Reading News About Ukraine: Five Things to Check First

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, a huge volume of information about Ukraine has also been circulating in Japanese. There is no way to verify all of it yourself. What you can do is check a few points, one at a time, about the single piece of information in front of you.

Here are five such points. They require no special skill. What is needed is not scrutiny of the content itself, but the habit of looking at where a piece of information came from and how it traveled to you.

1. Who put it out

First, check who first put out the information. What matters is that a government or military announcement is a source for the fact that “such an announcement was made” — it does not mean the content has been independently confirmed. This applies equally to announcements from either side.

One example is the “Ghost of Kyiv.” Immediately after the full-scale invasion began in February 2022, a story spread that an unnamed Ukrainian pilot had shot down one Russian aircraft after another. According to an Associated Press article distributed on May 2, 2022, the Ukrainian Air Force Command stated on Facebook that the “Ghost of Kyiv” was “a superhero legend created by Ukrainians,” a collective image of pilots rather than a specific individual. In the same statement, the Air Force said that Major Stepan Tarabalka, whom some had identified as the “Ghost,” was not the “Ghost,” and that the claim he had shot down 40 aircraft was also not true. The same article treats as fact that the major died in an air battle on March 13 of that year.

A party to the conflict’s own official statements can later be disavowed by that same party. So “because the government said so” is not the end of verification — it is the beginning. The same applies to the fact-checkers themselves. EUvsDisinfo, a site that tracks disinformation originating from Russia, is run by the East StratCom Task Force, set up within the EU’s diplomatic service in 2015, and the site itself states that its content “does not represent an official EU position.” Who runs a site, and how that operator describes its own position, is worth checking before you read the content.

2. When and where the footage is from

The second point is the date, time, and location. Footage of a real event is repeatedly recirculated as if it depicted a different time or place.

On March 3, 2026, the Japan Fact-check Center (日本ファクトチェックセンター, JFC) verified a video that had spread on X with the caption “an Israeli nuclear power plant destroyed by an Iranian-made missile,” and rated it false. The video, reposted more than 5,100 times and viewed more than 1.66 million times, actually showed a large fire at a military ammunition depot in Kharkiv oblast in northeastern Ukraine on March 24, 2017. JFC used Google Lens to search and traced it to a 2017 article by the Canadian outlet Global News, confirming a match in the apartment block in the foreground and the spiral of smoke in the lower left of the frame.

There are cases running the other way, too. On November 7, 2022, JFC rated a video that had spread with the caption “a body moving in the background” as unrelated to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The fact-check article describes the original footage this way: “The footage of the demonstration was filmed in Vienna, Austria in February 2022, about two weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began, and shows a performance protesting climate change.”

What these two cases have in common is that the original footage was tracked down not through special inside information, but through image-search tools anyone can use. The tools used — InVID’s video analysis feature, Google Lens — are also named in the articles. Running a frame of a video that catches your attention through image search is something readers can do too.

3. What the evidence actually is

The third point is how you count evidence. A common mistake is to count reposts as separate confirmations. If ten accounts are saying the same thing but it traces back to one source, that is one piece of evidence, not ten. Ten outlets running the same wire-service story is no different from reading one article ten times.

A case JFC verified on May 16, 2024 is a clear example. A video mimicking a BBC News screen and claiming that “NATO leaders are disappointed with Ukraine’s policies” spread widely. JFC rated it false. According to the article, BBC Verify journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh identified the video as fake, and Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins posted that it was at least the seventh fake video of its kind since November 2023.

On the surface, “the BBC reported it” looks like strong backing, but the BBC never actually reported it. A news organization’s logo and screen design are used not as evidence but as decoration made to look like evidence. The way to check is simple: search that outlet’s own site for the same content.

4. Whose claim it is written as

The fourth point is the subject of the sentence. Phrasing like “it has been reported that…” erases who actually said it. Putting the missing subject back can change the weight of the information considerably.

The monthly report on the protection of civilians for August 2026, published by the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) under the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, can be read as an example of this. The report presents at least 372 civilians killed and 2,349 injured in Ukraine in August 2026 as “verified” figures, while also setting out, unaltered, the figures Russian authorities published for individual incidents (at least 85 killed and 498 injured in the occupied territories; at least 113 killed and 736 injured within the Russian Federation), and then states:

Due to lack of independent sources of information, however, HRMMU has not been able to verify the vast majority of allegations.

UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, “Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict: August 2026 Update”

Figures that could be verified and figures that were published but could not be verified are treated differently within the same report. Whether a writer makes this distinction is a clue to how reliable their article is.

5. What is still unknown

The fifth point is the one most easily overlooked. A source that volunteers what it has not been able to confirm is more trustworthy than one that states everything as certain.

The same HRMMU report explains the limits of its own figures in the body of the text. Having defined “verified” as applying only to records that meet the standard of “reasonable grounds to believe,” it states:

The actual extent of civilian harm – both casualties and infrastructure damage – is likely considerably higher

Ibid.

A footnote further states that a reported attack on a bus near occupied Katerynivka in Luhansk oblast on August 26, 2026 was not included in the tally, because of limited information and lack of access to the area. Writing that your own figure is “probably lower than the actual number” is not an admission of weakness. It is the work of handing the reader what the figure does and does not cover.

According to the same report, verified civilian casualties since February 24, 2022 total 70,950 — 17,257 killed and 53,693 injured. When citing this figure, you need to carry along both the qualifier “verified” and the caveat that the actual number is higher.

The conclusion when there is no answer

Even after going through all five points, the truth often cannot be settled. The correct conclusion in that case is “still unknown” — not picking one side or the other. Being able to leave something unresolved may be the most useful skill you gain from these five points. If you are looking for leads in Japanese, the Japan Fact-check Center’s (日本ファクトチェックセンター) list of Ukraine-related articles and FactCheck Navi, run by the Fact-Checking Initiative Japan (ファクトチェック・イニシアティブ, FIJ), are good starting points. But being listed at an entry point is not the same as having been verified.

What this outlet does when it writes an article

Finally, here is Ukrainavi’s own policy. The five points above are, as it happens, also our editorial procedure.

• We treat government, military, and corporate announcements as sources for the fact that an announcement was made, and write about that separately from confirming the content
• We do not cite search-result summaries. We always open the original page and check it
• We distinguish reposts from independent confirmation. We do not count articles from the same wire service as multiple pieces of backing
• We attach the time period, population, unit, whether a figure is an estimate or confirmed, and the publishing body and survey year to every number
• We do not paper over what we could not confirm; we state it alongside the article
• We describe the events of February 24, 2022 as “Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine,” and do not use euphemisms that hide who is responsible

At the end of this article, too, we list the sources we referred to and what we were unable to confirm. Reading that first will show you how far the writer checked, and from what point on they did not.