The former Prosecutor General of Ukraine has admitted that Ukraine will be defeated by Russia, the Russian media reports. Yuriy Lutsenko, who was also one of the leaders of the opposition during the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych's term, would thus morally prepare the Ukrainians for defeat. In reality, the politician's words were taken out of context. What he actually wrote was that, despite the difficulties encountered, Ukraine will succeed in liberating all its occupied territories.
NEWS: “Lutsenko is preparing Ukrainians for defeat and promises them a harsh February. The former Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Yuriy Lutsenko, wrote on January 20 on social media that Ukrainians should prepare for hard times.
[...] “It will be a hard month. We have to get used to the fact that the situation will be such that we will not only have news about victories”, he wrote. The former Prosecutor General explained the withdrawal of the Armed Forces of Ukraine from a number of localities by the need to protect soldiers’ lives.
[...] In Russia everything happens according to plan - organized, quietly, no panic and no noise. The intensity of the offensive has increased”.
NARRATIVE: Ukraine's former Prosecutor General is preparing Ukrainians for defeat
WHY THE NARRATIVE IS FALSE: In reality, in his Facebook post, Yuriy Lutsenko, who was the Prosecutor General of Ukraine under President Petro Poroshenko, after having previously been imprisoned by the pro-Russian Yanukovych regime, did not write that Ukraine must prepare for defeat. On the contrary, he encouraged Ukrainians to persevere despite the heavy fighting in Donbas. The Russian state media built this anti-Ukrainian propaganda narrative from an anti-Russian post!
“We chase the mercenaries of the Wagner group like we would cockroaches, we kill them not only with artillery, but also with kamikaze drones. Soledar is a real trap”, writes Lutsenko, mocking Russia's fighting methods.
At the same time, the politician, who fights with a territorial defense unit, writes that Russia is sending an increasingly larger number of soldiers to be part of the offensive and its troops are bigger, so Ukrainians must be very patient because “the war does not consist only of victorious accounts given by officials’ spokespersons”.
The Russian press does not mention anything about this part of Lutsenko’s statement, also ignoring the final message in the post: “We will resist. We will mount a great counter-offensive. We will liberate our territory. We will win this war”.
So, what Yuriy Lutsenko said was not meant to morally prepare Ukrainians for a defeat in the war. On the contrary, he tried to encourage them in the face of a Russian offensive. A number of Russian publications carried this fake news, adding that “by April, Russia will have defeated Ukraine on the battlefield”. The purpose of this narrative is to demoralize Ukrainians and increase battle fatigue, which has reached a new phase in the context of Russia's bombing the Ukrainian electricity grid.
Veridica has debunked a series of fake news about the war in Ukraine. According to the Russian propaganda, NATO is providing outdated equipment to Ukraine, and the EU hides its involvement in crimes committed on Ukrainian territory by setting up a special tribunal. The Russian media press wrote that Russophobic foreign nationals will be entitled to tear apart Crimea and Donbas once these territories are liberated. In July 2022, Russian journalists wrote that US scholars supported Putin’s ideas about Ukraine . Other fake news was spread about the Kyiv Government voicing mistrust in its Western partners , or about terrorists trained in the EU, who will act against civilians in Donbas.
