Evidence

The claim traces to Anton Kobyakov, an adviser to Vladimir Putin, who made the assertion in an interview (reported by TASS and picked up by Yahoo News/Reuters wire copy, Ukrainska Pravda, Ukraine Top News/Glavnoe, RBC-Ukraine and Zamin.uz around August 2025/2026). Kobyakov claimed Russian forces found documents at an abandoned Ukrainian Territorial Defence brigade headquarters indicating Kyiv planned to attack Russia on 8 March 2022 (timed, he said, to be presented as a 'gift' for International Women's Day), and that Moscow's 24 February 2022 invasion was launched to preempt this. Multiple outlets covering the claim explicitly note that Kobyakov 'provided no evidence' for the allegation beyond his own assertion, and RBC-Ukraine's headline directly frames it as 'Kremlin gives fake reason for invasion.' No independent verification of these alleged captured documents has been published, and no primary-source images or documents were produced alongside the claim. I could not locate a formal, dedicated fact-check verdict from Reuters Fact Check, AFP Fact Check, Bellingcat, or EUvsDisinfo specifically addressing this particular claim, though the framing across Ukrainian and Western-adjacent outlets treats it as an unsubstantiated Kremlin narrative consistent with earlier Russian post-hoc invasion justifications (e.g., 'denazification,' NATO expansion, alleged Ukrainian genocide in Donbas) that were also unsupported by verifiable evidence. This also contradicts the well-documented pre-invasion timeline in which US, UK and other intelligence agencies warned for months (from at least November 2021) that Russia was massing troops and preparing to invade Ukraine, while Russian officials repeatedly and publicly denied having any invasion plans right up until 24 February 2022.