Photo: Sammy-Sander auf Pixabay

This article was first published by Truthmeter.mk (North Macedonia), within the framework of Western Balkans Anti-Disinformation Project.

A Facebook post shares a media report that Russian forces have captured another town in Ukraine, backed up by a distorted statement from the Russian Defense Ministry, which actually reported the capture of a settlement, without specifying what settlement it was. In fact, it is a village, and a small and sparsely populated one (and probably already empty), which can barely be found on a map, so this claim is unfounded

A post on the social network Facebook shares a news story from a Macedonian website, which is on the topic of the war in Ukraine, with a sensationalist headline:

The Russians have captured another city.

The news is incorrect, and the aforementioned site tried to support it with the following words:

Alexandropol in the Donetsk People’s Republic was liberated through decisive actions by units of the Centar group of forces, the ministry said in a statement, TASS reported.

Here the site refers to the Russian Ministry of Defense, but tends to omit part of what the ministry stated, as reported by the Russian news agency TASS. What is omitted is the following (translated from Russian):

The settlement of Alexandropol of the Donetsk People’s Republic was liberated.

So, a certain settlement fell under the control of the Russian aggressors , which they falsely describe as the “liberation” of territory, which, according to them, belongs to the internationally unrecognized Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), but as notorious as they are for propaganda, at least they did not go so far as to claim that they had captured (“liberated”) any city. The aforementioned Macedonian site, or perhaps the source from which it took that “news” arbitrarily added that.

There are seven settlements with this name in Ukraine (Russian: Александрополь, Ukrainian: Олександропіль), but none of them is a city, they all are villages (links to their geographical location: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7). There used to be more villages with this name, but they were renamed.

Three villages, which now bear that name, are in the Donetsk Oblast, i.e. in the territory claimed by the so-called DPR, and the Russian Ministry of Defense has shown itself to be extremely unprofessional and has not even specified which of those villages has now been captured (“liberated”).

The Russian propaganda weekly newspaper Argumenty i fakty claims that it was the village of Alexandropol in the Kramatorsk District of the Donetsk Oblast, which it even objectively describes as small, and this location is also referred to by Alexander Kots, a war correspondent for the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, also a Russian propagandist, according to whom the village had about 150 inhabitants before the war. Due to the war, last year the local children and their parents were forcibly evacuated, which probably contributed to the village becoming quite empty. We previously listed him under No. 4.

So, even Russian propagandists admit that it is a small and sparsely populated village, while the aforementioned Macedonian site reports on the “capture of a city”, which sounds like a major military victory, making the site actually a bigger Russian propagandist than the Russian propagandists themselves. Truthmeter.mk has previously taken note of that site spreading fake news originating from the Kremlin.

Taking into account everything stated so far, we assess the post as untrue and almost the same content was published by other Macedonian media outlets: here and here, so the same assessment applies to them as well.