The CEO of Ukrainian defense company Fire Point, Iryna Terekh, denied reports that production of FP-5 "Flamingo" cruise missiles had allegedly been halted. The wave of manipulations was prompted by a fragment of her old interview that was taken out of context and circulated in an edited form. In fact, she was not talking about abandoning "Flamingo," but about having no plans to create additional cruise missile models, UNN reports.
Iryna Terekh personally responded on the social network X to the spread of inaccurate information, explaining that the company was not abandoning "Flamingo" but, on the contrary, planned to continue improving the missile.
"We do not plan to develop additional cruise missile models; instead, we are focusing on developing the existing model, while directing the greatest efforts toward two ballistic models," Terekh wrote.
At the same time, the spread of fake reports concerning Ukrainian long-range weapons may go far beyond ordinary information speculation. As military cybersecurity expert Kostiantyn Korsun explained in a comment to UNN, discrediting Ukrainian arms manufacturers may be one of the tools of Russia's information warfare.
"Discrediting Ukrainian manufacturers of long-range weapons, especially those producing truly effective weapons, may be one of Russia's tools for countering the development of Ukraine's defense-industrial complex. The goal is to establish narratives in Ukraine that are advantageous to Russia: supposedly, this is bad, it is fake, and programs for developing and producing such weapons have no prospects," the expert said.
According to Korsun, the aim of such information campaigns may be to shape a negative public attitude toward Ukrainian defense developments. In particular, this may be done by imposing the idea that they are allegedly ineffective and that funds spent on their production are wasted.
The expert explains that such operations do not always begin with blatantly false messages. A much more effective tool may be the use of real facts that are subsequently distorted or presented in a context favorable to the adversary.
Against the backdrop of these accusations, Iryna Terekh also separately responded to allegations that state funds had been used to create the weapons.
"The state spent zero hryvnias and zero kopecks on the development of each of our product models; this applies to FP-1, FP-2, FP-4, FP-6, FP-7, FP-9, and will continue to apply to all further developments. This is an atypical approach, but it is our additional contribution to the country," Terekh wrote.
Recall
Earlier, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also spoke about the scale of Russian influence on the information space. During a speech at the Warsaw Security Forum, he said that following Ukrainian strikes on the data centers of Russia's "Yandex," there were noticeably fewer bots, hate, and provocations on social media.
Later, the Center for Countering Disinformation under the National Security and Defense Council published a study according to which, following the attacks on October 8 and 12, the number of messages from the accounts studied that displayed signs of inauthentic behavior on Facebook and Telegram decreased by 83.6% and 42.6%, respectively.