On the night of June 17, 2023, news spread about the injury and coma of the head of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, Kirill Budanov, with reference to one of the largest publications in Germany. We checked to see if Stern had published anything similar.

“According to the German publication Stern, Kirill Budanov is in a coma” - similar posts went viral on Telegram, collecting, according to the TGStat service, at least 7 million views in the first 24 hours alone. Posts with a link to a German magazine published, in particular, channels"Putin on Telegram" (258,000 views at the time of writing this analysis),"Voenkor Kitten Z" (179,000), "Scott Ritter on Telegram" (130,000) and "Breaking News" (87,000). Shared message and TV presenter Vladimir Solovyov (295,000 views). With reference to Stern, information about Budanov’s injury was published in the next two days by a number of Russian media (for example, "Pravda.ru" And "AmurPolit.ru"), A "Moskovsky Komsomolets" with reference to ex-Verkhovna Rada deputy Ilya Kiva, he even wrote that the head of the Main Intelligence Directorate died from his injuries.

IN end of May Russian media reported that on the morning of the 29th, the headquarters of the Main Intelligence Directorate on Rybalsky Island in Kyiv was hit. The building allegedly housed up to a hundred officers, including foreign ones, as well as the head of the department, Kirill Budanov. Since then messages about the supposed wounded or even death the head of Ukrainian military intelligence are published in Russian media and Telegram channels almost daily.

The earliest reference found by “Verified” is that Stern allegedly wrote about Budanov’s injury and coma, appeared in the anonymous Telegram channel “Phoenix” on 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, a slightly modified version of Phoenix’s post was published in the “Putin on Telegram” channel, and by midnight, according to TGStat data, it was shared by more than a hundred more pro-Kremlin channels, collecting almost 1.3 million views in less than an hour.

However, Stern magazine, a reputable German weekly published since 1948, never published such a report about Budanov’s injury and his fall into a coma. To this paid attention journalist Alexey Kovalev. As of June 16, the last message mentioning Budanov was posted on the Stern.de website May 15, and the last article of the publication, in which the head of Ukrainian intelligence was given some significant attention, was published February 28.

On the evening of June 17, the Stern editorial office published corresponding statement: “Russian propagandists claim, citing Stern, that the head of the Ukrainian special services is in a coma in a Berlin hospital. But the message is fictitious." Open data confirms that Stern magazine indeed did not publish any information about Budanov’s injury and coma. A keyword search in German and English, as well as a search of references in web archives, did not yield any evidence that the German magazine (or other reputable European media) published such news.

This makes it highly likely that the false message with an unfounded link to Stern was first published in the Russian-language segment of Telegram and disseminated by a network of politically biased channels.