Russian Fake News Claim Four European States Want to Partition Ukraine

By: Infovilág | 16 September 2025

A Russian disinformation operation, citing forged documents, claims that the West intends to carve up Ukraine. The campaign attributes the alleged discovery of these “secret documents” to a Russian hacker group. There is just one problem: their French isn’t nearly good enough.

A Kremlin-linked disinformation operation is using fabricated evidence to accuse Ukraine’s allies of planning to divide the war-torn country among themselves once a peace agreement with Russia is concluded.

The claims—identified by EuroVerify, Euronews’ fact-checking team, on Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, TikTok and X—are based on supposedly confidential French military documents published by Killnet, a well-known Russian hacker group.

The disinformation alleges that these leaked documents reveal a secret plan under which four allies—France, the United Kingdom, Poland and Romania—would share Ukraine’s territory and natural resources. The so-called “Coalition of the Willing” would allegedly deploy up to 50,000 peacekeepers to guarantee the peace deal.

A map has also been circulating, supposedly illustrating the future “zones of influence” in detail. But a closer look reveals numerous grammatical and spelling errors, which—as pointed out by a new French government account on X created to debunk such claims—prove the map is not the work of the French military.

For example, Belarus is incorrectly labeled “Biélarus” instead of Biélorussie. The name of former French general Thierry Burkhard is also misspelled. Not to mention that the title of the map omits the definite article—an error experts say is typical of native Russian speakers.

The map also depicts Crimea—annexed by Russia in 2014—as an integral part of the Russian Federation, despite France and its Western allies refusing to recognize the annexation and considering Crimea an occupied Ukrainian territory.

Open-source intelligence experts say the map first appeared on 9 September on the Telegram channel “Mash.” Mash is a Kremlin-friendly Russian outlet and one of the platform’s most popular Russian-language channels.

EuroVerify found the map and accompanying false narrative on several other outlets of similar orientation. The same claims were also repackaged into an AI-generated video styled like a news broadcast, which has already amassed more than one million views.

The same disinformation crew is believed to be behind earlier propaganda campaigns related to the war in Ukraine. These include claims that the Kyiv government was selling the organs of fallen soldiers on the black market, and another story—also investigated by EuroVerify—asserting that Ukraine had lost as many as 1.7 million soldiers since the full-scale invasion began. While X is now flooded with debunks of these falsehoods, the fake news continues to circulate freely on other platforms, including Facebook and Instagram.

This article was produced with the financial support of the European Union. The views and statements expressed herein reflect the position of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the official stance of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.