On 25 May 2023, Vechirniy Kyiv (“Evening Kyiv” in Ukrainian), an online news outlet reporting on news from the Ukrainian capital, reported its website had been targeted in a cyber attack by Russian hackers. Yevhen Lopushynskyi, the head of Kyivinform, the municipal company which owns Vechirniy Kyiv, said the website had been attacked around 3 p.m. Kyiv time. Technical services worked on fully restoring the page’s normal functioning for three hours, he added. The hackers identified themselves as members of a group named Solntsepek (the name of a Russian flamethrower weapon), Vechirniy Kyiv’s editor-in-chief Olena Petryshyn said.
“They wrote: ‘we are the Solntsepek hacker group’, and started posting the same news item every minute”, Lopushynskyi told IMI, a Kyiv-based media freedom defense group. “This was, more or less, a text and an image of Zelensky dressed as a clown [with the following message]: ‘Attention, Zelensky! We, the Solntsepek hacker group, hacked all state websites, discovered all the information and corruption'”, he added. According to Vechirniy Kyiv, this was not first time the media’s website had been attacked, with smaller attacks having occurred several times in the first few months of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.