The bloody and terrible war in Ukraine has been accompanied by a war of words. One of the more frequent words heard in the Russian media is vranyo, which means a“lie”. The Russian government and media ...

“Vranyo” is a Russian word for a specific type of lying. “I once translated it for one of our ministers as ‘epic, bare-faced whopper that we both know cannot possibly be true, but I’m going to tell ...

It seems to be the season of upsets, with underdogs pummelling Goliaths. While this may suggest shock defeats at the FIFA World Cup, I refer to Russian retrograde moves in the Ukraine war, ...

So vranyo starts with lozh, the negation of truth, and goes from there. Vranyo is not about the proposition itself – it focuses attention on the lie-tellers and why they are lying. As one wag put it ...