A number of Russian Telegram channels have been sharing a caricature of French President Emmanuel Macron depicted as a rooster, claiming that it was broadcast by FRANCE 24 in a programme that aired on March 13. However, the image circulating is a doctored version of the cover of a French magazine called L'Hémicycle. The FRANCE 24 clip has also been doctored to include it.
Since news broke on February 16, 2024 that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny had died while incarcerated in the Russian Arctic, there has been a resurgence of doctored images and fake news aiming to discredit Navalny and his family. We took a look at three of the most widely spread fake news items about Navalny. None of them are true.
Pro-Russian social media users have been widely circulating what looks like a Euronews report showing French farmers dumping manure outside the Ukrainian embassy. French farmers began protesting for better pay in January and the video claims that the farmers took the drastic manure action after the Ukrainian ambassador penned a letter asking them to stop their protests. But this video is fake. It's one of a series of fake news reports aimed at making Ukraine look bad in the eyes of the West.
Does Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky actually have a secret talent for belly dancing? That's what a number of accounts on Twitter and TikTok are saying, with video to prove it. However, it turns out that the viral video is actually a deepfake that's been circulated by pro-Russian accounts in an attempt to discredit the Ukrainian president.
Mārtiņš Staķis did not promise to close the Mikhail Chekhov Russian Drama Theater in Riga.
The Russian media quotes a Kremlin protege of the people’s militia in the so-called “LPR” that women who have an education in chemistry, biology or veterinary medicine are allegedly being recruited for the war in Ukraine. The publication adds that in this way Ukraine is preparing for “provocations” with chemical weapons.
This is a fake. There is no convincing evidence that women are being recruited into the Armed Forces of Ukraine to prepare “provocations” with chemical weapons.
Russian media and Telegram channels are distributing a video in which Ukrainian soldiers allegedly stopped a woman with a child because she did not give way to them. As evidence, they provide a segment from the video recorder in the woman’s car. The soldiers then allegedly started yelling at the woman, cursing her, threatening her with guns and shooting in the air because she was speaking to them in Russian.
In fact, this video is staged, it was filmed in the occupied territory of the Donetsk region, where there are no Ukrainian troops.
An alleged announcement from the online service “Doc.ua” is being spread online that from March 1, 2023, the reception of donated blood will be carried out only when the donor is a “pure-blooded Ukrainian”. Foreign citizens are prohibited from being donors.
However, the service did not provide such announcements. In Ukraine, ethnicity is not included in the list of criteria for a potential blood donor.
A screenshot of the news, which was allegedly published on the Dialog.ua website, is being spread online. It says that Valerii Zaluzhnyi allegedly reported that the soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine began to create same-sex unions more often.
However, this is a fake. Zaluzhnyi did not make such statements, and there is no such publication on the Dialog.ua website.
The creators of the disinformation claiming Ukraine plotted to assassinate Tucker Carlson did not intend for it to be used inside Russia: they designed it specifically to target U.S. audiences. That is evident from the fact that no major Russian state-controlled news outlets reported the “breaking news” about the alleged plot despite their weeks-long fixation on every minor detail of Carlson’s visit to Moscow.
