Fresh, hot off the press and sufficiently stupid: this is what a textbook Russian fake news story looks like

A genuine, unadulterated Russian fake news story has arrived — fresh, hot off the press, and just stupid enough to be worth sharing with our readers. Citing information from an unnamed woman serving in the Russian armed forces — how fortunate that in Romanian the word for soldier also carries gender, otherwise we wouldn't even know that much about the source — Russian channels report that Kyiv is deliberately delaying the restoration of internet access. Naturally, there's no mention of the fact that Russian bombs destroyed anything in the first place; the delay's alleged purpose is supposedly to stop Ukrainians who want to protest against Zelensky from organizing. The fake news story is especially stupid because it is being spread on the very internet that, according to the story, the Ukrainians in question can't even read, since Zelensky never had their main cable fixed.

There's a second, even more instructive layer to this stupidity. When Ukrainian drones knock out Yandex data centers one after another, a "good news" story curiously appears almost immediately in the Russian information space, mirroring the strikes on Yandex: look, it's not just our internet that's down, theirs is too — and not because of drones, but because the tyrant wants it that way. The recipe is simple and can be applied to anything. If it turned out tomorrow that Zelensky had stolen the pig herds of livestock farmers in Magadan, the day after tomorrow the Kremlin's mercenaries would already be writing that Kyiv has run out of chicken and people are eating hamsters — to reference the famous video.

But a fake news story being ridiculous doesn't mean it can't be effective. While we're busy marveling at how stupid an internet lie is, we fail to notice that in the meantime an idea has been planted in millions of minds: that mass protests against Zelensky are brewing. Not that we can say for certain that everyone in Ukraine adores our dear Volodymyr, since in the fifth year of the war, with mobilization, power outages and corruption scandals, that would hardly be realistic. But there is a much simpler — if somewhat radical — way to secure the opportunities for Ukrainian protests that the Russians so badly want: stop bombing Ukraine.

What is true, however, is that Russia really is deliberately bombing Ukrainian internet providers. Since September 23, Russian drones and missiles have repeatedly struck Kyiv's data centers; according to the Ministry of Digital Transformation, after the very first strikes alone, around a hundred thousand households in Kyiv and the surrounding area were left without internet access. The Russian Ministry of Defense cynically called this a "forced digital detox." Kyivstar, the country's largest mobile operator, alone was hit eight times in ten days; according to Oleksandr Komarov, the company's chairman, one of their data centers was completely knocked out, their central warehouse was hit by two missiles, and their Kyiv headquarters was struck on September 27. This scale clearly shows the difference between the Russian campaign and the handful of Yandex data centers hit by Ukrainian drones. Moscow has been methodically destroying Ukraine's digital infrastructure for weeks, Kyiv only responded in the last few days, and yet Kremlin propaganda is now complaining that the internet is faltering in Ukraine.

One doesn't have to look far for the protesters either. The main organizer of one such alleged large-scale anti-Zelensky protest, which Kyiv is supposedly trying to prevent by cutting off the internet, is Oleksandr Todorov, a former Odesa journalist. He's a longtime champion of Russian narratives, pushing the same line since 2014 and apparently still not tired of it. It was Todorov who, back in 2014, was even given the chance to give a presentation at the European Parliament about the so-called "Odesa Khatyn." The Odesa tragedy of May 2, 2014, was a real event: after clashes, dozens of people, mostly pro-Russian activists, died in a fire that broke out at the Trade Unions House; the European Court of Human Rights later found that Ukrainian authorities had committed serious failures, although the events were largely fueled by Russian propaganda. Moscow, however, immediately inflated the tragedy into genocide, with Sergei Naryshkin, then chairman of the Duma, speaking of an "Odesa Khatyn" just a few days later. Khatyn is a village in Belarus whose inhabitants were massacred by the Nazis in 1943, and its name should not be confused with Katyn, where the Soviet NKVD executed Polish officers. The Kremlin, however, is particularly fond of exploiting the similarity between the two names, since a bit of historical confusion always comes in handy for obfuscation. This narrative became one of the cornerstones of the story, repeated regularly ever since, that Ukrainians are massacring Russians en masse.

The event held in July 2014 at the European Parliament was organized by Tatjana Ždanoka, a so-called Latvian member of the European Parliament, who advertised it as a meeting "with the victims and witnesses of the Odesa massacre." In 2024, however (that is, ten years later), it emerged that Ždanoka had worked for the Russian FSB for decades: several European investigative outlets exposed her based on leaked emails and connections, meaning she was not figuratively but quite literally a Russian agent. Fake news stories like this, then, don't appear out of nowhere; the same actors, the same networks and the same stories keep coming back in them, only the scenery changes. In 2014 it was a conference room in Brussels, in 2026 it's a Telegram message from an anonymous Russian servicewoman, but the goal has remained the same: to make the world believe that it is not Russia killing people in Ukraine, but Ukraine killing its own people.

Frenzy