The Insider has uncovered several signs indicating that the little-known “anti-war” group Global Citizens Against War 1984 (GCAW1984) is of Russian provenance. In late August, GCAW1984 claimed responsibility for planning an arson attack on a plant in Slovakia belonging to Ukrainian drone manufacturer Skyeton.
GCAW1984 describes itself as an international anti-war movement unaffiliated with any state and opposed to militarization regardless of the country involved. The group has called companies producing weapons for conflict zones “legitimate targets” and threatened further acts of sabotage. It has also hinted at a possible future attack on a U.S.-Israeli missile production plant that is planned to be opened in Germany.
The first sign that Russian is the native language of GCAW1984 was found on the group’s Instagram account, which is run in English but but features two saved story collections with the same Russian name (“Актуальное”). The Insider checked them with Instagram’s interface set to English, and the label remained in Russian, meaning that the word “Актуальное” was entered in Russian by whoever managed the account.
Several more traces have survived in the website’s source code. The site was created using Hostinger AI Builder, and the page code contains the generator: Hostinger AI Builder tag. The code suggests that a ready-made template was used to create the site and was not fully customized for GCAW1984. Its configuration still contains the template name “bulletin.”
An unusual detail emerged in the formatting of the site’s text. The page’s main font is Poppins, but within a quote from George Orwell’s novel 1984, a small fragment retains different formatting: font-family: "YS Text", -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Arial, Helvetica, "Arial Unicode MS", sans-serif.
YS Text is the proprietary font of Russian internet search giant Yandex. Since the font is not used elsewhere in GCAW1984’s website design and appears only within a separate fragment of text, it may have been carried into the editor along with formatting copied from another source.
Notably, the quote from Orwell itself points to a possible Russian-language source. Although 1984 was written in English, GCAW1984 does not use the original English wording.
Orwell’s sentence reads as the author actually wrote it reads:
Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad.
On the GCAW1984 website, however, a re-translated version appears:
Just because you're in the minority, or even in the singular, doesn't mean you're crazy.
The wording “even in the singular” sounds unnatural when applied to a person in English. It does, however, correspond quite literally to a common Russian translation of the same sentence:
«Если ты в меньшинстве — и даже в единственном числе, — это не значит, что ты безумен».
This is, for example, the version published in Russian by the Quotes of Famous People portal, Eksmo, and Russian-language digital libraries.
The authors of GCAW1984, quoting an English-language novel on an English-language website, apparently did not use the original English text but instead translated its Russian version back into English.
The Insider previously analyzed the GCAW1984 manifesto and a letter received by the editorial office from a person identifying himself as Robert Lewanowski. An AI analysis of both texts also identified numerous constructions characteristic of translation from Russian. A native English speaker shown the manifesto by The Insider suggested that its author was a native speaker of an Eastern European or Slavic language.
There are discrepancies in the biographies of the organization’s members published on the website as well, as the Slovak outlet Aktuality.sk noted. The “Team” section lists just two people — Polish national Robert Lewanowski and Serbian national Stefan Ilić. Lewanowski, for example, is said to have been drafted into the Polish army in 2007 and served for two years, even though compulsory military service in Poland at the time lasted nine months.
The website’s authors also claim that he studied at Poland’s National Defence Academy and took part in humanitarian missions in Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, and South Sudan. However, The Insider was unable to find independent evidence corroborating such activities. The website explains this by saying that Lewanowski deliberately “tries not to publicize his activities” and prefers to “remain in the shadows.”
Ilić’s biography is described in similarly elaborate detail. According to the website, he was born in Niš and lost his mother when the city was bombed by NATO forces in 1999. Ilić is said to have received medical training, and from 2011 he purportedly worked in Syria and other Middle Eastern countries “as part of a UN humanitarian mission.” He then allegedly worked as an anesthesiologist at a major hospital in Germany while simultaneously studying political science at the Free University of Berlin. In late 2025, he was supposedly fired for taking part in protests against increased military spending and “NATO’s aggressive eastward expansion policy,” after which he returned to Serbia due to unnamed threats. The Insider has so far found no independent confirmation of this biography either.
Interestingly, both Lewanowski and Ilić are named after footballers — one Polish and one Serbian. The Polish footballer’s surname, however, was slightly altered, as the unknown “pacifists” removed the letter “d” from Lewandowski.