Russian sources are distributing a news release from the German Welt TV channel, which showed a video of soldiers from the 12th Azov Brigade storming Russian combat positions. The fake news claims that Azov used footage from the Call of Duty video game, and the video is supposedly from the Pokrovsk direction. They also accused German media of failing to comply with journalistic standards.

But the information about using video game footage is false. VoxCheck reports that there is no computer graphics in the video, the fighting is real. On July 15, 2024, the unit's official YouTube channel published a first-person video consisting of three parts: advancing through positions, clearing and consolidating after the assault. In addition, the assault took place in the Serebrianskyi forestry of the Luhansk region, and not in the Pokrovsk direction.

Russian propagandists impose the opinion that the Azov fighters support ideas that the modern world sharply rejects: anti-Semitism, Nazism, and other types of xenophobia. The Azov fighters are shown as those who devalue people based on their origins. In Moscow’s vision, Azov is ready to kill for “Ukrainian blood”. This is not the first time that the Kremlin has presented Ukrainians in this way — as aggressive, ultra-nationalistic, and valuing only “Ukrainian blood”. For example, Russian propaganda has already spread fakes about Ukrainian fighters’ wives complaining that their men transfuse them with “Muscovite blood”; or that Ukrainians prohibit foreign citizens from donating blood.

Despite the fact that in Ukraine (as in any other country) there is a share of people who are supporters of far-right ideas, it is the Kremlin that deliberately exaggerates their weight in Ukrainian society. In addition, it attributes to them a common ideology with Nazi Germany and the attitude towards sympathizers of Russia as a lower caste. At the same time, in the last parliamentary elections of 2019, for example, nationalists did not enter the Verkhovna Rada, not to mention far-right movements.