DISINFO: Ireland sending extradition letters to Ukrainians to force them into the army
SUMMARY
A Ukrainian living in Ireland has received a chain letter from the Irish Department of Justice. The base of the extradition is an agreement between Ireland and Ukraine after the 1957 European Agreement on Extradition. Should he evade the summons, the man faces penalties of at least one year of prison both in Ireland and Ukraine. The extradition has no political motivation and can be recurred at the Supreme Court, the letter says.
RESPONSE
The letter is fake and has been debunked by Irish and other international fact-checkers such as Shayan Sardarizadeh at BBC Verify. The Irish Times confirmed with the Department of Justice of Ireland that it did not send any letter of this kind.
Both EUvsDisinfo and Ukrainian fact-checkers at Detector Media have previously reported on similar disinformation narratives about Ukrainian men being deported from Poland. The goal of these disinformation messages is to portray the situation in the battlefield as helpless and desperate to the point that Ukraine needs to mobilize even its citizens abroad.
See other examples of similar disinformation narratives, such as claims that NATO confirmed the death of half a million Ukrainian soldiers in the war it started, that Ukraine is training pensioners as tank crews because its military reserves are gone, that Ukraine’s military leadership sacrifices its soldiers for demining, or that the US proxy war against Russia has turned Ukraine into a graveyard.