Homesick for the Invader
A claim invented on a Kremlin-linked Telegram channel about war-weary Ukrainians longing for Russia's return just picked up a Slovak byline
"Many have started missing the arrival of Russia," a Ukrainian-sounding Telegram channel called Legitimnyy posted on August 30th, adding that people in the southeast and across left-bank Ukraine simply don't care which flag flies over them anymore, so long as the shooting stops. A Slovak outlet, Hlavné Správy, picked the line up within hours and ran it as evidence of a mood shift inside Ukrainian society.
What the article didn't mention is that Legitimnyy has nothing to do with Ukraine. Ukrainian intelligence services place the channel inside Russian military intelligence's own information apparatus, dressed up to look like a local insider feed.
That distinction matters more than it might seem. This is not a case of one outlet misreading a genuine, if unflattering, piece of Ukrainian public opinion. It's a manufactured quote, laundered through two layers of fake authenticity, first as an "insider" Ukrainian source, then as independent Slovak reporting, before landing in front of European readers who have no reason to suspect either link in that chain.
What Legitimnyy actually is
Legitimnyy has run this playbook for a while. Its stock in trade is manipulation dressed as insider knowledge: leaked-sounding claims about mobilization failures, front-line collapses, and infighting inside Ukraine's military and political leadership, delivered in the tone of someone who has access rather than an agenda.
Ukrainian security services have linked the channel to Russia's GRU, and its actual goal is fairly narrow, wear down Ukrainians' trust in their own leadership from the inside, using a voice that reads as Ukrainian precisely because a voice that read as Russian would fool no one.
The August 30th post fits that pattern exactly. It doesn't argue that Ukraine should surrender. It asserts, as settled fact, that large parts of the country already have, psychologically if not yet legally, and that the only people standing in the way of a deal are the ones in Kyiv still willing to fight.
That's a more useful lie than a crude one, because it doesn't ask Ukrainians to accept defeat. It tells them defeat has already been quietly accepted by everyone around them.
A newspaper that's done this before
Hlavné Správy is not a neutral bystander that got fooled by a convincing fake. It's one of Slovakia's largest far-right alternative outlets, with a long publishing record built around Kremlin talking points, EU and NATO conspiracy theories, and material sourced from pro-Russian politicians dressed up as independent commentary.
Slovak intelligence services blocked the site briefly in 2022, right after the full-scale invasion began, over concerns serious enough to count as a national security matter, including reported financial links to Russian diplomatic staff.
None of that history is a secret in Slovakia. It is, however, largely invisible to a European reader who stumbles across an English or German summary of the story a few links downstream, where it no longer carries any of Hlavné Správy's baggage and reads instead as one more foreign outlet reporting a genuine trend.
The site's function in this chain isn't to invent anything. It's to launder. A GRU-linked Telegram post becomes, one republication later, something that looks like independent European journalism confirming what the Telegram post already claimed.
What Ukrainians say when someone actually asks them
None of this would be worth dismantling in detail if Ukrainian opinion on the war were genuinely unknowable. It isn't. The Kyiv International Institute of Sociology published fresh polling in early August, and the numbers don't leave much room for the reading Legitimnyy and Hlavné Správy want to sell.
Sixty percent of respondents called it categorically unacceptable to hand the whole of Donbas to Russian control even in exchange for security guarantees. Fifty-nine percent said they would accept freezing the front line roughly where it sits now, provided Ukraine keeps receiving weapons and financial support, but explicitly without any legal recognition of occupied territory as Russian.
Seventy-seven percent believe Ukraine remains capable of continuing to fight effectively. Read together, those numbers describe a country that wants the killing to stop and has not, as a result, decided to stop caring who wins.
That gap, between wanting a war to end and being willing to accept whatever terms would end it, is exactly the distinction the Kremlin narrative depends on erasing. Exhaustion is real after four and a half years of full-scale invasion. Consent to occupation is a different thing entirely, and polling a population's fatigue is not the same as polling its surrender.
The regions Moscow keeps claiming to speak for
The specific claim about the southeast and left-bank Ukraine deserves its own scrutiny, because it isn't a new one. Russian messaging has returned to these regions for years, insisting their residents are quietly pro-Russian, or at least indifferent enough to accept Russian rule without much fuss.
The polling doesn't support that story there either. Even in the regions Russian propaganda has spent the longest time trying to paint as sympathetic ground, majorities still reject ceding territory to Russian control.
There's a crueler irony sitting underneath the claim. The people living in and near these regions are not some hypothetical population weighing abstract flags. They are the ones who have absorbed the missile strikes, the drone attacks, the destroyed apartment blocks and power stations, the years of occupation and the disappearances that come with it, more directly and for longer than almost anyone else in the country.
Manufacturing a narrative in which these specific people are quietly relieved at the prospect of Russian rule requires erasing exactly the experience that makes such relief the least plausible reaction imaginable. That's not a reading of public opinion. It's a rewrite of it.
Why this particular lie, right now
The timing isn't incidental. The front line has been largely static for a long stretch, and a war Russia cannot currently win by advancing is a war Moscow has every incentive to try winning by other means, chiefly by convincing the outside world that Ukraine's own population has already given up the fight it's still funding and arming.
A story about tired, indifferent Ukrainians secretly hoping for Russian rule doesn't need to convince Ukrainians of anything. Its real audience sits in Berlin, Bratislava, Warsaw, and Brussels, where the same story is meant to plant one specific, corrosive idea: that continued support for Kyiv is propping up a fight the Ukrainians themselves are quietly ready to abandon.
That's the piece worth holding onto here: a fabricated quote on an anonymous channel is a minor irritant on its own.
The same quote, laundered into a Slovak outlet and picked up by whoever aggregates news across the EU without checking where it started, becomes something closer to a policy argument, aimed less at Kyiv than at the voters and officials deciding how much longer to keep helping it.