Antifake / Factcheck

22 лютага 2023

Top 5 Fake news weekly. Soldiers were buried in the city park in Ukraine

Deliberate disinformation in order to exaggerate Ukraine's losses in the war.

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According to several telegram channels, in Zhytomyr, Ukraine, the dead soldiers had already been buried in the city square, reported both Igor Korotchenko, the Russian military expert and frequenter of political talk shows as well, and Alexander Shpakovsky, the Belarusian political scientist.

They both reposted the video with lots of new graves with Ukrainian flags.

«Here are mass graves of Ukrainian servicemen in Zhytomyr. There are no more places in the cemeteries, they have been  buried in city squares». 

The video has a watermark from the Forpost telegram channel, where it is currently no longer available. The same news was spread by the VK group "News of Donbass" and the website "Zhytomyr’s Zov". 

Thanks to the Google maps service, we were convinced that on the video is not a city square, but the Zhytomyr military cemetery No. 2 on Seletskaya Street, which was established in 1946.

To verify this, we contacted the press service of the city administration. And especially for our fakechart, they took a couple of fresh pictures of this cemetery. Here are the gates and the same residential area around the cemetery. Until recently it was considered closed.

««In 1970, the executive branch decided to stop burials. And for a long time it had been considered a closed city military cemetery. The  war of the Russian Federation against Ukraine made its own adjustments. Since 2014, dead Ukrainian servicemen have been buried there again», the director of the Zhytomyr city center of social services Olga Yurchenko said.  

Thus, reports about Ukrainian military burials right in the city square are deliberate disinformation in order to exaggerate Ukraine's losses in the war.

The fake appeared in contecst of fighting in Ukraine is going on. Bearing heavy losses, Russian troops are advancing on the fronts of the Zaporozhye, Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

The UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace says Putin's forces are suffering. 

The combat potential has been reduced by 40%, including two-thirds of Russian tanks destroyed or damaged.

It seems, both Korotchenko and Shpakovsky and the pro-Russian media really wanted to show that Ukraine was also suffering huge losses, so they named the shown military cemetery as the city park.

An Edelweiss flower is a sign of Nazism

Zelensky assigned the name "Edelweiss" to the mountain assault brigade.

Belarusian and Russian media presented this as evidence of Nazism in Ukraine.

In the days of the Wehrmacht, one of the Nazi divisions had been called "Edelweiss" because of its emblem decoration by picture of that mountain flower.

Here is the ATN telegram channel's report.

«The Nazis have their own historical memory.

Whether Zelensky saluted in nazi style with raised hand after signing the decree, not reported!»

And the Russian Life.ru released an article with the title “Thugs with a swastika. What made the Nazi Edelweiss famous, after which Zelensky named the assault brigade”. 

«During the Second World War, the Edelweiss brigade had been engaged in the Holocaust on the territory of the USSR and the Ukrainian SSR», it’s said in the article.

The Russian Foreign Ministry also was involved

«They say there are no Nazis in Ukraine, right?

For the blind and deaf, here's another piece of evidence. On Valentine's Day, Zelensky officially named the Ukrainian division "Edelweiss" after the infamous Nazi Wehrmacht unit responsible for its war crimes».

However, the name of this mountain flower was used not only by the Wehrmacht division.

Since 2011, the 17th Special Forces Detachment of the Russian Guard has officially been called Edelweiss, but the Foreign Ministry and the media did not react in any way and did not call them Nazis.

Thus, in 5 years, in 2016, it was renamed into “Avangard”. 

In addition, the CSTO troops have been conducting their exercises at the Edelweiss training ground in Kyrgyzstan. The Russian military also has visited there.

And the troops of some NATO countries have been conducting an Edelweiss raid, the international military competition aimed to test the skills of the mountain military in the Alps.

Well, last year in Belarus, a children's tourist tent camp in the Kostyukevichi district was also called "Edelweiss".    

In general, the name of a flower does not outrage anyone until has nothing to do with Ukraine.

Therefore, the ATN and Life.ru and the Russian Foreign Ministry made an elephant out of a fly.

All of America's inventions are made by immigrants 

As it was stated by Olga Shpilevskaya, the head of the TV-channel MIR representative office in Belarus, the Americans themselves aren't able to invent anything, and all their inventions are due to smart immigrants. 

Here are her words said on the air of the "Editors' Club" program on "Belarus-1":

«But I want to say that in this case the Americans may be even more effective. Thet just learn what they need.

— Wait, maybe they have the highest ratings, but who makes all the scientific discoveries, all the important moments?

The people who come to them, not the people who study at their universities».

If we look at the list of universities with the largest number of Nobel laureates who have studied at them, we can see a significant preponderance of US universities.

So perhaps Western education isn't as bad as Shpilevskaya claims.

Though we have to say that researchers on the topic admit that immigrant inventors do play an important role in American innovation, although not as big as the Belarusian television ascribes to them.

Here is one quote from a 2017 study of patent records by a group of authors from Harvard and the University of Chicago:

«According to our data, immigrants made up 19.6% of all inventions between 1880 and 1940. Today it is about 30%».

In general, in the US, ⅔ of inventions are made by locals, therefore Shpilevskaja’s words are fake.

“Minute of silence” is a unique invention of Shoigu

Russian rescuers brought to Turkey a unique invention of the Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation Sergei Shoigu, a technology called “minutes of silence”, Russian TV-channel «Zvezda» reported:

«I will add just a couple of words about this unique technology that is now used there.

Because these are absolutely miraculous cases of rescue, when after 40 hours, 70-80 hours, babies, children and adults were taken out from under the rubble.

And all thanks to the tactics that our current Minister of Defense Sergei Kuzhugetovich Shoigu broughted into use of the Ministry of Emergency Situations while he was the head of the Ministry of Emergency Situations.

Back in 1995, this practice appeared that still saves the lives of hundreds. This is the so-called “minutes of silence».

In his book called “About Yesterday” Sergei Shoigu said that the idea to arrange “minutes of silence” while saving people appeared in 1995 during a rescue operation after an earthquake in Neftegorsk.

In fact, minutes of silence during rescue operations were arranged before.

For example, this tactic was used after the 1988 Spitak earthquake in Armenia, 7 years before Sergei Shoigu was hit with the idea.  

«As climber Aghvan Chatinyan recalls in a conversation with media Meduza, they were essentially laborers who helped foreign rescuers.

They also had special equipment (including devices that amplify sound to hear people from under the rubble), and specially trained dogs, and searchlights to work at night ... Sometimes rescuers arranged "minutes of silence" to hear the voices of survivors from under the rubble».

In general, those very unique technologies for rescuing people from the rubble are, for example, such as an ultra-sensitive microphone that picks up sounds inaccessible to the human ear, or a special video camera, or a detector that captures carbon dioxide, indicating someone's breathing under the rubble.

Well, the fact that during the rescue it is necessary not to make noise is a widespread practice, and not an invention of Shoigu.

In Europe, inflation is higher than in Belarus

Last year, the annual inflation of 16 European countries was higher than Belarusians one.

This was stated by Prime Minister Roman Golovchenko at the meeting with Alexander Lukashenko on economic issues, the state agency BelTA reported.

«Lukashenka assessed the work of the economy last year: nothing had collapsed, but it could've been a little better.

In turn, Prime Minister Roman Golovchenko cited an interesting fact.

"In the inflation rate list of 20 European countries Belarus took 17th place. Thus, 16 countries showed inflation higher than ours"».

In fact, it is not clear which 20 European countries the prime minister is talking about, but in any case, Golovchenko's words aren’t true.

This is inflation data for 20 euro area countries. Spain, the country with the lowest annual inflation, has 5.5%. Latvia has the highest inflation, it is 20.7%.

In Belarus, prices increased by 12.8% as of December 2022. 

Thus, it turns out that Belarus is in 17th place, but in the opposite way.

And here are the statistics for all 27 EU countries. And even here Belarus with its inflation is somewhere between Croatia and Romania. So, there are only 9 countries where the situation is worse, not 16.