Such information is disseminated by Russian resources. Allegedly, one of the rockets hit a Kyiv hotel where foreign advisers and mercenaries lived.

Like, the Russian soldiers knew that “someone important” had settled in the hotel, so they chose it as a target. The propagandists also spread information that in the Alfavito Hotel and the Ukraine Palace, located 100 meters away, both buildings received significant damage from a rocket strike, “interesting people were sitting there - Western and Ukrainian, with and without shoulder straps”.

After the mayor of Kyiv, Vitalii Klychko, announced that a journalist from Japan had been wounded during an attack on Kyiv, Russian propagandists said that he was not a journalist at all: “Yeah, and at the front are all the drivers”.

To justify the terror and their aggression against the civilian population, the propagandists noted that this was revenge for the allegedly destroyed hotel in the occupied Kherson, where the traitor of Ukraine, collaborator and ex-deputy of the Verkhovna Rada Oleksii Zhuravko died, as well as for the explosion in the hotel in the temporary occupation where the former head of Roskosmos, the head of a group of military advisers to Russia, Dmytro Rohozin, and the head of the so-called “government” of the Donetsk occupied territory, Vitalii Khotsenko, were injured.

After the explosion in a Donetsk hotel, propagandists intimidated Ukraine that Russia would begin to strike at the places where Ukrainian top officials of law enforcement agencies are located. If their goal was precisely the power structures, they would not have destroyed the hotel, in which journalists have been holding various conferences and training sessions for many years in a row. In particular, Belarusian journalists and bloggers stayed there, for whom the Detector Media NGO conducted training sessions in 2019 as part of the School of Quality Media project. Also, they would not destroy the Ukraine Palace, where New Year's performances for children are usually held these days. Fortunately, only one person was injured in the Ukraine Palace, receiving minor leg injuries.

On January 31, during a massive rocket attack on Ukraine, anonymous telegram channels spread the message that the Ukrainian authorities were hiding the truth about the number of Russian missiles. Allegedly, government officials downplay the number of Russian missiles fired at Ukraine and reassure people that Russia will soon run out of missile stocks.

Like, the reality is completely different, and this evidence is a photograph of the sky over the Russian city of Astrakhan, covered with traces of launched missiles.

In fact, neither the Ukrainian authorities nor the Department of Strategic Communications of the Office of the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine hide the number of missiles that Russia fired at Ukraine, nor are they silent about the consequences of the hits and the results of the work of the Ukrainian air defense forces.

In the Ukrainian information space, a photograph of the sky with traces of launched Russian missiles was distributed by the Strategic Communications Department of the Office of the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine: “The sky in Astrakhan. Traces of “gifts” from the invaders who launched them in the direction of Ukraine. The bastards won't calm down”.

Russian propagandists spread such messages in order to intimidate Ukrainians and cause distrust in the authorities.

Russian propaganda constantly uses foreigners to prove that the whole world is on the side of Russia. Also, propaganda pretends that the opinion of an American is the official position of America, and the opinion of an Italian is the official position of Italy, and so on.

Most often, to create the appearance that everywhere, and even in the United States, more and more people “support Russia” or “understand Putin”, or “believe in the victorious power of the Russian army”, they use American former military men, mainly supporters of ex-President Donald Trump . They often appear on the Fox News channel, and they make provocative statements, which are then used by Russian propaganda, but do not correspond to reality. One of these people is the former adviser to the head of the Pentagon, Colonel Douglas McGregor. In 2020 Trump nominated him for the post of ambassador to Germany, but the Senate did not support the candidacy. After that, he was appointed as an adviser to the acting minister of defense; he remained in this post for three months until the change of administration. In 2014, McGregor supported the annexation of Crimea and spoke on RT, where he claimed that the inhabitants of Crimea were Russians, not Ukrainians.

The last time McGregor's statement that “almost nothing will be left of Ukraine” in the near future was made public in the Russian media at the end of December.

Insider has collected the colonel's comments since the start of the full-scale invasion and found out that the colonel's predictions are not true.

So, on February 27, three days after the start of the war, he said on Fox News: “Now the battle in Eastern Ukraine is almost over, the Ukrainian troops are largely surrounded and cut off, now they have a concentration down in the southeast in 30 to 40 thousand , and if they don't vend, surrender the next 24 hours, the Russians will ultimately annihilate them”.

On March 6 on Fox Business, he found an explanation for why it didn't happen.

“At the first five days, the Russian forces, I think, were too gentle. They have now corrected that. So I would say another 10 days this should be completely over. But the question is, what is it that Zelenskyi is going to do? The Russians have made it very clear what they want is a neutral Ukraine. This could have ended days ago if he accepted that. And then they can adjust the borders, but the eastern part of Ukraine is firmly in Russian hands, but again, the Russians are not seizing the territory. They are destroying Ukrainian forces. That’s their focus”.

After another 10 days, the colonel tried to pretend that his prediction was justified. On Tucker Carlson's Fox News program, he stated: "The war is really over for the Ukrainians”, “They have been grounded to bits. There’s no question about that despite what we report on our mainstream media”.

McGregor delivered another analysis on the ultra-right cable and satellite channel Real America's Voice on July 7:

“The war, with the exception of Kharkiv and Odesa, as far as the Russians are concerned is largely over. There is no intention to do anything else because the Russians don’t have a very large army. They’ve got a very limited armed force and that’s by design, they didn’t want to build a huge army, they certainly are not in a position to threaten NATO nor would they unless they were directly attacked by us.

So the last thing, the last thing that Putin wants is to go west of that Dnieper River and end up incorporating, 20 million, 25 million Ukrainians into Russia. He knows they don’t want to be part of Russia, that’s never been his aim”.

On September 12, on the air of the same Carlson program, McGregor again stated that “this war may soon end,” and added: “The Ukrainian army is bled, tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers are killed or wounded, Ukraine is really in the balance.”

This was the day after the liberation of Izium, Balakleia and Kupiansk - and before the Ukrainian army liberated Kherson.

McGregor's statements are so strange that even his party members criticize him. For example, Liz Cheney even publicly asked the Fox News channel: “Why do you continually put Douglas MacGregor on @FoxNews to spread Putin’s propaganda and lies? This is absolutely not in America’s interest". Earlier, she called McGregor the representative of “Putin's wing of the GOP”. And even one of Fox News's most famous journalists, Jennifer Griffin, has spoken of McGregor as an ““apologist” for Putin” with “so many distortions”.

The holiday is coming and the fakes invented by Russian propaganda are becoming more and more like fairy tales. The fact-checkers of the Myth Detector edition recorded the distribution of a photo collage in Russian telegram channels, where Volodymyr Zelenskyi is supposedly sitting on Santa Claus’s lap and “asking him for another 50 billion dollars”. It's fake.

It was created by the American fictional satirical news outlet Babylon Bee. Today, on the front page of this publication is the news that Max will remain in the position of CEO of Twitter, if they count the votes received by mail. Also, that Cain killed Abel in the field, and not at home, so that the elf on the mantelpiece would not see this. Obviously, the news about Zelenskyi was about US President Joseph Biden signing a budget for next year, in which $ 45 billion is allocated to help Ukraine and its allies. This year, financial assistance to Ukraine amounted to $ 28 billion - and this does not include the cost of weapons transferred by partners of the Ukrainian army.

The Kremlin sent the Russian media a methodology on how to write about the results of 2022. According to Meduza, the first thing the Russian media should do is emphasize that Volodymyr Putin, by unleashing the war, was saving Russia from an attack by NATO and Ukraine. There is also the thesis that since 2014, Western countries have been going to “divide and conquer the Russian people”. The war, that is, the “special operation”, should be called successful, and an example of achieving goals is “increase in lands”, that is, occupied territories. The methodology does not mention defeats at the front.

The document is divided into four parts: “Main”, “Strengthening of Russia”, “SVO” (Special military operation) and “New World Order”. In the “Strengthening Russia” section, it is recommended to write about how high Putin’s rating is and about the “unconditional support of the special operation” by the Russians. The “New World Order” section says that the media should talk about Russia as “leaders of countries” who “do not recognize the exclusivity of the West” and call it “the leader of a just, democratic and multipolar world”. At the same time, Putin “gives Europe a chance to come to its senses” and stop “being a US vassal”.

These are all the most common theses of Russian disinformation of the last 10 months. Propaganda is constantly trying to convince the Russians and the anti-NATO world to justify the defeats inflicted on them by the Ukrainian army. Propaganda also claims that Putin's rating is growing, and all Russians support the war, but the real picture, even from studies of Russian-controlled sociological services, is different: Putin's rating is falling, the number of supporters of the war is decreasing. In world politics, Russia is now as far from “leading positions” as its closest partners - Syria, Iran, Cuba and Venezuela. And thanks to the sanctions imposed against Russia by dozens of countries around the world, it is becoming increasingly dependent on really influential countries, primarily China.