Anonymous telegram channels write about this after the massive shelling of Kherson on the morning of December 24. According to one version of propagandists, the Ukrainian military fired at the center of Kherson from HIMARS, and according to another, they hit the city from “Grad” multiple rocket launchers. However, none of these versions is true.

The propagandists assure that impressive elements found in the form of shrapnel testify to the shelling from HIMARS and prove this with photographs. As the Stop Fake fact-checkers found out, along with a real photo with a car, propagandists published a photo with balloons taken in 2016 in Kuwait. It does show tungsten balls from the M30A1 multiple launch rocket system.

The version of the propagandists about the attack on the Grad multiple launch rocket systems was refuted by both the Deputy Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Kyrylo Tymoshenko and foreign experts.

The propagandists spread an “analysis” of photographs of one of the Grad craters, which allegedly proves that the fire was fired from the north, from the territory controlled by the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Like, the funnel in the photo was cleaned up, but the furrows from the debris on the pavement were not removed. Behind them, you can easily establish where the shell came from, namely from the north, from where there are no Russian soldiers.

The photographs used by the propagandists were indeed taken at the site of the tragedy, and the analysis of the shelling itself was falsified. This is stated in the investigation of OSINT analyst DefMon.

The analyst argues that the projectile was fired from the southeast and most likely by the Russian military. His conclusions are confirmed by Bild journalist Julian Repke, who previously investigated similar cases of shelling in Donbas in 2015. Repke also calculated the direction of the projectile launch, coinciding with the results of DefMon: presumably, the projectile was fired from the left bank of the Dnipro, now under the control of Russian troops.

As a result of Russian shelling of the center of Kherson, 13 people were killed, 64 were injured with varying severity.

This is not the first time that Kremlin propagandists have tried to cover up the shelling of the civilian population and civilian facilities in Ukraine, calling them “another Ukrainian provocation” carried out in order to discredit the Russian military.

It was these fakes that propagandists spread after the missile attack on the Kramatorsk railway station, Zaporizhzhia and other cities of Ukraine, where dozens of civilians were killed.

Such information is being disseminated in social networks with a link to a fake page of the Ukrenergo company. These messages were discovered and warned of a fake by specialists from the national energy company Ukrenergo.

“Emergency shutdowns are a forced step, applied only in the presence of a deficit in order to maintain a balance of production and consumption in the energy system. Power engineers will be able to refuse them only after the complete cessation of enemy attacks on our energy system”, the Ukrenergo telegram channel says.

The company stressed that Ukrenergo has only one official Facebook page - https://www.facebook.com/npcukrenergo and only one official telegram channel https://t.me/Ukrenergo.

“Something else, created under our logo in social networks, is also a fake of the Russian IPSO”, Ukrenergo noted.

Fake power outages are another attempt by Russia to stir up Ukrainian society and encourage dissatisfaction with the authorities and protests against the war.

This was written by some Russian media and anonymous telegrams.

Allegedly, planned hospitalizations were suspended in Kyiv for an indefinite period, as hospitals are overflowing with wounded soldiers from the Bakhmut direction. This is allegedly evidenced by a report by the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, which says that “only one such hospital receives up to 100 seriously wounded soldiers per day”.

The suspension of planned hospitalizations in Kyiv is not at all connected with “overcrowding of hospitals”, but with continuous Russian shelling of the energy system and other critical infrastructure of Ukraine, which entails possible emergency shutdowns of electricity, heat and water supply.

In early December, Deputy Minister of Health of Ukraine Mariia Karchevych announced that in case of a prolonged shutdown of electricity, heat and water supply in Ukraine, the Ministry of Health would suspend planned hospitalizations and operations in hospitals.

The statement of propagandists that hospitals in Kyiv are overflowing with wounded Ukrainian soldiers brought to the capital from the direction of Bakhmut has no evidence. The authors of such publications refer to a report in the newspaper Corriere della Sera, which allegedly confirms this thesis. The journalists of the publication do write that the hospital they managed to visit is overflowing with wounded soldiers, but the medical institution referred to in the report is not located at all in Kyiv, but near Bakhmut.

‘Yesterday afternoon we reached the Lyman hospital, a town about fifty kilometers east of Bakhmut, where dozens of seriously wounded were stabilized by doctors before they were rushed to the major medical facilities in Dnipro and Kyiv. The center is deserted, the destruction is enormous: perhaps, out of more than 30,000 inhabitants at the beginning, a few thousand now remain”, the Corriere della Sera article says.

Currently, Bakhmut in the Donetsk region remains the hottest spot along the entire frontline with more than 1300 km of active hostilities. Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said that medical facilities in the temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine are overloaded and unable to cope with a large number of wounded Russian occupation troops.

Russian propaganda deliberately spreads disinformation about the losses of the Ukrainian army in order to emotionally put pressure on the Ukrainians and divert attention from the losses in their own army. Earlier, they said that the Ukrainian authorities are lying to the Ukrainians, that there are no losses in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and the losses near Bakhmut are colossal.

Such information was disseminated by anonymous telegram channels posing as Odesa ones. They mix posts with declarations of love for Odesa and its history with explicit Kremlin narratives, the Center for Strategic Communications reports.

According to them, allegedly in Odesa there is a business to collect biomaterial from dead Ukrainian soldiers who become posthumous donors. They say that the remains of the bodies are burned, the dead are given the status of “missing”, and biomaterials are taken out to Lviv twice a week. It is not true.

In fact, Russian propaganda has been constantly promoting the message for the past eight years that Ukraine is a “supplier of spare parts for Americans and Europeans” and has become a center for illegal transplants and organ trafficking.

Kremlin-controlled anonymous telegram channels have circulated a number of photos of Christmas tree decorations with swastikas and other Nazi symbols claiming they were in Ukraine. In reality, this is not true.

On Flickr, a photo and video sharing and archiving website, swastika Christmas decorations were published in 2011. They were later distributed by Slate.fr. Also, these toys are mentioned in a scientific article in Polish about the celebration of Christmas during the Second World War.

These photos were taken at the Bread and Art Museum (until 2018 Bread Culture Museum) in Ulm. In 2013, German art historians exhibited a collection of 400 Christmas tree decorations from the Third Reich to demonstrate how fanatics changed the symbols of Christmas.

Among the old photographs with Nazi symbols, the propagandists published one fresh photograph, which has Christmas decorations with the inscriptions “Glory to the Armed Forces of Ukraine”, “Azov”, “Right Sector”. The propagandists stole this photo from the site olx.ua, which sells New Year’s patriotic toys.

Russian propaganda regularly disseminates “evidence” of Ukraine’s alleged adherence to Nazi ideology in order to justify the need for its fictional “denazification” of Ukraine. 

Fraudsters take advantage of the fact that as a result of a power outage, the mobile signal is weakened or disappears altogether. This was reported in the Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security.

They pretend to be representatives of mobile operators and promise to “switch” a person to another “tower”. Like, so the connection will remain stable even when the electricity disappears.

After that, a person receives a code - if you say it to a criminal, they will get access to mobile applications of banks, social networks, etc.

This information was spread by pro-Russian social networks. Allegedly, the Russian military during the night assault on Bakhmut captured a volunteer from the “Revansh” (Revenge) battalion, Stanislav Kolomiiets.

In the spring, Kolomiiets recorded a video in the village of Moshchun, Kyiv region, where, against the backdrop of dead Russians, he says that “these jackals” failed to plunder the property of Ukrainians. This video was used by Russian propagandists, saying that this soldier of the Armed Forces of Ukraine was “found, taken and punished”. As evidence, they published a video in which he allegedly “apologizes” to the Russian occupiers while in captivity.

In fact, Stanislav Kolomiiets, who before the full-scale war led the municipal inspectorate in the Cherkasy city council, is still in Kyiv and cannot be on the other side of the front line in the Donbas. This was confirmed by the former people's deputy Ihor Mosiichuk, godfather of Kolomiiets.

Russian propagandists in this way intimidate the Ukrainians and, against the backdrop of their own defeats, create a deceptive effect that achieves success at the front.