The hit American film Barbie has taken Russia by storm, beating a dour propaganda blockbuster produced by the Kremlin to promote its war in Ukraine.

Despite failing the Kremlin’s morality test, bootlegged versions of Barbie have now been dubbed into Russian.

“Let’s go!” the company that has produced the new Russian-language version of Barbie said on Thursday. “From today, the movie of the year is dubbed.”

Hollywood film studios pulled out of Russia last year after the invasion of Ukraine, but with Russian cinemas on the brink of collapse and determined to sustain an air of normality, the Kremlin has turned a blind eye to bootlegged versions of American films.

But now this strategy risks undermining the Kremlin’s propaganda message.

Instead of flocking to watch films about the corrupt West, young Russians want to watch Barbie, a fantasy world of loud Americanisms that promotes equal rights.

In the film, Barbie and Ken are thrown out of Barbie Land for not being beautiful enough and have to survive in the real world before they return with discriminatory human views which they then purge. The film has been tipped to win several Oscars.

But the Kremlin does not approve and last month its culture ministry issued a statement saying that Barbie didn’t “meet the goals and objectives set by the Head of State to preserve and strengthen traditional Russian spiritual and moral values”.

Instead, the Kremlin wanted Russians to watch Witness, a propaganda tale about a Jewish violin player from Belgium who gets stranded in Kyiv on the opening days of its invasion last year. In the film, the violinist sees his manager get raped and murdered by Ukrainian soldiers and a Ukrainian officer marching around with a copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

The film has flopped.

On the Russian film ranking website, Witness has received an average rating of 3.9 out of 10.

The Daily Telegraph, London