New Zealand’s national broadcaster has launched an investigation and put an employee on leave after it said a series of stories on its website about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had been edited to present a “false account of events”, Reuters reported.

Government-funded but independently-edited Radio New Zealand (RNZ) had by Sunday corrected 15 articles on its website dating back to April 2022 due to what it called “inappropriate editing”.

RNZ’s corrections suggest that the editor altered the original reports to present pro-Russian interpretations of events in Ukraine as fact. 14 of these stories were provided by Reuters and one by BBC UK.

The RNZ statement states that a detailed review and analysis of all reports about the war in Ukraine, which may have been improperly edited, is currently underway.

RNZ is a Reuters media client. Neither Reuters nor the BBC responded to requests for comment.

A spokesman for New Zealand Broadcasting and Media Minister Willie Jackson said the minister had been briefed on the matter and would receive further information from officials on Monday.

RNZ said on Friday it had become aware of the issue, without providing further details, and had launched an “immediate investigation”. He added that the staff member has been placed on leave pending the review and is currently banned from RNZ’s IT systems.

On Saturday, RNZ chief executive Paul Thompson announced an external audit of RNZ’s editing processes, the results of which will be made public.

The case gained notoriety after a June 8 Reuters article on the use of the word “war” in Russia was amended. The article was edited on the RNZ website to convey information that in 2014 “an elected pro-Russian government was overthrown during the violent Maidan color revolution in Ukraine.” The article then inaccurately claimed

that “Russia annexed Crimea after the referendum because the new pro-Western government suppressed ethnic Russians in eastern and southern Ukraine.”

Pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in 2014 in what became known as the Maidan Revolution, after months of protests over his failure to fulfill his promise to forge closer ties with the European Union. Dozens of protesters were killed.

Kyiv and most Western governments considered the referendum on Crimea a milestone. Russia has also been accused of using false claims of repression of ethnic Russians to justify a declaration of independence in eastern Ukraine by pro-Russian separatist groups.

A corrected version on RNZ’s website restored the original wording from a Reuters source, which said “the conflict in eastern Ukraine began in 2014 after a pro-Russian president was overthrown in Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution and Russia annexed Crimea, separatist forces with the support of the Russians are fighting against the armed forces of Ukraine.”

A UN General Assembly resolution declared the Crimean referendum invalid, and the UN Human Rights Office said in 2014 that ethnic Russians in Ukraine had falsely claimed to have been attacked to justify Russian intervention.