Social media posts claim a photo of a man in samurai regalia shows Japan's ambassador to Ukraine, saying he chose to stay and fight invading Russian forces. This is false; the image pictures Ukraine's ambassador to Japan, who tweeted it prior to the invasion.
A video of military planes flying in formation over residential buildings has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times in posts that claim it shows Russian fighter jets entering neighbouring Ukraine in February 2022. The posts circulated online within hours of Russian President Vladimir Putin unleashing a full-scale ground invasion and air assault on Ukraine. The footage, however, has been shared in a false context. It has circulated since at least 2020 in social media posts about rehearsals for a Victory Day air show in Russia.
After Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, dramatic footage of a huge explosion was viewed tens of thousands of times in social media posts that claimed it shows buildings destroyed by Russian air strikes. In fact, the video shows a deadly blast that ripped through the Lebanese capital Beirut in August 2020.
Disinformation is part and parcel of the approach to war as seen in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Ukrainian Armed Forces are holding back the Russian aggressor's offensive.
Ukrainians did not shoot at the Russian border checkpoint.
The Ground Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine have denied this information. The Ukrainian military did not put down their weapons and did not side with the Luhansk People's Republic.
The information has been spread in social networks that the Joint Forces Operation in Donbas headquarters has been practically destroyed. The news source is the post of the head of the "DPR" Denis Pushilin.
However, this is fake. The adviser to the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, Anton Gerashchenko, has already refuted it.
A media specialised in putting the spotlight on Russian disinformation has highlighted a false flag attack in eastern Ukraine that pro-Russian media outlets were pinning on Kyiv. Corpses likely retrieved from a morgue were used to set the scene.
How then can the well-oiled Russian machine produce such "low-cost" disinformation? "Simply because, for the moment, the Russian authorities do not need to do better." [...]
What’s more, it’s not so much the quality as the quantity of disinformation that matters. "The goal is to create so many different – and sometimes even contradictory – versions of what is happening at the border that no one can really distinguish the true from the false anymore."
