He was abducted and tortured by Russian soldiers. Then they started using his Instagram to push pro-Kremlin propaganda

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Before the war broke out, Igor Kurayan, a 55-year-old from the southern Ukrainian port city of Kherson, shared frequent gardening updates on social media. His feeds were full of palms, pomegranate trees, marigolds, bamboo and avocados, grown at his home and small business near the Black Sea. He called it his "fairytale garden."

On February 25, a day after Russia invaded Ukraine , Kurayan posted a selfie on Instagram with a rifle, announcing he had volunteered to fight in the Territorial Defense Forces, reserve units of Ukraine's military. Soon after, kherson fell to Russian  troops  and in early April, after weeks living under and protesting against their occupation, Kurayan was abducted. He was watering plants in his shoe store when he said Russian soldiers dragged him outside and threw him into a van. 

Soon after Kurayan's kidnapping, his Facebook and Instagram pages, and a new TikTok account registered under his name, began posting messages entirely out of character for the man known to family and friends as a proud Ukrainian, a passionate activist and avid gardener. 

At first, Kurayan's captors painted him as a patriot, posting old photos from his time running supplies to Ukrainian soldiers on the front line in Donbas, where Russia-backed separatists have been battling Ukraine's government since 2014. 
 

Then strange videos started to surface. In one, Kurayan looked gaunt and ashen, flanked by two armed, masked men holding the blue and yellow Ukrainian flag and a red and black flag associated with the Ukrainian nationalist movement. He said that Kherson was occupied and rallies were pointless, adding that the Territorial Defense there had disbanded. In another, he denounced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's government and called on his countrymen to surrender. 

"I think that further resistance is useless," said Kurayan in the clip, which was shared across his social media accounts and aired on Russian state TV. Standing in front of a cache of weapons, his hands bound, he said he had been part of a plot to attack Russian soldiers and free activists, but that he'd given up, adding: "I suggest that all fighters of the Territorial Defense surrender their weapons."

"They started to use my father's social media. They saw he was active on Facebook ... They registered him on TikTok — my dad does not even know what TikTok is," Kurayan's daughter, Karyna, a 23-year-old journalist who left Ukraine after the war began, told CNN. "They wanted to make a puppet out of him."

Karyna provided the videos and screenshots of posts made on her father's original social media accounts to CNN. The posts, which she shared with Ukrainian authorities, were removed by Kurayan after his release. 
 

Speaking with CNN on an encrypted video call, Kurayan said that Russian soldiers alternated between torturing him for information — twisting his fingers with pliers and beating him bloody with a truncheon — and using his iPhone to access his social media accounts, sharing images portraying him as a hero-turned-traitor. "They started using these photos to play their game," Kurayan said, adding that his captors showed him how they were hijacking his accounts, taunting him. "They used my Facebook, my Instagram, and TikTok, which I didn't have, they made a page there."

The Russians offered me to betray Ukraine, to cooperate with them. They first wanted to show, 'look here is a patriot, and then he betrayed his country,'" Kurayan added, describing how his captors had articulated the arc of their strategy in using his social media. "They said, 'you are a very famous person in Kherson ... we want to make you mayor.'"

CNN has reached out to TikTok for comment about the account created using his name, which is still active. Nothing has been posted since April 24, four days before his release.

As the war in Ukraine stretches on, the battle for hearts and minds is entering a new phase. Moscow is shifting its strategy from a national to a local level, attempting to bring Ukrainians living in occupied territories onto Russia's side. But after struggling to find willing collaborators, it has resorted to new tactics.  

"In the beginning, in the blitzkrieg phase, Russia's propaganda machine was working on the national level — now these efforts are localized, they're trying to convince local people, particularly in occupied areas, that Ukraine has abandoned you," Mykola Balaban, deputy head of the Centre for Strategic Communications and Information Security (Stratcom Centre UA) under Ukraine's Ministry of Culture and Information Policy, told CNN.

"In the case of Igor and many others, they use this content inside of Russia too, to show, 'look this Ukrainian he was an activist, pro-Ukrainian, but now he understands, we show him what is the real situation and now he is pro-Russian, and he understands what we are fighting for.'"