The information that Serhiy Shnurov visited the city of Irmino in the Luhansk Region was spread by the Russian propaganda media with reference to the Russian actor Georgy Bolonyev. Later, a photo in which Shnurov is allegedly in Luhansk Oblast also appeared on the pages of Ukrainian online media. However, this is not true.

The photo turned out to be a fake. Shnurov accused Russian propagandists of having photoshopped his old photo into a picture with Prigozhin and Bolognev. Pro-government Russian media also denied the fake, referring to the words of Shnurov's press secretary Serhii Guguchkin. Like, the singer is currently in Turkey and taking part in a corporate event. Later, Bolonev published other attempts of the same photo on the Russian social network Vkontakte and wrote that Shnurov is being confused with the Russian actor Sergei Garusov. And this is done not only by readers of social networks, but also by residents of occupied Stakhanov who saw Harusov in person.

"Media Detector'' checked the photo. It is impossible to establish the author and the location of the shooting, as metadata about who created the image is erased in social networks. Reverse search of the original image on the Internet through search engines and the TinEye extension is not convincing due to the clutter of image reposts. However, analyzing the image in the InVid application shows traces of editing. Especially, the right part of the image, where Shnurov is supposed to be. This shows that Shnurov is not really in the photo from Irmina. Harusov is only three centimeters shorter than Shnurov, this difference can be muffled by a hat, higher shoes or lifting on the toes. So, they could really be "confused".

The use of photos of celebrities who were not actually in the temporarily occupied Ukrainian territories is a novelty for Russian propagandists. Previously, they published news about stars who really visited the occupied territories for, apparently, ideological reasons.