The pro-Kremlin media spread the ‘news’ that the attack on the Poltava Institute of Communications was successful thanks to information passed to Russian intelligence by the Ukrainian military themselves. The propagandists claim that Forbes wrote about this: “The publication notes that the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces pays well for such services. Thus, a fee of up to 500 thousand dollars was allegedly paid for information about Poltava”.

However, this information is not true. This is reported in the StopFake project. In the Ukrainian and English versions of Forbes, apart from the news about the Russian attack on the Institute of Communications in Poltava, no other materials on this topic were published. Also, in the Russian version of the magazine there is no corresponding ‘news’.

The propaganda resources that spread this disinformation did not provide any links to supporting materials. No other authoritative media published this ‘news’, although such information would have been immediately picked up by many sources, because any information about spotters, collaborators immediately appears in the Ukrainian news. For example, about the spotter of the Kharkiv military administration, who was sentenced to life imprisonment.

That is, this is another invention of the Russians, in which they used the brand of a famous magazine to make the fake more credible.

On September 3, 2024, Russia launched a missile attack on the Poltava Military Communications Institute and a hospital located nearby. According to official data, 55 people were killed and more than 320 were injured as a result of the ballistic missile strikes.