aim, in both cases, was not to steal data or damage infrastructure, but to make ordinary people feel that the war had suddenly, without warning, become apocalyptic. That is the logic of psychological operations: to erode morale, to spread confusion, and to force governments to spend time and credibility reassuring their own citizens. The fact that the messages were so crude that most people saw through them does not make the attempt trivial; it makes it a test, and the next attempt may be better written.

3. Attribution is the hardest problem, and it matters most

Ukraine’s Centre for Strategic Communication blamed Russia for the hack of its app. Russia’s emergencies ministry blamed no one for the hack of its own app. A hacking group called Hitcore was named in the fake messages, and a Russian Telegram channel said its representatives had claimed responsibility, but that claim has not been independently verified, and no official attribution has been made for the Russian incident at all. CNN reported that it is not clear whether the two hackings are linked. This fog is the central problem of cyber warfare: attacks can be routed, disguised and claimed by proxies, and certainty is rare. But attribution matters because it decides the response. If a state directed these hacks, they are an act of war by other means. If a criminal or hacktivist group acted alone, they are a crime. And if each side hacked the other’s app in retaliation, as one Russian blogger’s phrase “the first cyber shoot-out in history” suggests, then a new kind of tit-for-tat has begun, one that could escalate far beyond fake alerts. Until the evidence is public, all three explanations remain open, and that ambiguity is itself part of the weapon.

4. A humanitarian success ended, and the war resumed within hours

The timing of the hacks is impossible to ignore. They arrived in the same hours that the six-day Oleshky truce expired, a truce that had moved nearly 800 civilians, from a one-year-old child to a 94-year-old, out of a town with no electricity, gas or drinking water, and that had been arranged by the US first lady and the Pope. It was the longest ceasefire of the war, and it held. Then, within hours of its expiry, fake nuclear alerts were flashing on phones in both countries, Russian drones were injuring people in Kherson, and the energy war was back in full force. The contrast is the story of this war in miniature: cooperation is possible, it is narrow, it is local, and it ends on schedule, while the machinery of escalation never stops. The Pope’s hope that the cooperation in Oleshky would “strengthen their willingness to engage in dialogue” will now be tested in Abu Dhabi, where negotiators are due to meet within days. The hacks are a reminder of how little goodwill survives the end of a truce.

5. The cyber war has been running since the first day, and it is accelerating

Sunday’s incident did not come out of nowhere. Cyberattacks have shadowed this war since its first hours, when hackers knocked out thousands of Viasat satellite modems on 24 February 2022, the day Russia invaded, in an attack the US, UK and EU later formally blamed on the Russian government, according to TechCrunch. In December 2023, hackers linked to Russia’s GRU military intelligence destroyed the core of Kyivstar, Ukraine’s largest mobile operator, cutting off 24 million subscribers and temporarily disabling air raid warning systems in Kyiv and Sumy, according to Reuters and the Security Service of Ukraine. What is new about Sunday’s attack is its symmetry: both sides’ warning apps, on the same night, with the same apocalyptic script. That symmetry suggests the cyber war is entering a phase in which civilian warning infrastructure is treated as a legitimate target by both sides, or by third parties happy to provoke both. As the Kremlin’s own spokesman admitted, the threat is growing as technology, including artificial intelligence, evolves. The lesson for every country watching is that the systems that tell citizens when to run for shelter are only as strong as their weakest software, and that weakness is now being tested in real time.

What to Watch Next

1. The technical investigation: Ukraine’s Air Raid Alert team says it is taking additional measures to secure the app, and Russia’s emergencies ministry says it is fixing the vulnerability in its own system. Watch for the findings of both investigations: how the attackers got in, whether the two incidents share a method or a source, and whether either government names a culprit with evidence.
2. Whether trust in the apps survives: Russian users are already deleting the Emercom app, and Ukrainian users were told to disregard strange messages. Watch whether download and usage figures fall, and whether either government issues new guidance on which channels citizens should trust when the app and the sirens disagree.
3. The Abu Dhabi talks, 6–10 November: Negotiators from Ukraine, Russia and the United States are due to resume ceasefire discussions, with an energy ceasefire, a maritime ceasefire and prisoner exchanges on the technical agenda. Watch whether Sunday’s hacks and the resumed strikes harden positions before the talks even begin.
4. The Patriot-for-refineries bargain: Zelensky has offered to halt strikes on Russian refineries for a month if the US supplies Patriot interceptors, and says Kyiv will pay for them. Watch whether Washington accepts the deal, whether missiles can be transferred from existing stockpiles rather than waiting years for new production, and whether Moscow pauses its own energy attacks in return.
5. Kherson and the energy war: Russian attacks resumed in Kherson within hours of the truce ending, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are without power as winter approaches. Watch whether Russia mounts the major offensive on Kherson that Ukrainian officials fear, and whether the power grid survives the next round of strikes.

Sources

• CNN — Fake warnings of nuclear attack posted on hacked Russian and Ukrainian emergency apps
• The Times — Russia and Ukraine given fake warnings of nuclear strikes in cyber attack
• New York Post — Hackers breach emergency alert apps in Ukraine and Russia with fake warnings of nuclear attacks
• The Munich Eye — Russian strikes cut power for thousands as Kherson ceasefire lapses
• Times Now World — Zelensky offers to halt strikes on Russian refineries in exchange for Patriot missiles
• Associated Press via BusinessMirror — Russia just used its new hypersonic missile again in Ukraine. Here’s what to know about the Oreshnik