The problem with fighting fake news from Russia is that it often comes from top officials in Moscow like Sergei Lavrov, Russian foreign minister. Lavrov’s latest distortion of the facts came in an interview given to Izvestia on Feb. 10, and was refuted that same day, though that, of course, was ignored by the Russian media which repeated his lie.
Lavrov claimed that it was “the radical and nationalist forces in Kyiv” who bear responsibility for the new escalation in fighting and that this “is documented in the reports of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission”. He spoke only of shelling by the Ukrainian Army, with civilian deaths, destruction and the fact that many people were left without water, electricity and heating effectively attributed to the Ukrainian side.
