The US State Department has shut down its Global Engagement Center, which aimed to counter disinformation from countries including Russia, China and Iran. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed on Wednesday that the centre restricted free speech in the US and elsewhere.

Ukraine has no connection to the attempted assassination of US President Donald Trump by American citizen Ryan Root. The only link between Root and Ukraine is that he allegedly tried to buy a rocket launcher and a surface-to-air missile from someone he believed to be a Ukrainian arms dealer. However, it remains unclear whether this seller was in fact a Ukrainian citizen. Root also communicated with other illegal arms dealers in the US, as well as smugglers from Mexico who allegedly helped him escape the country after the attempt on Trump’s life. According to court documents, Root had no links to the Ukrainian government or military leadership.

A video assembled to look like a BBC report about Ukraine’s first lady seeking political asylum has been shared by social media users but is a fake, a spokesperson for the outlet has said. The video mimics the British broadcaster’s formatting for visual reports on social media, with multiple uses of its logo, red and white branding, and familiar typeface.

BBC News did not release such a story. The boy in the photo is named Roman Oleksiv – he received burns as a result of a Russian missile strike on Vinnytsia in 2022.

The document in the photo is a consent form for legal posthumous organ donation in the province of Ontario, Canada. Only Canadian citizens or those who have permanent residence, as well as state health insurance, can apply for donation. Most likely, the propagandists simply downloaded the form from the Internet.

This video, like Kateryna Levchenko’s quote, is fabricated by propagandists.

Images generated by artificial intelligence have the potential to rewrite history, experts are warning. Free online tools can create fake depictions of events such as the Holocaust and 9/11 within seconds. Experts say the results blur the line between fact and fiction, leaving people unsure of who or what to trust.

A video of NATO troops and armoured vehicles in Estonia in February is not evidence of a recent military escalation with Russia, as has been suggested online. VERDICT: Miscaptioned. The video shows NATO troops in Tallinn on February 24, 2025, for Estonia’s Independence Day, according to NATO and British officials. Photos posted online in 2024 suggest the three armoured vehicles in the video were in Estonia long before February.

This claim is false and has been officially denied by company representatives.

The statement about the proposal of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to resettle the population of Gaza to Ukraine and Syria is a fake.

On 4 April 2025, Russian forces launched a ballistic missile attack on a residential area in Kryvyi Rih. The missile, equipped with a cluster warhead, landed near a children’s playground, causing heavy civilian casualties. Twenty people were killed, nine of them children. Video footage from the restaurant, which was also damaged in the strike, clearly shows that no military personnel were present at the time of the attack.

This claim, made by propagandists citing African media, is false – mainly because Defence Minister Rustem Umerov did not visit Niger in November 2023. Moreover, by the end of 2024, the French company Orano had lost control of uranium mining in Niger, and the country’s main uranium buyers are now Russia and China.

The claim circulating on Russian platforms that a Ukrainian soldier allegedly confessed to killing a child near Sudzha is either fake or at least unverified. The message was posted on a Facebook account that, according to available data, previously belonged to Ukrainian soldier Artur Yakovitskyi. His family has reported him missing – according to open sources, he disappeared near the settlement of Sudzha on 28 February 2025. On 28 March, a suspicious post appeared on his Facebook page, allegedly containing a confession to the murder. On 1 April, a screenshot of this post began actively circulating on pro-Russian Telegram channels. The image of the “murdered teenager” attached to the post was likely generated by artificial intelligence – this is supported by the analysis results of several AI detection tools.

The claim that BBC News labelled a photo of Ukraine’s Ambassador to the UK, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, as the “next president of Ukraine” is unfounded and constitutes disinformation. The screenshot, purportedly taken from a BBC News broadcast, has been faked.

The propagandists fabricated a screenshot of a Ukrainian news article with a quote purporting to be from Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the head of the Ukrainian presidential administration, saying that EU countries ‘owe’ Ukraine for security. In reality, Podolyak said that each country independently determines the amount of military assistance Ukraine can expect.

A post shared on Facebook claims to show a Charlie Hebdo magazine cover of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Verdict: False There is no evidence that this image was created by the magazine. It is fake.

Neither Euronews nor any other trustworthy source has reported such an incident.

VERDICT: Altered. The image is a manipulated version of an authentic group photo.

No video with such content was published by the French news channel BFMTV.

Russia itself has not stopped attacking Ukraine’s energy and civilian infrastructure for a single day – neither after Zelenskyy’s promise to stop such attacks, nor after Putin’s conversation with Donald Trump, during which the Russian leader supposedly ordered a halt to attacks on Ukrainian energy facilities. After the alleged ‘agreement to stop strikes’, Russia continues to launch more than a hundred attack drones into Ukraine every day, targeting energy facilities, among other targets. The most massive attacks after the agreement between Putin and Trump were Russian strikes on the regions of Kropyvnytskyi, Odesa, Zaporizhzhya, Donetsk, Sumy and Kyiv regions.