Recently, Russian media wrote that a shell-shocked Ukrainian soldier from Ternopil stabbed to death his wife and two small children because of the flowers of an inflatable trampoline. We have verified the accuracy of such messages.
News of this triple murder began spreading online on December 10, 2022. According to online publications, a soldier of the Ukrainian Armed Forces named Boris Pilipenko (sometimes Pilepenko) received a concussion on November 14 during combat operations and, after rehabilitation, returned to his hometown of Ternopil, where he stabbed his wife and two children to death with a knife. The reason was allegedly a children's inflatable trampoline in the colors of the Russian tricolor - the fighter thought that treason had occurred at home, and flew into a rage at the sight of the enemy flag. It is also reported that the Ukrainian family received this trampoline as humanitarian aid for children from France and that the Ternopil police opened a criminal case under article murder. Such publications can be found on the websites "Public News Service", TV channel "Ren-TV", "Federal News Agency", "Pravda.ru", "Russian seven" And others news resources.
In Telegram channels and social networks, this story is often illustrated with a screenshot of news from the Ukrainian TSN website, thereby demonstrating that Ukrainian media allegedly wrote about this event. The image shows a photo of a white, blue and red trampoline that appears to have blood stains on it. On Telegram, the most widely circulated entries were from the following channels: “Live broadcast"(606,000 views), "Ne.Sugar"(191,000), "Ukraine.ru"(191,000), "Army 18+"(184,000), "Bullet" (169,000), "First People's"(157,000), "Anastasia Kashevarova" (153,000), "Sheikh Tamir"(141,000), "Signal"(128,000, already deleted), "Ostashko! Important"(113,000), "Special Operation Z"(92,000), "Boiling water" (73,000) and "Voice of Mordor"(68,000). There are similar posts on VKontakte (examples here, here, here, here And here), Twitter (here And here) And "Zene"
Note that most publications say that the police found three corpses, but there are resources according to which there were four: Pilipenko allegedly finished with himself shortly after the massacre of family members.
According to the viral screenshot, news of the murder in Ternopil appeared on December 7 at 10:14 on the website of the Television News Service under the headline (translated from Ukrainian) “Killed his wife and two children for an inflatable trampoline. What is known about the murder of a family in Ternopil.” At the same time, the word “two” is used in the original, although, according to rules Ukrainian language, it should be written “two”. In addition, there is no lead isolated the adverbial phrase “turning home”, and there is no period at the end of the sentence. We can assume that these are typos, but it seems unlikely that so many errors could appear in two sentences and no one corrected them over time (at the time the screenshot was taken there were almost 8,000 views).
According to the distributed image, the text on the site was placed by the editor Oksana Zinchenko, however, we did not find such material under her name. A search on the TSN website also did not help us find such a news article from other authors. Overall, we were unable to find any mention of this trampoline story online between December 7th and December 10th. At the same time, not a single publication with a screenshot contains a link to the TSN material; accordingly, it is also not possible to check the presence of this material in the Google cache or the Internet archive.
The screenshot shows that the emblem of the National Police of Ukraine is superimposed on the photo of the trampoline. Our colleagues from the StopFake website contacted to the press service of the Main Directorate of the National Police in the Ternopil region, where journalists were told that there had been no such or similar incident in the city recently, and accordingly, the police did not post a photograph of the bloody trampoline.
In addition, the StopFake authors found another news, posted Oksana Zinchenko on the TSN website on December 7 at 10:14, and suggested that this publication could become the basis for creating a fake screenshot. That material is dedicated to Russian missile attacks on the Zaporozhye region. In addition to the author’s name, date and time of publication, the reading time of the text, the number of pictures and the category in the main menu of the site (“War”) also coincide.
However, if you carefully compare the viral screenshot and ours, you will notice that on the viral screenshot above the heading a completely different heading is indicated - “Ukraine”, although the heading “War” should also be indicated there.
We also analyzed the fonts and came to the conclusion that the font on the viral image differs from that used on the TSN website. This is most noticeable in the letters “a”, “y”, “b” and “z”.
Apparently, the photo from the fake screenshot shows an inflatable trampoline playpen from the company Intex. However, we were unable to find a trampoline in white-blue-red colors on the Internet, since the original product has yellow instead of white. Also exists A mini version of this trampoline, but the colors on it are even more different.
We found the earliest publication about a murder over a trampoline in Telegram thanks to a keyword search in the TGStat service. She appeared in the channel "Russia"(27,000 views) December 10 at 10:53 Moscow time.
In conclusion, let us add that the news we are considering called fake even in the pro-Russian Telegram channel of the Ministry of Truth, which positions itself as a fact-checking project, but at the same time violates all the basic principles International Fact-Checking Network: Refutations are published by anonymous authors who do not provide readers with links to sources, do not describe their methodology, sources of funding or correction policy, and also openly support one of the parties to the conflict.
According to the authors of the Ministry of Pravda, the fake news about the murder in Ternopil was carried out by the Center for Information and Psychological Operations (TsIPsO) in order to discredit Russian sources of information. No evidence was provided for this. This is not the first time that pro-Russian channels blame the Ukrainian special services for the appearance and spread of fakes on the RuNet. For example, this already happened during the spread fake screenshot Elon Musk's tweet, in which he allegedly swears at the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, and an image ticket Moscow metro with an inscription about nuclear war.
Cover photo: social networks
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