“StopFake News” is no Onion-style satire, but rather positions itself as serious public service journalism, identifying fake news and debunking it on the air. That is because Kiev, with its running battle with Moscow, was plagued by fake news long before concern over the problem spiked in Western Europe and the United States.

During the Ukraine crisis in 2014, manipulative and often outright invented news poured in from Russia on satellite television and websites and into sympathetic local newspapers.

Recurring themes emerged, becoming the talk at water coolers around the capital: An Islamic State training camp had opened in Ukraine; President Petro O. Poroshenko was a drunk and sometimes appeared inebriated in public; nationalists had taken to lynching or, in one infamous case, crucifying Russian-speaking children.

Ukraine banned some Russian television broadcasts, a practice that raised free speech objections, and yet the fake news still circulates online. “StopFake News” has chosen public debunking, not banning, as the best defense — and has shown it can become its own form of appealing entertainment.

StopFake, which is also the name of the organization that founded the newscast, began its work nearly three years before a report by American intelligence agencies into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election in the United States. And it predated by a year the European Union’s establishment of a department to identify and call out fake news plants from Russia. Facebook has recently hired fact checkers in the United States and Germany to flag false reports, not all of them Russian in origin.