After the Russian missile strike on Kryvyi Rih on January 17 that killed four people and damaged residential buildings and an educational institution, Russian media mass-shared the “news” that that missile strike killed a NATO instructor who trained F-16 pilots from Denmark. This news is fake. Let’s get through how Gwara’s fact-checking team debunked it.
What happened?
On January 18, Russian sources mass-shared the news about the death of Danish NATO instructor Jeppe Hansen, which was supposedly reported on Twitter by his colleague Oscar Sørensen. The news was shared by X users (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), Russian media outlets that work for foreign audiences (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), First channel (archive) and TASS agency (1, 2), and Telegram channels that systemically spread Russian propaganda: Uncle Slava (Дядя Слава), Sheikh Temir (Шейх Тамир), and others.
“After the Iskander strike at the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU)’s educational center in Kryvyi Rih, the NATO instructor for F-16 flights from Denmark, Jeppe Hansen, was liquidated, which was confirmed by his friends on social media,” the news said.
The news (archive) written by the Russian TASS agency was also shared on X. TASS wrote that they got the information about the pilot’s supposed death from unnamed sources in the security forces.
Also, some pro-Russian Telegram channels say the post contained a photo of the killed NATO instructor and screenshots from his profile in LinkedIn attached.
Analysis
First step, we’ve analyzed the screenshots of Oscar Sørensen’s posts, who is supposedly the friend and colleague of a pilot who died in Kryvyi Rih.
The post is written in Danish, and here is its word-to-word translation:
“Today, we’re facing sad news. Recently, it became known that my friend and colleague Yeppe Hansen died in Kryvyi Rih in Ukraine. Here, in Denmark, he taught Ukrainian soldiers to pilot F-16 jet fighters. His experience and mastery helped hundreds of Ukrainians to grasp this complicated discipline. But today, his life was tragically cut short. I express my deepest condolences to his family and close ones. He was a real professional and a good friend.”
Note that X users didn’t retweet this post but made their own tweets with the screenshot attached. The screenshot had the time and date of when the tweets were posted: on January 17, at 15:28 PM. This screenshot with a corresponding date and time was spread in Telegram channels, too.
At the moment of publishing this article in Ukrainian, Oscar Sørensen (@OscarSrnsn) had another profile photo on X, and his account didn’t have a tweet about the pilot’s death. His pinned post, though, said (and still says at the moment of publishing the English version of the debunking – archive): “News of Jeppe Hansen’s demise was greatly exaggerated. In the last hour he lead a bicycle raid into Russia that destroyed Russia’s entire Su-57 fleet.”
Next step, we’ve searched for any information about Jeppe Hansen from Denmark. There’s nothing online about the man, except for in pro-Russian media. Then, we looked for his LinkedIn profile, “screenshotted” by Telegram authors.
We found 125 matches to the “Jeppe Hansen Danmark” query but no one similar to “security and defense command specialist of Royal Danish Air Force.”
Then, we checked the official statement released in response to a post about the Danish NATO pilot’s supposed death.
Troels Lund Poulsen, Danish minister of Defence, and the Defence Ministry itself released statements (on X, Facebook, MoD website) debunking the story about an F-16 pilot instructor from Denmark being killed in Ukraine.
“The information is false. No Danish soldiers have been killed in Ukraine. It is a false story that is being circulated in Russian media – probably to discredit Denmark. I take this very seriously. But unfortunately, it is part of a reality with a very serious security situation, where false influence campaigns and misinformation are being used on a large scale,” the minister said.
So, the information about NATO instructors dying in Ukraine’s Kryvyi Rih after the Russian missile attack is fake. Russian propaganda pushes these types of fakes to justify the attacks on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine and civilian deaths that follow — and to discredit Ukraine’s allies and countries that provide international aid.
Conclusion: Fake
Author: Olha Yakovleva
Our Kharkiv-based newsroom has been doing fact-checking for almost three years: through Russia’s all-out war, it’s been vital to provide our audience with insights into how Russian propaganda (and propaganda, period) works. Thank you for keeping an eye on our debunking pieces. If you can, please consider supporting our fact-checkers on Patreon, BMC, or PayPal.
More Russian fakes
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