Spanish blogger spreads fake about death of soldiers from NATO countries in Odesa

He is known for his long-time advocacy of Russia and far-right views

A Spanish YouTube blogger and retired colonel, Pedro Banos, said during a program on his channel El Canal del Coronel that 18 British soldiers had allegedly been killed and 25 others injured in Russia's missile attack on Odesa. He claimed that the French military had also suffered casualties.

His statement was immediately shared by Russian media outlets, pro-war Telegram channels and multiple French-, Spanish-, Italian- and English-speaking accounts on social media platform X and Telegram groups.

This is a fake. Banos does not provide any evidence that military personnel from NATO countries have been killed in Ukraine. He spreads information, referring to an unnamed source whom he has allegedly trusted for 30 years.

Banos is known for spreading pro-Russian narratives and conspiracy theories in Spain.

In the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s, he had a military career in Spain and participated in three peacekeeping missions in Bosnia and Herzegovina as a military advisor. In 2018, he was even nominated for a senior position in the field of national security, but was not appointed because of his advocacy of Russia.

Before the start of Russia's war against Ukraine in 2014, Banos was one of those who called for rapprochement between the European Union and the Russian Federation. Then he denied Russia's downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, including doing so in the studio of the propaganda channel Russia Today. He wrote on X that he believed that a Ukrainian aircraft shot down the passenger plane.

Banos justified the annexation of Crimea, wished the EU to have a politician "at least half as popular as Putin" and suggested involving Russia in "solving the pension problem in Spain."

After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in March 2022, he wrote on X that he was "fascinated with Putin's charisma."

Banos also denied Russian crimes against the civilian population in Syria and the involvement of the Russian State Security Service in the poisoning of the Skripals.

In 2017, when the Spanish General Prosecutor's Office began to investigate Russia's involvement in the so-called "Catalan separatism" and the local press conducted several investigations that proved Russia's involvement in unrest in Catalonia, Banos denied this and even publicly spoke out against journalists and news outlets that wrote about Russia's interference in Spain's internal affairs.

He justified Russia's "recognition" of the so-called "LPR/DPR" and blamed NATO and the United States, not Russia and Putin, for Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Banos has extreme far-right views and lectures at the Institute of Social, Economic and Political Sciences, founded by French far-right politician Marion Marechal, who is a niece of Marine Le Pen.

Russia often uses loyal foreign journalists and bloggers to promote its own narratives to both international and domestic audiences. The Ukrinform website has already published materials about the Russian propaganda system in Turkey and pro-Russian propagandists in the United States and EU countries.

Earlier, a fake "news story" was published in Hungary about Ukrainians plotting an assassination attempt on Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Andriy Olenin