Antifake / Factcheck

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Shkvarka News tried to back up a fake Ukrainian court ruling with a forged document

The Telegram channel claimed that a mother was being forced to remove the words "Illegally mobilized" from the headstone of her son, who died in the war.

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Fake appearance date: 02.04.2025
According to the authors of the Telegram channel Shkvarka News, the Brovary District Court in the Kyiv region ordered the mother of a fallen Ukrainian soldier to erase the inscription. As proof, they published what they claim is the official court ruling. The document raised suspicion with the Weekly Top Fake team.

The authors of the Telegram channel Shkvarka News published the alleged court ruling received by the mother of a fallen Ukrainian soldier on April 2, 2025.

"A woman from the Kyiv region wrote "Illegally mobilized" on the headstone of her son, who was killed near Sumy. Now she’s being harassed on social media and pressured to remove the inscription through the courts, or else the cemetery administration will take down the headstone," says the post.

As evidence, they posted photos of the headstone and the court ruling.

What caught our attention was the formatting of the document. A legitimate court ruling must include details in the upper right corner—such as the case number and judicial proceeding reference. In addition, a judge is required to justify the decision by citing relevant legal statutes. None of that appears on the document shared in the post.

The WTF team looked into whether such a document actually exists. We searched Ukraine’s unified court registry by the date of the ruling and found that no judges with those names issued any decisions that day. We also searched for the judges’ names and keywords from the text, but came up empty.

That leads to one conclusion: the document shared by the Telegram channel’s authors is a fake.