A Russian court sentenced Brittney Griner, a basketball star from the US, to nine years in prison for bringing a small amount of marijuana into the country. By contrast, US teenager Audrey Lorber was given a slap on the wrist for a slightly more serious case of the same crime.
According to a YouGov poll, the idea of introducing new additional sanctions against Russia has strong support among Europeans: 74% of those surveyed in Poland, 75% in the UK, 76% in Spain, 55% in Germany, 56% in Italy, 62% in France, all support the introduction of additional economic sanctions against Russia in their country. What the Europeans are unwilling to support are further sanctions against Russia if it would negatively impact their own standard of living. It was this single indicator - one of many in the survey - that the Kremlin media focused on, portraying it as the overall European sentiment on sanctions, thereby manipulating the integrity of the YouGov survey data.
The Pentagon and the Ukrainian Armed Forces denied Russian Defense Minister Shoigu's claims about the "destruction" of HIMARS system used by the Ukrainians. The photo and video of broken military equipment shows an Oshkosh military truck and an M777 howitzer, not an American HIMARS.
The Catherine II statue is the property of the Odesa City Council. The city of Odesa, and not the Ukrainian President will decide its fate. The Ukrainian President cannot single handedly order that the Odesa statue be demolished or replaced, he simply does not have the authority or the power to do so. This is the responsibility of the local city authorities. Russian media however chose to focus only on the petition which ironically proposes to replace a Russian empress with an American porno star, which gathered 26,468 signatures of support.
A video clip of motorists angrily dragging away demonstrators who were blocking a highway has been viewed tens of thousands of times in online posts that claim it shows Ukrainian anti-war protesters obstructing traffic in Spain. This is false: the clip was filmed in a highway in the Italian capital Rome. The group that staged the protest told AFP it showed a climate demonstration unrelated to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Serhiy Volynsky, the commander of Ukraine's 36th Marine Brigade, who is in Russian captivity, has not said anything that could be interpreted as support for the Russian propaganda version of the deadly explosions at the prisoner of war camp in Olenivka.
The photo of empty shelves with supposedly sold-out energy-saving light bulbs was actually taken in a US supermarket at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The story is certainly complicated, and the information currently accessible to the public is clearly not enough to draw any conclusions. But the topic of Western russophobia was clearly added to it by the correspondent of Channel One. The publications in Spanish and Swiss media do not mention that the problem is related to the war in Ukraine. They only cite Elena's words: "At school, the war in Ukraine is talked about a lot. They say that we, Russians, are all bad. And the girls would come home sad because of it" - without claims that it could have caused the children to be taken away. And the story that the girls are allegedly considered children of Ukrainians killed in the war is found only in Valentina Solovyova's story.
Verdict: False
The footage was taken during a 2017 event at the University of Ghent. The event was not affiliated with NATO.
Verdict: False
The photos show a set of custom-built Lego figures. A Lego spokesperson confirmed the images do not depict an official product.