Zelenskyy asks people not to believe fake news: so much anxiety is being caused

KATERYNA TYSHCHENKO — SATURDAY, 16 JULY 2022, 22:07

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has urged Ukrainians not to believe fake news and anonymous sources.

Source: the president’s evening address

Quote: "How many people were scared today by the fake news about a massive Russian missile attack on Ukraine? After everything that’s happened in previous weeks. After Dnipro, Vinnytsia, Chasiv Yar... How much anxiety is caused every day by people passing on horror stories from Russian propagandists and officials. How many problems Ukrainians are creating for themselves by trusting any anonymous source.

Sometimes this takes on unhealthy forms, when deliberately planted stories from Russia are spread via social media and websites. These stories have only one purpose: to supplement the missile and artillery terror against our state with information terror."

Details: Zelenskyy noted that Ukrainians "also need a kind of emotional sovereignty".

"So that we don’t play along with the information game against Ukraine, and have the power to consciously perceive any information, any messages, no matter who they come from. And to see who needs them and what they need them for, and whether Ukraine needs them at all, whether they make the path to victory easier for us," he said.

"Sometimes information weapons can do more than conventional weapons. It is clear that no rockets or artillery that Russia has will succeed in breaking our unity or knocking us off our path. And it should be equally clear that Ukrainian unity cannot be broken by lies or intimidation, fakes or conspiracy theories," the president added.

According to Zelenskyy, never in the past has so much depended on Ukrainians’ ability to be extremely careful and circumspect in the information field.

Previously: Earlier on Saturday, Ruslan Martsinkiv, the mayor of Ivano-Frankivsk, had posted on Facebook and Telegram that a massive missile strike across Ukraine was supposedly about to happen.

"There is information about a massive rocket attack across Ukraine!" he wrote. The posts were subsequently deleted.

Svitlana Onyshchuk, the head of the Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast State Administration, did not respond to this claim.