A poet celebrated in Russia for glorifying the war in Ukraine has been revealed as the creation of an exiled anti-Putin journalist – and his works as translated poems from Nazi Germany.

Starting in mid-2023, 18 poems appeared on the Kremlin’s version of Facebook in the name of “Gennady Rakitin”, saluting the heroic sacrifices of Russian soldiers and the noble leadership of Vladimir Putin.

One of these, titled On Holy Night, described “whispering to a dear son for the last time and dying for our peaceful Donbas”. It has now been revealed as a tweaked translation of a poem written to inspire Nazi soldiers towards the end of the Second World War.

Another, The Leader, was published next to a photograph of Putin sitting on a thicket of shrubs. It described the Russian president as a “gardener” reaping the “fruits of hard labour” who is loved by his people and whose “immortality is rising”.

But this was not a new poem inspired by Putin’s invasion, it was a translation of a 1938 verse about Adolf Hitler written by Eberhard Moeller – an anti-Semite and Nazi propagandist – and Rakitin, its “author”, did not exist.

Exiled journalist

Kremlin officials did not spot the ruse and instead lapped up the fake poetry, said Andrey Zakharov, the exiled Russian investigative journalist who invented Rakitin.

“All these worthy people appreciated the patriotic position of the fake Rakitin,” he said on Friday after finally revealing his invention to Rakitin’s fans.

Mr Zakharov, best known for exposing a Kremlin troll factory in St Petersburg, said 100 Russian MPs, 30 Senators and dozens of other Kremlin apparatchiks became Rakitin’s “friends” on the VKontakte social network.  

These included Elena Yampolskaya, Putin’s cultural adviser, and Dmitry Rogozin, a Russian senator who often posts photographs of himself posing in military uniform in occupied Donbas.