In March, the messages about the unknown individuals preparing to come to schools and shooting people started spreading online from anonymous groups on Telegram, particularly in Zhytomyr, Khmelnytskyi, Dnipro, Kryvyi Rih, and other Ukrainian cities.
What happened?
Our fact-checking chatbot Perevirka received a string of requests to check messages about the possible terrorist attacks in the schools of Khmelnytskyi, Zhytomyr, Dnipro, Kryvyi Rih, and so on.
These messages contained pictures of the weapons, a list of schools, and threats.
“We are many, we are not scared, the police won’t be able to catch us. We will execute you. You will be eliminated in your schools,” one of the messages says.
Analysis
For the first step, we’ve analyzed the content of those messages. Mostly, the posts had similar text, in which the different things were a city, the date, and the number of schools, to which the supposed attackers are threatening to come.
The majority of these messages were spread in the closed groups on Telegram, from which they were then sent to Telegram users
For the next step, we found out when these messages started to spread. It occurred that they first appeared in the autumn of 2024 threatening schools in Lviv and Ternopil. This year, they were shared in Dnipro, Mykolaiv, Vinnytsia, and Zhytomyr.
An anonymous group with a message targeting Lviv initially had 20 subscribers, but then rapidly became popular: Ukraine’s Interior Ministry reported that when it was blocked, it already had over 2,500 subscribers.
“It’s known that the channel was administered from the Russian Federation’s territory. Not for the first time, the enemy’s disinformation is trying to spread panic and destabilize the mood in society,” Interior Ministry wrote.
In October 2024, the similar messages appeared in Ternopil, in particular in the group “Red Ternopil.” The message mentioned the city’s 25th school, which didn’t function in 2024 — it was merged with other educational facilities into Ternopil academic lyceum “Genesis.” Authors of school shooting threats used non-existent institutions for their “attacks.”
A new wave of messages was documented in March 2025. In Dnipro, information about shootings in schools was spread by a user named “Red Dnipro.” The message was also shared in Kryvyi Rih.
Department of Humanitarian Politics of Dnipro City Council noted that the threats of supposed school shootings is a fake manufactured to spread panic among locals:
“Previous experience shows that such messages are often a part of information-psychological operations (English equivalent for that would be PSYOP — ed.), aimed to destabilize the situation. The perpetrators even name distinct educational institutions in an attempt to sew fear and mistrust,” the Dnipro City Council said.
In March, Telegram channels also anonymously spread information about possible shootings in the educational facilities of Mykolaiv.
On March 14, 2024, the city mayor, Oleksandr Sienkevych, said in his Telegram that such messages are part of the information war.
“The fear for children is the strongest emotion propagandists are counting on,” Sienkevych said.
As such, the viral messages about possible school shootings started spreading back in 2024 by anonymous groups on Telegram. They were moderated from Russia. School shootings didn’t happen in any of the cities mentioned in threats.
Conclusion: Fake
Author: Ilona Zholondiievska
More fact-check pieces
- No, Ukrainian boy Prince Harry talked to didn’t get his burns in “domestic fire”
- No, Ukrainian refugees weren’t called “homeless, jobless beggars” in Stephen Colbert’s TV show
Subscribe to news from Kharkiv, Ukraine
Most important stories from the frontline region
