In RuNet you can find claims that the Ukrainians “decommunized” the periodic table by changing the name of the element, which was received in honor of the Moscow region. We have verified the accuracy of this story.
January 24, 2025 Telegram channel "Ukraine.ru“(151,000 views at the time of writing this analysis) wrote: “Meanwhile, the periodic table was decommunized in Ukraine. The chemical element Moscovium found in it was “successfully” renamed Ukrainian (in some posts ukrainium. — Approx. ed.). The element received its true and international name due to the fact that it was discovered and obtained in Dubna, near Moscow. What does Ukraine have to do with all this? This is a rhetorical question. Now the main thing is that independent chemists do not remember the existence of the chemical element ruthenium, which named in honor of the Latin name of Russia (Ruthenia). Anything can be expected from people whose skulls are filled with Bandera hafnium.” The post contains a table that supposedly show children in Ukrainian schools.
According to the TGStat service, in January 2025, at least 350 similar Russian-language posts appeared on Telegram, with a total of more than 2.2 million views. Among them are recordings of channels “Ne.Sugar"(283,000 views), "Uncle Slava"(196,000), "Kirill Fedorov / War history weapons"(121,000), "First People's"(98,000), "Z-News | Army 🅉 18+"(71,000), "Open Ukraine | Open Ukraine"(58,000), "Angry Bunny 18+" (56,000), etc. The renaming of the element was reported by "Channel 5" And "Komsomolskaya Pravda" Moreover, the newspaper clarified: “This is not a joke, not a fake from some Panorama or similar source.”
However, there were reports of the renaming of Muscovy to Ukraine two years ago. Thus, according to TGStat, in January 2023, about 460 similar posts appeared on Telegram, which received a total of approximately 4.2 million views. Among the most popular are channel publications “Truthfulness"(283,000 views), "Observer"(238,000), "Z-News | Army 🅉 18+"(234,000), "First People's"(189,000), "Sheikh Tamir"(179,000), "Pozdnyakov 3.0"(164,000), "From the scene"(152,000), "Ostashko! Important" (twice: 107,000 And 141,000), "Horde"(129,000), "Kot Kostyan - official channel"(114,000), "What happened?"(109,000), "Uncle Slava"(108,000), TG Team Russia (85,000) and "Antifake | Warp"(68,000). Those posts showed the same image as in 2025 and stated that the new chart was already available in office supply stores. There are similar publications in “VKontakte" And "Odnoklassniki", as well as in X on English language.
Muscovy (Mc) is a chemical element that was first discovered received in 2003 by the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (Dubna) in collaboration with Livermore National Laboratory (USA), its atomic number is 115. Initially, the systematic name “ununpentium"(Ununpentium, Uup), composed of the roots of Latin numerals corresponding to the ordinal number. In June 2016, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) suggested their own variants of the names of four new chemical elements of the periodic table of Mendeleev, among which was Moscovium (Moscovium, in honor of the Moscow region). After five months of consideration, the title was official assigned in November 2016.
Proof of the renaming of Muscovy to Ukraine in all publications given at the beginning of this analysis is the same screenshot of Instagram stories, which can be seen from the same interface elements (same time, charge level, Ukrainian language, etc.). According to the viral image, the image with the new version of the periodic table was originally posted by user @helenamaystrenko. At the time of this writing, this is profile unavailable. The stories indicate that the photo was allegedly taken in a certain stationery store, and the following text was superimposed:
“I graduated from school 20 years ago and still remember the table of elements. But this is something new."
“Verified” studied several Ukrainian trading platforms from Google search results. request “buy a table of chemical elements”, and on all versions of the product where the 115th element was, it was called either moscovium or ununpentium. Moreover, not a single authoritative publication in Ukraine wrote about its renaming to Ukrainian. On the contrary, several Ukrainian fact-checking projects and media departments claimed back in 2023 that this news was fake.
You can see the email at the bottom of the photo. [email protected] - this address belongs to the Kyiv publishing house "Litera LTD" And indicated on his website. The last four digits (04–16) of the old telephone number are also visible in the photo. numbers online store of this company. "Litera LTD" is engaged creation of educational literature for preschool educational institutions, secondary general and vocational education, as well as university students.
According to the agency "Ukrinform", in 2023, the editor-in-chief of the publishing house, Elena Borodina, stated that the periodic table of chemical elements captured in the viral screenshot was not produced by them, and the image was faked. She also emphasized that at that time their printed products did not indicate a similar telephone number for the online store. “This number is only on the official website. They simply took the data from the website and entered it in,” Borodina noted.
Post with a refutation on January 24, 2023 came out and on the Litera LTD Facebook page:
“We received the following letter in the publisher’s e-mail box:
“Good afternoon! My name is ***** Victor. Today I noticed a photo in some public pages, which indicates that in one of your textbooks or notebooks, where there is a periodic table of chemical elements, the name of one of the elements (you can see it in the photo) has been changed. Can you confirm this information? Thank you in advance for your answer.”
Thanks for the question! Suddenly ))))
And indeed, the public is spreading a fake with an alleged photograph of our chemistry manual, where the Muscovite element is replaced by the Ukrainian element.
Dear our customers, firstly, our publishing house did not provide the periodic table of chemical elements on the covers of our products (see photo of one of our publications, others are made in a similar way). Secondly, please check your sources. Our online store manager, in one Google search, found where... horns grow from. Twitter is teeming with this stuffing - a “snapshot” made in Photoshop. Do not allow a hostile IPSO (information psychological operation. - Ed.) to manipulate your thoughts and beliefs.
P.S. The element under this number in our table (black and white in the blocks of publications, visible in our photo) has a completely different name. And if it had something like the one in the tables printed in the enemy’s publications, then, of course, we wouldn’t be against renaming it, if anything))”.
The statement included photographs of the cover of a chemistry publication and a spread with a table. A similar photo was shared by the Ukrinform agency. In these versions of the tables, the 115th element was called ununpentium.
In addition, at the time of writing the Ukrinform note, Instagram @helenamaystrenko was still available, but the profile was closed as private. According to our colleagues from the project StopFake, the owner of the page did not respond to messages from journalists.
The earliest publication with a viral image that “Verified” was able to find using keywords appeared on January 23, 2023 at 16:22 Moscow time in the Telegram channel “Frivolous news"(@KomitetZ, 21,000 views). The entry was marked: “From subscriber Nikolai Fomenko.” Previously this resource twice mentioned in our analyzes as a distributor of misinformation. After 12 min. a similar post also marked “from subscribers” was published in the Telegram channel “Shaman Rahu"(3000 views), which was spotted in the spread of dozens of fakes. The 2025 wave started on January 24 from Telegram channels “Miroslava Berdnik"(2700 views), "Voice of Russia" (2000) and "Ukraine.ru"(151,000).
Thus, in Ukraine the chemical element moscovium was not renamed to ukrainian. In 2025, a viral screenshot from 2023, which initially appeared in pro-Kremlin Telegram channels that had previously distributed fakes, went viral across the Internet. “Verified” did not find a store that sold the modified table of chemical elements. In addition, the publishing house that allegedly released such a table called the viral photo a fake.
Cover photo: social networks
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