On the night of June 17, 2023, the news of the wound and coma of the head of the GUR of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine Kirill Budanov spread with reference to one of the largest publications in Germany. We checked whether Stern published something like that.

“According to the German publication, Stern, Kirill Budanov is in a coma” - such records became viral in Telegram, collecting, according to TGSTAT service, at least 7 million views only in the first day. Posts with reference to a German magazine Published, in particular, channels"Putin in Telegram" (258,000 views at the time of writing this analysis),"Venocor Kitten Z" (179 000), "Scott Ritter in Telegram" (130,000) and "Urgent news" (87 000). Shared An message and TV presenter Vladimir Solovyov (295,000 views). With reference to Stern, information about the wound of Budanov published a number of Russian media in the next two days (for example, "Pravda.ru" And "Amurpolite.ru"), A "Moscow Komsomolets" With reference to the ex-deputy of the Verkhovna Rada, Ilya Kiva, and completely wrote that the head of Gur died of injuries.

IN end of May Russian media reported that the headquarters of the GUR on Rybalsky Island in Kyiv was struck on the morning of the 29th. In the construction there were supposedly up to a hundred officers, including foreign ones, as well as the head of the department, Kirill Budanov. Since then messages About the alleged wounds Or even death The head of Ukrainian military intelligence is published in Russian media and channels in Telegram almost daily.

The earliest of the discovered “verified” mentions that Stern allegedly wrote about the wound and coma of Budanov, appeared In the anonymous Telegram channel “Phoenix” June 15 at 20:11 Moscow time. The publication did not become popular, gaining only 22 views. A day later, on June 16 at 23:09, the Putin in Telegram channel published a slightly changed version of the Phoenix post, and by midnight, as TGSTAT data testify, even more than a hundred pro -Kremlin channels shared it, collecting almost 1.3 million views in an incomplete hour.

However, the Stern magazine, an authoritative German weekly, published since 1948, never published such a message about the wound of Budanov and his confusion in a coma. To this I turned it Attention journalist Alexei Kovalev. As of June 16, the last message with the mention of Budanov was posted on the site May 15, and the last article of the publication, in which the head of Ukrainian intelligence was given some considerable attention. February 28.

In the evening of June 17, STERN editorial office Published The relevant statement: “Russian propagandists say with reference to Stern that the head of the Ukrainian special services is in a coma in the Berlin hospital. But the message is fictitious. " Open data confirms that Stern magazine really did not publish any information about the wound and coma of Budanov. Search by keywords in German and English, as well as the search for references in the web archives, did not give any evidence that the German magazine (as well as other authoritative European media) published similar news.

This makes it highly likely to argue that a false message with an unreasonable reference to Stern was first published in the Russian -language segment of Telegram and widespread a network of politically engaged channels.