A clip with a TSN TV presenter is being distributed online. He claims that Europe has announced a new tranche for a pension supplement for Ukraine's Independence Day. Ukrainian pensioners will see their pensions increase, and the average supplement will be from UAH 2,300 to UAH 5,600. And to receive the increase, the TV presenter calls on people to follow a link to a special Telegram channel.

VoxCheck analysts have established that this video is fake. Using a special tool, AI Speech Classifier, it was possible to see that the audio recording itself was created using a neural network. That is, the propagandists used the original video from TSN, but superimposed their own audio track.

The EU also did not announce any tranche of additional payments to pensioners and other privileged categories for Independence Day. No media outlet published similar information.

Anonymous Telegram channels are distributing a photo of order No. 413 allegedly from the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine for July 29, 2024, which orders the invalidation of decisions by military medical commissions. It is about decisions by the military medical commissions made after 2022 in the Kyiv, Lviv, Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia and Odesa regions. A screenshot of the “order” is added to the publications.

VoxCheck analysts explained that such an order from the Ministry of Defense simply does not exist; it was forged.

For example, the Ministry of Defense did not publish such orders on the official website. The Ministry of Defense page contains only one order No. 413 for 2020, and it does not concern the decisions of the Military medical commissions.

The so-called document was forged, as indicated by numerous errors. For example, the fakers wrote the wrong date, document number, and added extra punctuation marks in the sentence - “Regulations on the Ministry of Defense (Ukraine, approved by the Resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine dated October 19, 2016 ME 730)”.

Or else, in the first paragraph of the order they wrote “regional”  not in Ukrainian, and in the second paragraph they incorrectly used a comma:  “...documentation, issued during the same period”.

A photo of what appears to be an announcement on the wall of the Sumy Regional Clinical Hospital is being circulated online. It states that the medical institution urgently needs donor blood for the wounded in the Kursk Region. A photo of the “announcement” is added to the publications.

“The need for blood is so acute that it is taken 24 hours a day. This is how Zelenskyi's PR campaigns end”, the propagandists comment.

VoxCheck analysts analyzed the case and found out that the propagandists had faked the photo by editing it in a photo editor. And the original photo shows the daily schedule for patients in the otolaryngology department.

There was no information about the urgent need for donor blood for the wounded in the Kursk region on the official website of the Sumy Regional Clinical Hospital or its social networks. But, for example, on August 6 and August 13, the DonorUA organization announced the need for donor blood in different regions, but Sumy region was not among them.

In addition, the Sumy Regional Clinical Hospital is not on the list of medical institutions accredited to collect donor blood. In Sumy, only the Sumy Regional Blood Service Center does this.

Propagandists have been systematically spreading fakes and manipulations on the topic of an alleged blood shortage in Ukraine. In this way, the authors of the messages are trying to convince that everything is bad in Ukraine and that there are many wounded who are not receiving adequate care because “there is not enough blood”.  We managed to refute several fakes on this topic. For example, one of the fakes said that Ukraine is banning all foreign citizens from becoming blood donors. We also checked the authenticity of a message on social networks about a Ukrainian woman abandoning her husband because he was “transfused with Muscovite blood”.

Pro-Kremlin media are distributing a screenshot of news allegedly from Ukrainska Pravda about the cancellation of school certificates and higher education diplomas for men who have not updated their data in the Territorial centers of procurement and social support. These changes allegedly occurred in accordance with a Cabinet of Ministers resolution. 

But VoxCheck fact-checkers took up this case and found out that it was a fake photo. The Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine did not issue a resolution with such content. The fakers forged a screenshot of the Ukrainska Pravda article, replacing the title and illustration of the original material.

There is no corresponding article on the website or in social networks of Ukrainska Pravda. At the same time, the screenshot indicates the time and date of publication of the “news” - August 14, 15:11. Currently, the publication has published an article by the author Valentyna Romanenko under the title “The General Staff called on Ukrainians and foreigners not to enter combat zones without permission”. It did not talk about the cancellation of certificates.

Propagandists have recently started to fake stories and materials from well-known media outlets, using their design elements to create the effect of recognition and trust in one of the quality media outlets. For example, we recently reported that anonymous people were spreading a fake story from the supposedly French publication Le Figaro, which spoke about a “Ukrainian refugee-murderer”.

Kremlin telegram channels are spreading information that the number of measles cases in Switzerland has increased due to Ukrainian refugees. The Swiss Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH) assumes that the pathogen was brought to Switzerland from abroad. And propagandists have concluded that it was Ukrainians who brought this virus, since measles is allegedly actively spreading in Ukraine.

VoxCheck specialists explained that the Federal Office of Public Health of Switzerland responded to a request that the increase in measles cases was not related to Ukrainian refugees. In fact, it is unknown whether there were Ukrainians among the sick. This was not reported on the Federal Office of Public Health's social media pages or website.

According to the latest data from the Ministry of Health, 152 cases of measles were recorded in Ukraine in the first 7 months of 2024. While in 2023, there were only 30 patients during the same period. That is, the number of patients has indeed increased, but we are not talking about a large-scale outbreak measured in thousands. The last time there was a measles outbreak in Ukraine was in 2017-2019, when more than 110 thousand people fell ill with measles.

Thus, Russian propaganda tries to present Ukrainian refugees as criminals or terrorists, as a cultural and economic threat to the EU - in order to reduce support for Ukraine. We mentioned this in our own research. Since the beginning of the great war in Ukraine, Russian propaganda has been trying to discredit refugees who were forced to leave Ukraine to save their lives.

Propagandists regularly spread fakes about them; they call refugees dependents; they claim that they went abroad not for safety, but for profit; they spread various diseases, etc. Propagandists need this to stake out the opinion that Ukrainians are pagans who do not appreciate the help that residents of other countries give them; they take advantage of the kindness of residents of other countries.

Anonymous Telegram channels are spreading a supposedly Bloomberg video story. It says that military analyst and retired general Bradley Gerik gave an interview for a podcast to Military.com: there he allegedly expressed the opinion that the results achieved in the Kursk region are “insignificant” and not worth the large material and human losses suffered by the Ukrainian Armed Forces in this operation.

VoxCheck analysts explained that Bloomberg did not publish a similar story. Moreover, there is no such video on the official website of the publication, nor on the media's pages on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter (X), TikTok and YouTube.

At the same time, retired General Bradley Gerik did not comment on the operation, all his quotes are made up. He never gave comments on the Military.com podcast. Although Military.com covered the Ukrainian offensive in Kursk, it did not refer to this analyst. The online publication believes that the operation in Kursk proved “Ukraine's ability to seize the initiative” and raised the morale of the fighters.

Read on Censor.NET: The US is allegedly involved in the operation in the Kursk region.