Kremlin prepares provocation for final days of prisoner exchange - GUR

This decision was personally made by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine (SVR) has said.

According to the intelligence service, Russia intends to distribute false lists of dead Ukrainian military and civilians, allegedly confirmed by the Russian side. The goal is to provoke panic and indignation in Ukrainian society by shifting responsibility to the Ukrainian authorities.

The disinformation campaign has been authorised personally by the head of the Kremlin and is controlled by one of Putin's top deputy chiefs of staff. Russian propagandists are actively spreading emotional messages in the media and social networks, manipulating statistics and accusing Ukraine of "sabotaging" the exchanges.

The entire Kremlin propaganda machine - from Simonyan and Solovyov to war correspondents and bloggers - is involved in this information campaign. Pro-Russian fringe media in Europe, including Hungary's Magyar Nemzet and Magyar Hírlap, the Czech Republic's CZ24.news, Slovakia's Jednotné Slovensko and the French-language Réseau International, also support the spread of fakes.

The Kremlin's main narrative: Ukraine allegedly refuses to accept the bodies of the dead, nearly six thousand soldiers have not been returned to the country, and relatives have to wait because of the inaction of the Ukrainian authorities.

The SVR warns that the culmination of the disinformation campaign is expected in the last days of the exchanges - tentatively on 20 June. The final goal will be the deliberate dissemination of false lists of the dead in order to cause a public outcry and shift responsibility to Kiev.

We shall remind you that during the second round of talks in Istanbul, Ukraine and Russia agreed on a large-scale prisoner exchange. The exchanges took place on 9, 10, 12 and 14 June. Wounded, seriously ill, prisoners aged 18-25 years were released, including the defenders of Mariupol and officers held since 2022.

Earlier Socialportal wrote about the story of Ukrainian human rights activist Maxim Butkevich, who spent more than two years in Russian captivity. Maksym was sentenced to 13 years in the Russian Federation on a trumped-up case that claimed he was an extremist who ran a squad of far-right radicals. These charges shocked everyone who knew Maksim. He was a human rights activist for decades, co-founder of the organisation Without Borders, and one of the few people in Ukraine who cared about the fate of asylum seekers, refugees, and foreign students who faced arbitrariness, rudeness, and intolerance. He also helped political refugees stemming from authoritarian regimes, primarily Putin's.