A pharmacy in the city of Berehove with signs in Hungarian and Ukrainian. Anton Skyba

The region’s population of 1.3 million is a mixture of all the bordering nationalities, plus Ukrainians, Russians, Ruthenians and a large population of Roma. In the regional capital’s squares and cobblestoned streets, it’s as common to hear Hungarian as it is Russian or Ukrainian. Bilingual signs can be found across the region, particularly in areas where there is a heavy concentration of one group.

Some in the region say that through a campaign of embellished and often outright fabricated news reports, the Kremlin has tried to paint a picture of frustration and distress among Ukraine’s minority groups living under an unsympathetic far-right nationalist government in Kiev.

The most recent example of this is a mid-March report aired on a popular Kremlin-owned channel claiming that some 10,000 Ruthenians, an eastern Slavic people with a large concentration in Transcarpathia, convened a congress and were demanding autonomy.

Prokup, a Ruthenian and the director of a local Ruthenian choir, Babchyna Spivanka, never heard of the meeting. Nor had the de facto leader of the Ruthenian community, Yevhan Zhupan, until he received a frantic phone call from a friend the night of the report.

Prokup and Zhupan said there was no meeting of thousands of members of the close-knit Ruthenian community in March and no call for autonomy. The report was simply made up, just as a similar one was the year before, Zhupan said.

“This wasn’t the first provocation from Russia in our region,” said Zhupan, the head of the Carpatho-Rusyns People’s Council, an umbrella organization representing more than 90 percent of the Ruthenian cultural and advocacy groups in this mountainous enclave. “It was only the latest one, and I’m afraid it won’t be the last.”

The reports are a familiar tactic used by the Kremlin-controlled media and social media trolls. Kiev and the West have accused Moscow of using information warfare to fuel the separatist movement, first in Crimea and then in eastern Ukraine.

“The strategy is to show that there is a lot of unhappiness in Ukraine and to show the Ukrainian authorities are incapable,” said Margo Gontar, the editor and a co-founder of StopFake.com, a fact-checking project developed last year that aims to counter Russian propaganda. “If everything appears to be falling apart, an impression is created that Ukraine is not really a working state.”

In Transcarpathia, most people seem to have dismissed the provocative reports.

“Less than 1 percent of the population paid any attention to such stories,” said Volodymyr Chubirko, a Ruthenian and the head of the Transcarpathia regional council. “We don’t need outside players interfering in our internal affairs. Nobody is interested in a situation like they have in Donetsk or Luhansk now.”

The conflict in the east has claimed more than 6,000 lives and destroyed much of the industrial region’s infrastructure and economy. A fragile cease-fire is barely holding.

Like the rest of the country, Transcarpathia has felt the effects of the war, raging some 900 miles away. Thousands of young men have been mobilized to serve in Kiev’s forces against the separatists. The draft has not always been popular among the region’s minorities.