Russia launched a new fake about Budanov and Zaluzhny

Russian propagandists are peddling a new fake that allegedly the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Valeriy Zaluzhnyy, and the head of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ukrainian Defence Ministry, Kyrylo Budanov, colluded to carry out a "coup d'état" in Ukraine. This was reported by the InfoLight.UA project, which specialises in raising media literacy, fighting fakes and propaganda.

Russian blogs started spreading lies about a coup allegedly prepared by Budanov and Zaluzhny on 10 November. At the same time, they referred to some "foreign" sources available to them.

InfoLight.UA pointed out that the Russians had tried to push such fakes earlier, but this time the Chinese site sina.com.cn was named as the primary source of the "sensation". At the same time, when checking the site and searching for the news itself, it was not found there. The Russian Federation did not provide a direct link to the original source.

Despite all our attempts, we did not find this information on the sites, screenshots of which are distributed by the enemies. However, there are no people fluent in Chinese in our team, so we leave a small probability that such information was published. Although everything looks like a banal editing of the page code," InfoLight.UA pointed out.

The project also found this news on the Asia Times website, which is frequently visited by American users. It says that the West allegedly wants to replace Zelensky through elections or a "coup".

At the same time, the article refers to a certain Larry Johnson, allegedly a retired CIA officer. And when clicking on this link, the reader is taken to the website of the Sputnik news agency, which is part of the Kremlin-controlled Rossiya Segodnya media group.

So, as a conclusion: taking advantage of the internal Ukrainian situation and "warming up" the topic of Valery Zaluzhny's resignation and his alleged conflict with President Vladimir Zelensky, the enemy almost immediately, albeit "on his knees", created another fake, which aims to bring another split in the Ukrainian society and the Ukrainian Defence Forces. It is important to be attentive to this and not to spread unverified information. And also to minimise internal political conflicts until the war is over," the InfoLight.UA team summarises.