MP Bezuhla accused the General Staff of lying after it claimed to have cleared a village in Sumy region where there were no Russians

The General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces (AFU), in its evening report yesterday, claimed to have cleared the settlements of Stepne and Novokonstantynivka (formerly Pershe Travnya) in Sumy region, near the Russian border.

The report was published on the General Staff’s official Facebook page:

“In the North-Slobozhanske and Kursk directions, there were 13 attacks by Russian invaders. The enemy carried out eight airstrikes, dropping 16 guided bombs, and conducted 287 shelling attacks, including 24 from multiple launch rocket systems. Ukraine’s Defense Forces cleared the settlements of Stepne and Novokonstantynivka (formerly Pershe Travnya) in Sumy region of Russian occupiers. The soldiers of the 225th Separate Assault Regiment, through active operations, pushed enemy units beyond Ukraine’s state border,” the statement said.

Notably, neither of these settlements had previously been mentioned in General Staff reports as captured, nor had there been any announcements of Russian troops entering them. On the Deep State mapping resource, they have also never been marked as part of the “grey zone” or under Russian control.

A similar situation occurred recently with Bessalivka in Sumy region: the General Staff announced it had been “liberated,” but MP Maryana Bezuhla pointed out that the General Staff had never previously reported the village as captured.

“There has long been no point in reading the General Staff’s operational reports — they’ve become propaganda, not information. This has been the case since 2023, and definitively since the southern counteroffensive. Commanders change, but the lies remain,” Bezuhla wrote on August 10.

At the end of July, Bezuhla also accused AFU Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi of trying to divert public attention from failures in Pokrovsk.