On 9 April 2025, local newspaper “Channel 33” reported that the deputy mayor of Tyvriv, a village in Vinnytsia region, had sent the outlet a request for a correction, claiming that it had published “false information” in a recent article. The article in question recounted the story of Denys Kyryliuk, a Ukrainian army pilot who was born and raised in a village near Tyvriv, and who was killed in 2023 in air combat with Russian figher jets. According to Channel 33, who quoted a decision by President Volodymyr Zelensky to posthumously grant the Hero of Ukraine (Ukraine’s highest state distinction) award to Kyryliuk, the army pilot died after his plane was struck by a missile. Kyryliuk was reportedly not able to catapult from the jet and save his life, as he had used his last moments in the air to steer it away and prevent it from crashing in a nearby village, thus saving civilian lives.
Channel 33 said that Kyryliuk’s father had addressed the outlet with a complaint: according to Mykola Kyryliuk, at a newly built war memorial in Tyvriv his son is described as having died “as a result of a plane crash”. This, in the father’s opinion, is disrespectful towards the memory of his son, as it creates the impression that he was killed while on the ground, and makes no mention either of his status as a Ukrainian army pilot, or of his heroic death, or the fact that he sacrificed his own life to save civilians, and that he was awarded Ukraine’s highest state distinction for this feat. Mykola Kyryliuk also claimed that his son’s links to the region were described on the monument as temporary, with the place of his dispatching within the army mistakenly described as if this was his place of usual residence.
In response, deputy mayor of Tyvriv Serhiy Stepanyshyn sent Channel 33 a letter in which he claimed that the newspaper had published “false information”, demanded a correction as well as for the outlet to “verify information before publication”. Stepanyshyn claimed that authorities in Tyvriv had used official documents sent by the Ukrainian army when designing the local war memorial, and that in these documents Kyryliuk’s death was described as having occurred “as a result of a plane crash”. Commenting on the letter, Channel 33 insisted that all the information contained in its original publication were correct, again quoting Kyryliuk’s father, as well as explaining that the document sent by the military also indicated that the circumstances of the pilot’s death had not yet been yet made clear at the time, and that these were later made clear in the text of President Zelensky’s decision to grant the Hero of Ukraine award to Kyryliuk.