In May 2023, a message about Ukrainian military personnel who were poisoned by volunteers was widely circulated in the Russian-language segment of Telegram and Russian media. We checked whether this news story has any basis in reality.

The text and video telling that 40 soldiers of the 30th separate mechanized brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine “were poisoned to death by dumplings” are widely separated in Telegram on May 9, after repost publications of military correspondent Murad Gazdiev in the Russia Today Telegram channel. The video shows a smartphone playing an audio message from an unknown person under the nickname marjankopuk, who claims that some volunteers brought food to the 30th brigade, including dumplings, which allegedly caused the poisoning and death of 40 military personnel. At the end of the message, the author calls for “checking volunteers.” Gazdiev notes that this message was found on the smartphone of a killed Ukrainian paratrooper. With reference to RT on May 9 and 10 this story hit and other media, including federal - they wrote about this, for example, Lenta.ru And "News». Moreover, if in the text of the news on Lenta there is a passage that “it is not known whether the Ukrainian military were deliberately poisoned or the incident occurred due to inadequate quality of the product,” then on Radio Sputnik the article was published under title “Media: Ukrainian volunteers poisoned 40 Ukrainian Armed Forces military personnel to death with dumplings.”

Screenshot of a message in the RT channel

None of the above-mentioned media provides any confirmation, except for the video in which the voice message is played. When searching on Google in Ukrainian for the request “fried dumplings ZSU”, “Verified” found video clip with similar information, distributed in the Ukrainian segment of social networks and instant messengers back in January 2023 and then refuted by Ukrainian fact checkers. There is no doubt that this video is based on the same audio message, since the sent audio itself, the death toll of 40 people, and the 30th brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces are mentioned, and the date on the video on Gazdiev’s channel is visible - January 26.

Neither we nor Ukrainian fact checkers were able to find any official statements or other evidence that the incident with poisoned dumplings is real. Project InformNapalm I analyzed this message and the reaction to it back on January 27th. How reported, fact checkers contacted several sources in the 30th Brigade and found no confirmation of poisonings. The original source of a voice message on WhatsApp is almost impossible to track by legal means, and the nickname marjankopuk can only be found announcement about selling a microwave oven.

Similar messages about military poisonings have appeared since the beginning of a full-scale war in February 2022, both in the Ukrainian and Russian information fields, but none of them, with careful attention consideration not confirmed by any reliable sources. For example, in August 2022, it was reported that eight Russian military personnel were poisoned with rat poison in a hospital in Sevastopol. By versions Ukrainian media, the reason was the negligence of staff when baiting rodents. On the same day, the plot was creatively reworked by Twitter users and turned into the history of radical partisan resistance with the transfer of “pies with rat poison” to the hospital.

Colleagues from The Insider suggest, that the January audio message arose as a result of the overlap of several Ukrainian news events from different years. One of the reports of mass (non-fatal) food poisoning of Ukrainian soldiers with food donated by businessmen-philanthropists spread in 2014. The second - not related to the Armed Forces of Ukraine - appeared in November 2022, when, due to Russian artillery strikes on the energy infrastructure of Ukraine, electricity was often cut off in Kyiv and other cities. Then about the danger of poisoning with stale food told On his Facebook page, former Minister of Defense of Ukraine Anatoly Gritsenko.

It seems that these stories overlapped each other, which led to the emergence of a frightening Ukrainian mailing, which a few months later found its way into the Russian media, received a “second wind” and experienced a new series of distortions.

Cover image: Ismet Shahin