This thesis was spread on social networks, in particular, on telegram channels broadcasting pro-Kremlin rhetoric. Reports say that it was Russia that repaired the highway, which Ukraine had “ignored” for 30 years. It is about the area of the international highway E-58 with a length of more than 150 km. In Ukraine, this international route is represented by the M-14 highway, which crosses five regions (Odesa, Mykolaiv, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk) and connects the main ports of the country in the Black and Azov seas. According to propagandists, they began to repair the international highway, but Ukraine is indifferent to “these regions”. This is manipulation.

The fact-checkers of the VoxCheck project took up the case, they found out that certain sections of the route were under repair even before the start of a full-scale invasion. The repair of the M-14 highway is provided for in the “Target Program for the Development of Highways of State Importance for 2018-2022”. At the end of 2021, it was possible to repair a 15-kilometer section of the route, near the village of Komyshuvate, Mariupol region. Also in early February 2022, they announced the opening of a tender for the restoration of another section of the corridor.

The motorway should be tentatively upgraded by the end of 2023. It would have been completely updated if Russia had not attacked Ukraine. The occupying authorities at the same time claim that Ukraine “did not take care” of some regions of Ukraine. It is likely that the Russians are carrying out repairs in the temporarily occupied territories and pass it off as their “merits”.

Thus, propagandists seek to whiten themselves by showing what kind of “restoration” and “repairs” they are allegedly engaged in. Analysts of Detector Media have already considered a similar case in which the authors of the messages claimed a “great restoration of Donbas”, and Ukraine, they say, did not want to deal with this region.