The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, wants all European cows to wear masks, Lukáš Machala, Secretary General of the Service Office of the Ministry of Culture, wrote on Telegram on April 22.
“(The masks) are produced by the American company Cargill, and the technology is supposed to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and contribute to the fight against global warming. So I don’t know which picture has the bigger (cow),” he added.
SME journalist Zuzana Kovačič Hanzelová was the first to draw attention to his post on Instagram.
(source: Telegram of Lukáš Machala)
This is a hoax that the Commission has also refuted in the past
The European Union is trying to promote several policies to mitigate the climate crisis. None of them, however, contain the mentioned measure for livestock.
“The European Commission has never proposed or plans to introduce masks for cows. This is false information,” the Commission confirmed to the euBrief portal.
Machala referred to the “Buyan” source for his claim. It is a pro-Russian Telegram account with 117,000 followers, which tries to profile itself as a channel about interesting things in the world.
In practice, however, in addition to seemingly ordinary news, it also spreads distorted information with an anti-European and pro-Kremlin tone. This is a common tactic of websites with problematic content.
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Examples of other news the channel has shared in recent days include reporting on the war in Ukraine from a Russian perspective or highlighting European migration problems.
He also highlighted the statement of Russian politician Valentina Matviyenko from Putin’s United Russia party, according to which “a complete family should consist of a mother, a father and five children.”
The hoax about the planned masks for European cattle also appeared in 2023, when the Austrian far-right Express portal reported on it. He claimed that their introduction is part of the Green Deal.
Subsequently, French MEP Annika Bruna also asked the Commission about masks, she wrote in 2024 Euronews portal. However, the then European Commissioner for Agriculture, Janusz Wojciechowski, clearly rejected the information.
It is not clear on what basis the Telegram channel Buyan pulled this false report again.
(source: Telegram of the Buyan account in the original Russian version. )
However, unlike the post shared by Machala, it did not include a collage of an edited photo of the animal alongside Ursula von der Leyen.
Nor did he ask the rhetorical question “who is the bigger cow” there. Both things were added there after the fact.
Putin’s narratives about “Gay Europe”
The Buyan channel’s anti-European contributions fit into a broader narrative that the Kremlin systematically promotes.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his propaganda machine have long portrayed Europe as a symbol of moral and cultural decline.
They brand the political West and its values of liberal democracy and freedom in the Kremlin as something corrupt and contrast them with the supposed “traditional values” of Russia.
In order to popularize this narrative even more, the derogatory term Гейропа (translated as Gayrope). We can hear it both from Putin and his entourage.
The goal is to mobilize the domestic audience, divert attention from authoritarian politics and deepen the image of the Union as a hostile and ideologically degenerate space from which Putin will protect Russia.
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