Phoenix Magazine Peddles Putin’s Propaganda

No fact checking at exposers of hypocrisy HQ

The Phoenix Magazine is an Irish fortnightly current affairs magazine that claims to be “Ireland’s leading investigative and satirical publication”. It’s available in print and online. It’s been going since 1983 and has been in steady decline since the Noughties. It had an ABC-audited circulation of 19,014 for 2004 and 18,268 in 2007. As of 2018, the figure was just below 12,000. Basically, the only people who read it are people who have more than a passing interest in Irish politics.

Let’s talk about The Phoenix Magazine's latest masterpiece: a breathless, wide-eyed retelling of a ludicrous fake news story, which, if you squint at just the right angle, it might pass for reporting—that’s if you’ve recently suffered a concussion and then drank 10 pints of Guinness (which I wouldn't recommend). The piece reads like it was dictated over a crackling phone line from the Russian Ministry of Propaganda, translated via Google, and then lightly dusted with a sprinkle of “analysis” to give it that authentic, we’re-not-complete-Putin-patsies flavour.

The Phoenix reported in its latest edition and took aim at traditional media.

HOW STRANGE that, despite their copious coverage of the war in Ukraine, RTÉ and the major Irish media – print and broadcast – haven’t bothered to mention the most revealing Ukrainian war story of the year so far: that Russian special forces recently captured two senior British Army officers, colonels Edward Blake and Richard Carroll, in an attack behind Ukrainian lines in the conflict zone in the coastal city of Ochakov.

At a press briefing last week by the Russian foreign affairs ministry, it was claimed that the two colonels were actively engaged in directing combat operations and had in their possession documents relating to the planning and implementation of such operations.

The capture of the two officers caused consternation in Britain’s Ministry of Defence (MoD), which at first denied the soldiers were even in Ukraine, until the dastardly Russians produced photographic evidence of them in custody.

But none of it is true.

The story centres around a claim that two British Army officers were captured by Russian special forces in Ukraine, which circulated online this week, drawing attention on social media, Eastern European fringe platforms, and of course, the once venerable Phoenix Magazine.

The initial report was published on the 4th of August by EADaily. These Kremlin-approved scribes breathlessly reported that two British colonels—Edward Blake and Richard Carroll- had been nabbed by Russian special forces on a “covert mission” inside Ukraine. The story cited an obscure Norwegian website with a long history of publishing anti-Western conspiracy theories.

According to EADaily, that bastion of Kremlin truth-telling (where facts are optional but loyalty is mandatory), Russian authorities have produced irrefutable proof of the captured British officers’ identities. And by irrefutable proof, they mean they said they have proof, which is basically the same thing in a country where “trust us” counts as due process. Naturally, none of this alleged evidence has been shown to the public—because why bother with pesky things like transparency when you can just assert something and wait for the world to believe you. But fear not, dear reader! The article did include a single photograph of the two men in uniform—presumably taken right before they were whisked away to a Moscow detention centre to be tortured mercilessly. (Probably be forced to listen to Chay Bowes over and over).

The single photo below!

Do you notice anything about the picture? Yes, their passports appear to be levitating. That’s some serious James Bond stuff going on there, except, upon closer inspection, the text on the passports is illegible, the kind of gibberish you’d expect if you asked ChatGPT to “write British passport text, but in Cyrillic, after three shots of vodka.” And let’s not ignore the clipboard floating in the centre. The columns and rows look official—if by official you mean "random squiggles arranged by a monkey with a ruler." There’s no actual data, just the vague impression of data. This, my friends, is the cutting edge of Russian disinformation: AI-generated incompetence. They’ve mastered the art of making something look real—right up until the moment you think about it. And then, like a mirage in the desert, it dissolves into the digital void, leaving behind only laughter and a lingering question: Do they think we’re this stupid? Could the Phoenix be that stupid?

What the Phoenix Magazine has done is not journalism. It is not even competent propaganda. It is the intellectual equivalent of giving a small child a loaded gun. Here’s the unforgivable part: every single fact disproving their story was already publicly available. A five-minute search would have revealed that the claim had been dismantled by reputable fact-checkers and journalists, traced directly back via Russia’s notorious disinformation pipeline. Even Twitter’s most unhinged conspiracy theorists had moved on from this nonsense.

The Phoenix didn’t just repeat the lie. They polished it, packaged it, and presented it as a legitimate inquiry, like a used-car salesman insisting a rusted-out Lada is “vintage European engineering.” Were they lazy? Malicious? Or just so ideologically blinkered that they’d rather swallow Russian state-sponsored fiction than admit their preferred geopolitical narrative is built on quicksand?

Who Does This Serve? (Spoiler Alert: Not You)

Ask yourself:

• Why does The Phoenix keep platforming narratives that align perfectly with Russia’s talking points?

• Why do their “scoops” always seem to mirror the phrasing of Russia’s disinformation pipeline?

• And why do they treat debunked propaganda as if it’s some brave contrarian truth?

The answer is simple: They’re middlemen in a disinformation supply chain, laundering bad-faith narratives for an audience they clearly despise. Dripping with faux-concern, as if publishing regime-approved agitprop is some brave act of dissent, rather than the intellectual equivalent of licking boots for a byline.

The Final Indictment: A Publication That No Longer Deserves Its Name

At this point, The Phoenix has two paths:

1. A walk-back—retract the piece, pretend to fire the person who was responsible for the article being published.

2. Full mask-off—rebrand as The Putin Phoenix Fan-Club forthnightly and be done with the pretence.

Either way, they can either try to crawl back to credibility—or stop pretending they ever cared about it in the first place.

Here’s what the Russian state-sponsored News outlet reported.

Here’s what the Phoenix Magazine reported.

Spot anything?