On March 12, the television channel Zvezda published an article under the misleading title, “The Commander of the Battalion Dnipro-1 Confessed on Ukrainian TV about How He Had Become a Fascist.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcpjOzrw2ks
News under the same title was spread throughout other Russian sites and social networks.
In reality, Yurii Bereza, a member of the Ukrainian Parliament and the commander of the Dnipro-1 battalion, made no such confession when he spoke on the Espreso television channel on March 7 during the interview in question. As a guest on the weekly program, Evening with Mykola Kniazhytskyi, Bereza said that when he had been doing his military service in Kamchatka, Russia, in the 1990s, he had been called a “Banderist” simply for being Ukrainian.
“‘You are Banderists. ‘You are fascists,’” Bereza said he was told. “I have heard these words since 1991 in Kamchatka. Nothing changed. Kitchen talk became the talk of the general public.”
Bereza’s remarks are actually confirmed in the body of the Zvezda article. But the headline was entirely misleading and presumably written with the knowledge that Internet users often skim headlines without reading the articles themselves.
