A bestselling author came under fire Wednesday after the Russian edition of his book on disinformation and “fake news” scrapped all references to lies President Vladimir Putin has told.

The Russian-language version of Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari’s “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” replaced a paragraph criticizing Putin’s portrayal of the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea with one about President Trump, according to The Times UK.

The English-language version described Putin’s statements about the arrival of Russian forces bearing no insignia in Crimea as an example of “a new and frightening era of ‘post-truth.’ ”

“The Russian government and President Vladimir Putin in person repeatedly denied that these were Russian troops and described them as spontaneous ‘self-defence groups’ that may have acquired Russian-looking equipment from local shops,” the book states. “As they voiced this rather preposterous claim, Putin and his aides knew perfectly well that they were lying.”

But in the Russian version published last month, that paragraph is replaced with one about Trump.

It reads: ““According to The Washington Post, President Trump has made more than 6,000 false claims publicly since his inauguration. In one speech he gave in May of 2018, 76 per cent of Trump’s 98 assertions were false, misleading, or entirely unfounded.”

The new paragraph also says that Trump brands the media as liars who spread “fake news.”

Another chapter in the English version refers to the “Russian conquest of Crimea” — but the Russian edition calls the annexation “the joining of Crimea to Russia.”

“Russia itself does not consider the annexation of Crimea an invasion of a foreign country,” the Russian-language edition also notes.

Leonid Bershidsky, the founding editor of the Russian newspaper Vedomosti, blasted Harari as a coward and accused him of “craven self-censorship.”

“It’s rather post-truth to teach the residents of dictatorships about post-truth only using examples from other countries,” he wrote in an op-ed for Bloomberg Wednesday.

The popular author defended himself in a piece for Newsweek, explaining that his book would have been banned from being published in Russia if the changes hadn’t been made.

“The main consideration was to reach Russian readers with messages about the dangers of dictatorship, extreme nationalism and religious intolerance,” he wrote.

“Some will no doubt disagree, but I think that as long as local adaptations of books are done in the form of altering specific examples rather than core ideas, they are worth the price.”