Russian media are circulating a video purporting to show the torching of an Orthodox Church belonging to the Moscow Patriarchate in the Mykolaiv region by Ukrainian “radicals”. The video was actually taken in Russia ten years ago, in 2013.
Russian propagandists regularly create fakes about alleged “persecution” of a branch of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine. The latest such fake concerns a video of a church burning in the Mykolaiv region.
The Kremlin media and various social media accounts claim that in the village of Novopoltavka in the Mykolaiv region, Ukrainian Orthodox Church supporters burned down a church which belongs to the Moscow Patriarchate.
“In the village of Novopoltavka (Mykolaiv Oblast), radical supporters of the Ukrainian Church set a Moscow Patriarchate church on fire. Earlier, the Ukrainian Nazi Korchynsky called for churches to be burned if the Russian language is heard there,” writes the “ZOV LPR” site
In fact, the video purportedly showing an act of arson against a church in Mykolaiv Oblast has nothing to do with Ukraine at all, and it was not filmed in 2023. This video was first published on January 23, 2013 with the description: Illinka church on fire.
Illinka is a Russian village in the Astrakhan region. The church fire was widely reported by the Russian media in 2013. A report about the fire on the “Zarya Caspia” TV channel from 2013 features the exact same footage that Russian propagandists used 10 years later in their Mykolaiv church fire fake.
Ukraine’s Center for Strategic Communication and Information Security also confirmed that the video shared online is fake.
