On 10 April 2023, Pavel Kazarin, a journalist working at Ukrainska Pravda, a leading Ukrainian online media, informed that a fake Ukrainska Pravda page had appeared online, featuring an article allegedly written by him. The article heavily criticised Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces, according to the journalist. In a Facebook post, Kazarin claimed that “fake op-eds under the name of regular authors” of Ukrainska Pravda regularly appear online, and called upon readers to be aware of such cases when encountering articles with “suspicious” content allegedly published by Ukrainska Pravda. He added that he republished all his articles on his social media accounts, explaining that any articles allegedly written by him and available online, but not available on his social media, were in fact not by him. According to whois, a domain verification instrument quoted by IMI, a Kyiv-based media rights defense group, the fake Ukrainska Pravda website was registered on 12 February 2023 under the domain name pravda-ua.com (the actual domain name of Ukrainska Pravda is pravda.com.ua).

In a statement published later on 10 April by Ukrainska Pravda, the media outlet publically called upon the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) to investigate the case: Ukrainska Pravda’s editor-in-chief Sevhil Musaieva said she believed that the creation of the fake page was a “Russian IPSO [Informational-Psychological Special Operation] aimed at discrediting the [Ukrainian] army and undermining confidence in the leadership of Ukraine, both military and political”. It was not possible to independently verify these claims.