In December 2023, the Russian-language segment of the Network first circulated a video about a Ukrainian soldier who was rejoicing at being sent to clear the territory in front of the general’s garage instead of the front, and then the news of his death. We checked whether this news is true.
The 19-second video began circulating on the Internet on December 11. In it, a young man in a Ukrainian Armed Forces uniform dances contentedly with a shovel in front of a garage and draws a “snow angel.” The caption under the video, translated from Ukrainian, reads: “I thought I was going to Avdeevka, but I went to clean the general’s garage.”
A few days later, a funeral photograph, allegedly of the same young man named Valery Tarashchuk, spread around social networks. The viral video from his TikTok was allegedly seen by Ukrainian security forces, found the hero and sent to the real front, where he suddenly died. “The transfer of a young man to the front was not some kind of example of justice, because the punishment of the commanders was not reported, but an act of personal revenge on the part of a disgraced officer using soldiers for personal purposes,” read a comment on one of the Russian resources.
This case was written about by such media as “Russian newspaper", "Arguments and facts", "Main regional" And "DPR news feed" The news was spread by Telegram channels “Pozdnyakov 3.0"(280,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Bad News 18+"(245,000), "Ne.Sugar"(244,000), "Readovka explains"(232,000), "Russia now» (227,000), etc.
Finding information about a deceased Ukrainian Armed Forces serviceman named Valery Tarashchuk is quite difficult - he is not mentioned on such resources as, for example, “Memory Platform Memorial" And "Ukrainian memorial" “Verified” did not find any information in open sources about Ukrainian fighters with similar first and last names. But that was the name of the fictional Russian hero fake late November 2023 about a Ukrainian janitor who allegedly broke a statue of a woman in Paris in a fit of lust.
A resource can help you find the real name of a soldier with a machine gun search4faces, working with photos of people on social networks. He claims that with a probability of 66.79% we have a 21-year-old user “VKontakte» Stiopa Igonin.
And indeed, a native of the Cherkasy region of Ukraine has profiles in Facebook And Instagram with a photo familiar to us with a weapon in his hands, and in his account TikTok, where Stepan has more than 8,000 subscribers, it’s easy to find two videos - dancing in front of a garage and with a “snow angel”.
Both videos were published more than a year ago, in December 2022. Unlike the viral video, there are no subtitles about the general's garage and Avdeevka, a suburb of Donetsk that the Russian army storms from October 2023. Moreover, the surroundings on one of video does not look like private property - rather, it is a military unit within the boundaries of one of the Ukrainian cities.
“Verified” tried to contact Stepan Igonin through one of his accounts. As it turned out, everything was fine with the soldier. “I was shocked when my friends showed me this news. Everything that is written there is complete nonsense; I have not cleaned the garages of any generals. Nobody looked for me and didn’t send me to Avdeevka,” Stepan answered.
According to the TGStat service, the first video from Igonin’s TikTok with a caption about Avdeevka was posted on December 11 at 13:05 Moscow time by the pro-Kremlin Telegram channel “Khalyapin 1.0" Previously "Verified" already incriminated this resource is used to spread fake news about Ukrainian military losses, and in both cases the publication was no longer available at the time of writing the review. In this case, too, all the signs of deliberate disinformation are evident: incorrect captions were added to last year’s videos, the person featured in the video was falsely declared dead, and his name was replaced with the name of the person involved in another false news story born in the depths of Russian propaganda.
Cover photo: screenshots from social networks
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