A pro-Russian blogger spread a fake story that claimed Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera’s birthday was being celebrated in Berlin, using forged posters and manipulative media reports.
Named Anatoly Shariy, he was identified by Lyudmyla Mlosh, President of the Central Union of Ukrainians in Germany (Zentralverband der Ukrainer in Deutschland, ZVUD), in a comment to the Ukrainian World Congress.
“ZVUD had nothing to do with this event and did not announce it. We only learned about the poster after it started circulating online, and we deny this disinformation,” Mlosh said.
The fake story was debunked by the Ukrainian civic organization specialising in the fact-checking website StopFake, and according to Detector Media. Online, a photo of a poster claiming to announce a mass celebration of Bandera’s birthday in a Berlin park on Jan. 1 circulated widely.
“The announcement lists ZVUD — a well-known civic organisation active since 2007 — as the event organiser. However, it turned out that neither such an event nor any similar posters officially existed,” the journalists wrote.
After Shariy spread the fake news, German-language sites later picked it up, including Infrarot Medien, which regularly spreads Kremlin narratives and discredits Ukrainian refugees and German policies.
“The goal of this provocation is once again to accuse Ukraine of ‘exporting neo-Nazism’ and to damage its reputation internationally,” the journalists wrote.
Meanwhile, manipulative claims circulated online about alleged “neo-Nazis brought by the German government.”
According to StopFake, creating such falsehoods from isolated posters is a typical tactic of Russian propaganda that have been previously used in Berlin to spread fake videos and advertisements to give the impression of “neo-Nazism” or “fatigue” with support for Ukraine.
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