A NATO Defense College report highlights that Russia appears unable to gain victory over Ukrainian forces, but expresses fears that the Kremlin may rebuild its army and accumulate forces to confront NATO countries in the future.
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.
Ukrainian prisoners of war held in a detention center in Russian occupied Olenivka in eastern Ukraine could not have been fired upon from the Ukrainian side. Facts available in the public domain, international experts' conclusions, the interceptions of Russian military conversations, all show that the Ukrainian military did not fire on the Russian prison camp where Russian invaders were keeping Ukrainian Azovstal defenders.
Russian propaganda presented a single activist's social media post about the Ukrainian language as a popular belief held by all Ukrainians in Poland. In reality, Ukrainian refugees are not demanding that Ukrainian be made an official language in Poland. The Polish Constitution clearly states that the only official language in the country is Polish, which is spoken by a majority of people. If minorities constitute at least 20% of the total number of inhabitants of a given municipality, and their language is entered in the Official Municipalities Register, they have the right to use their own language as a secondary language. Today, the Ukrainian language does not have such a status in any of the municipalities.
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.
StopFake found no evidence of Ukrainian refugees living in Europe having their children taken away from them. The German Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt) and the Youth Welfare Office (Jugendamt) are not aware of any such cases in the families of Ukrainian refugees.
A new hoax has been targeting Ukrainian refugees. These two men covered in Nazi tattoos, wearing beach shorts, have been presented as Ukrainian refugees in Croatia by pro-Russian Twitter accounts. In reality, the images show Hungarian members of a neo-Nazi group.
A Swiss land registry official said that documents claiming to show purchases of luxury properties by Ukrainian officials are forged.
The documents contain errors, such as the wrong digit count in numbers identifying the property.
A Swiss newspaper said the false claims were the work of a blogger loyal to the Kremlin.
Our ruling
A website claimed that three high-ranking Ukrainian officials had purchased luxury property in the resort town of Gstaad, Switzerland.
A Swiss land registry official said the documents cited as evidence were forged; errors in them prove that they did not come from the registry, the official said.
We rate this claim False.
Several pro-Russian accounts have been circulating photos that they say show how Ukrainians put anti-Russian stickers in different places in Auschwitz, the former death camp run by the Nazis. The stickers say: "Russia & Russians - The only gas you and your country deserve is Zyklon B", a reference to the toxic gas used by Nazis to kill prisoners in the on-site gas chambers.
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, over 7 million people have fled the country. Multiple reports have outlined the specific difficulties that African refugees faced as they attempted to cross the Polish border and enter the European Union. Georgina Robertson and Sophie Samaille take a look at a Facebook post falsely claiming that refugees from Africa were shot at by Polish police.