'The river of death': Russian propaganda spreading fakes about Tisza and Ukrainian-Romanian border

Russian propaganda is spreading several fakes about the actions of Ukrainian border guards on the Ukrainian-Romanian border near the Tisza River, particularly about the laying of mines on the banks of the river and the shooting of men who illegally try to cross the border.

Fake cover of The Economist

Russian media outlets, pro-war Telegram channels, bots on social media platforms X and TikTok and a pro-Russian Japanese-language website are sharing what they claim to be the cover of the British magazine The Economist, depicting a man with bullet holes in his back lying on a blue-and-yellow inflatable circle with the headline "The river of death. Thousands of military-age Ukrainians risk their lives by swimming across treacherous waters."

The cover is fake. Such a cover does not exist on the official website of The Economist or its social media accounts. The release date on the fake cover is the first week of summer 2024.

However, on the official website, the issue of the magazine for June 1-7 has a completely different cover. It features a World War II poster known as "We Can Do It!" and headlined "Meet America's Most Dynamic Political Movement."

The same picture was published on the official X account of The Economist.

Fake photo with Reuters watermarks

Russian bots on X, pro-war Telegram channels and Russian media are distributing photos with watermarks of the Reuters news agency. Propagandists claim that the photos depict a makeshift memorial in honor of men "shot by Ukrainian border guards" who tried to cross the Tisza River to illegally cross Ukraine's border with Romania.

This is a fake. Such photos were not published on the Reuters website on May 26, 2024. There is no evidence that these pictures were taken on the banks of the Tisza River.

The only photos published by Reuters on May 26, 2024 and related to Ukraine were taken in Kharkiv. Journalists took photos of the consequences of Russia's terrorist attack on a shopping center.

Therefore, it can be concluded that the propagandists took staged photos near one of the rivers and added watermarks with the Reuters logo using a graphic editor.

Staged video about "mines"

Russian media, pro-war Telegram channels and pro-Russian bloggers are spreading reports that Ukrainian border guards are allegedly laying mines on approaches to the Tisza River so that combat-age men could not flee abroad.

This is a fake. Blogger Ihor Mosiichuk, a former Ukrainian lawmaker who often spreads Russian narratives, launched a disinformation campaign on his TikTok channel.

Ukraine's State Border Guard Service spokesperson Andrii Demchenko refuted the reports on Ukrainian television. He called these statements a "hostile information and psychological operation."

However, this did not stop the Russian propagandists. After this statement, central Russian media outlets began to distribute a video in which a man in civilian clothes is allegedly lying, who "became a victim" of the explosion of a mine planted on the banks of the Tisza River.

The Center for Countering Disinformation of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine refuted this fake.

"The video contains clear signs of being staged. The vegetation in the video is not typical for the banks of the Tisza, and the elements of the uniform and equipment of the so-called border guard do not correspond to those used by the soldiers of the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine," the center said.

Andriy Olenin