In October 2024, a screenshot of a Facebook post circulated on social networks, where an unnamed Ukrainian Armed Forces serviceman reported the murder of two civilians in the Kursk region. We have verified the authenticity of this image.
On October 15, a screenshot of a post allegedly posted in the “Price of the State” (“Price of the State” - Ukrainian) community on Facebook went viral on Telegram channels. The post contains a photograph of bodies covered with earth and a caption in Ukrainian: “The photograph shows one of the villages liberated by the 61st Separate Infantry Brigade in the Kursk region. In the pit lie the grandfather and his grandson, who decided to resist us. We continue the extermination of orcs. Glory to Ukraine!” “One of the Ukrainian Nazis... decided that it would be a great idea to ‘boast’ about his atrocities to the entire Internet,” commented the screenshot on the Telegram channel “Russia now"(193,000 views at the time of writing this analysis). It was also published, for example, “Uncle Slava"(180,000), "Military leader"(110,000), "Auror's Diary | Z"(94,000), "What happened? (82,000) and "Tsargrad-TV"(76,000).
The 61st Separate Mechanized Brigade (OMB), which is discussed in the screenshot, is indeed participates in the invasion of the Ukrainian Armed Forces into the Kursk region, started August 6, 2024. During the operation, the Ukrainian military occupied part of the territory of the Russian region, including the border town of Sudzhu. It is the military of the 61st Mechanized Infantry Brigade announced about the capture of this settlement three days after the start of the offensive.
Page «Price of power» on Facebook belongs to the project of the same name of the analytical center “CASE Ukraine”. The profile description says: “An educational project that explains to Ukrainians how much the state costs them and where their taxes go.” The content posted on this page is dedicated to the spending of budget funds in Ukraine and the economic situation of the country, and posts about the war are extremely rare in the profile. As a rule, they relate to raising funds for the needs of the army.
However, a reverse search on the viral screenshot showed that for the first time the picture was actually published by “The Price of the Power,” but the caption to the original post posted on October 13 is strikingly different. In it, the project announced a fundraiser for the purchase of a car “to more effectively carry out combat missions,” and the photo allegedly shows the bodies of an elderly woman and her son from a village “liberated by fighters from the 61st brigade.” The photo is presented as “a consequence of the Horde presence.” What kind of village this is is not specified, but from the context it is clear that the original post is about the murder of Ukrainian civilians by the Russian military, and not vice versa.
When comparing this post and the distributed screenshot, it is clear that the text and time of publication are different. There are no other entries for October 13 in the “Price of the Power” profile. Most likely, to create a screenshot, the publication was edited by the reader in the browser by changing the page code. “Verified” has previously sorted out similar fakes and told, how this method is used for disinformation (it can also be used to change the time of publication).
A screenshot with a fake signature first appeared on the Telegram channel “Dill fresh» October 15 at 15:20 Moscow time. The authors of the post claim that there is a lot of photo and video evidence of the “atrocities” of the Ukrainian military in the Kursk region available on the Internet, but most of them were “filmed by Russian cameras, which can easily be interpreted as fake Russian propaganda.” “But here the militants outdid themselves and posted their crimes on the Internet,” writes Ukropsky Fresh.
As before wrote “Verified”, this is not the first time this channel has created and distributed such fakes. The authors of “Ukrop Fresh” take real statements and reports of the Ukrainian authorities and military and add false details to them. The targets of their attacks are often the pages of Ukrainian departments, organizations and non-profit projects on social networks, as is the case with the “Price of Power” post. So, in February 2024 at Ukropsky Fresh told about Kharkov second-grader Ivan, whose family’s savings were allegedly taken away by the military. The basis of this fake was the publication of the blog its_kharkov on Instagram. The original news, which appeared there two weeks before the post in Ukropsky Fresh, said that the boy came to the demining center in Kharkov to give the sappers the gloves he had bought with his own pocket money. Ivan's parents confirmed fact checkers who were present when the gift was presented, but noted the imagination of the channel’s authors.
Not all posts of “Ukropsky Fresh” are distributed on the Internet as widely as the fake screenshot of the “Price of Power” project, but there is a lot of similar content in this channel. Just a couple of days before the viral image was published there appeared message about “the celebration by the command of the 92nd Brigade of the failure in the Kursk region.” The fake was based on fast Ukrainian activist on Facebook, but in the screenshot the author of “Ukropsky Fresh” replaced the Donetsk direction with Kursk in the text and removed fragments that mentioned visiting wounded military personnel in the hospital.
Thus, the Ukrainian military man did not publish a post on Facebook in which he showed the remains of two civilians he killed in the Kursk region. The screenshot was faked, and was based on the publication of a Ukrainian non-profit project, from which it follows that the photo depicts the consequences of the Russian occupation of an unnamed locality in Ukraine. The primary source of the fake was the pro-Kremlin Telegram channel, which has been caught more than once in creating such disinformation.
Cover photo: social networks
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