Mykhailo Podolyak's fake tweet: Propagandists faked "deleted" post

Russian media and pro-war Russian Telegram channels are spreading the "deleted" tweet of Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the head of Ukraine's Presidential Office, which he allegedly published on March 21, 2024.

In the post, which Podolyak allegedly deleted, he calls Polish farmers "Putin's agents, who must be fought with appropriate methods."

The post is fake. Podolyak did not publish this post on X. There was no such post on his Facebook and Telegram accounts either.

Propagandists used graphic editors to fake a "deleted" post in the Internet Archive application, in which you can see changes on Internet pages and deleted posts.

However, Podolyak last made any changes to his X account on February 28, 2024.

The link in the fake screenshot with the deleted tweet is invalid and does not work, meaning such a post never existed.

It should also be noted that you can see in the fake screenshot that Podolyak published 3,064 posts on his X account. Now there are 3,065 of them. The last post was made on March 22, 2024 and is related to Russia's large-scale shelling of Ukrainian cities.

By the way, the 3,064th post was made on March 21, 2024 and is related to a ballistic missile attack on Kyiv. That is, the fake deleted post could not have been published on March 21, as it should have been the 3,065th.

The "author" of the screenshot is a bot with a stock photo that has no followers.

This is not the first time that Russian propagandists have forged allegedly deleted posts. The Russians earlier created a fake that business executives in Germany stopped supporting Ukrainians.

Russia is trying to use all the differences between Ukraine and Poland in the political, economic or historical spheres to make Ukrainians quarrel with Poles and reduce the level of support from Poland and Polish society for Ukraine in countering Russian aggression. Now the Kremlin is actively using farmers' protests in Poland as a factor that can cause anti-Ukrainian emotions in Poles and, accordingly, anti-Polish emotions in Ukrainians. Pro-Russian activists with anti-Ukrainian posters, who are cooperating with the Russian Embassy in Warsaw, were seen at farmers' demonstrations in the Polish capital. This was supposed to cement a negative image of Ukrainians in the minds of Poles. The fake "deleted" post is aimed at fueling additional anti-Polish and anti-Ukrainian emotions in the societies of both countries.

Andriy Olenin, Yuriy Banakhevych