Latest fact checks & sources

The VERIFY team analyzed two videos claiming to show an attack on Russian warship Moskva. Here is how we know those videos weren’t taken in 2022.

As Russian strikes pounded the besieged port city of Mariupol in Ukraine, Facebook posts shared in various languages claimed US General Roger L. Cloutier was captured by Russian forces there. However, NATO said the rumour was “completely false” and that Cloutier, who leads NATO’s Allied Land Command, had not been to Ukraine since July 2021. Cloutier was in Turkey when the false claims about his whereabouts circulated online.

A video claiming to be a BBC News report suggested Ukraine bombed one of its own train stations. The video was fake and did not come from BBC News.

As a number of other fact-checking organisations have made clear, there is no evidence that Soros and Zelenskyy are cousins or that a spokesperson from the DOD confirmed this. We could also find no evidence of any statement mentioning the two men in the DOD’s press releases or on its social media accounts.

The drones Russian media are claiming Ukrainian troops use to spray poisons are not combat drones, but rather DJI AGRAs T30 agricultural drones which are used in farmland management. According to the All Ukrainian Federation of Drone Owners, the drones in the video circulated by the Russian media belong to their client and they were stolen by the Russian military.

None of this is true. The video is a work of fiction and the people in it are actors. The video is related to war in Chechnya, but only because it’s a clip from The Search (2014), a war drama written and directed by French filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius. The Search is fiction, though set in a real war. But it’s worth pointing out that right at the beginning it specifically identifies the men who kill the man and woman as Russian soldiers. And the caption’s claim that “Ukrainian Nazis once upon a time invaded Chechnya” is incorrect.

Verdict: False The person who originally made the claim later said it was satirical. There is no evidence Winfrey announced the book’s removal.

Other countries have worse money laundering and human trafficking problems than Ukraine, according to experts and government reports. Now amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a post claiming Ukraine is the “money laundering and child sex trafficking capital of the world!” According to the State Department’s latest Trafficking in Persons report, Russia has a more serious problem with child sex trafficking than Ukraine. Both countries struggle with the issue, the report said, but Ukraine took action to address it between 2020 and 2021, while Russia failed to make “significant efforts” to eliminate the problem. While Ukraine convicted traffickers, increased financial assistance to victims, and launched awareness campaigns, Russia “convicted only one trafficker,” failed to “initiate any new prosecutions of suspected traffickers,” and “offered no funding or programs to provide services for trafficking victims.” Russia, not Ukraine, is among 11 governments the report says have “a documented ‘policy or pattern’ of human trafficking, trafficking in government-funded programs, forced labor in government-affiliated medical services or other sectors, sexual slavery in government camps, or employment or recruitment of child soldiers. The report also ranks countries based on the extent of government efforts to meet minimum standards for the elimination of human trafficking. Tier 1, the United States’ ranking, is the highest, but it doesn’t mean the country has no human trafficking problems. Rather, it means the country fully meets minimum standards to eliminate trafficking. Tier 2 ‘ Ukraine’s tier ‘ means a country’s government doesn’t fully meet the minimum standards but is making significant efforts to bring itself into compliance. Tier 3 includes countries such as Afghanistan and Russia that don’t meet the minimum standards and aren’t trying to. We rate this post False.

Josep Borrell is proposing tougher sanctions to pressure Russia to stop its war crimes in Ukraine. He sees increased weapons supplies to Ukraine as a way of helping Kyiv protect its territory and its people from Russian army attacks and notes that Ukraine will definitely prevail.

Contrary to Russian disinformation reports, the Ukrainian military did not blow up a nitric acid tank in Rubizhne, Luhansk province on April 9. According to Luhansk regional governor Serhiy Haidai, Russian troops had already twice blown up a nitric acid tank in Rubizhne. Blowing up its own chemical storage facility does not give the Ukrainian military any tactical advantage. The Ukrainian army has no plans to abandon its positions and leave Rubizhne.

Slovakia has refuted Russian claims that S-300 air defense systems it supplied to Ukraine were destroyed.

Amnesty International and many international organizations as well as representatives from various countries have expressed the need to investigate war crimes in the Kyiv region committed by Russian troops. Hundreds of journalists from all over the world and EU representatives have visited the towns where the atrocities were committed, international human rights activists, foreign forensics experts and representatives of the International Criminal Court are all collecting evidence of crimes committed.

Ukraine is not compromising its territorial integrity and sovereignty. The first billion hryvni of financial assistance released for the regions liberated from Russian occupation does not include the Kharkiv region because intensive hostilities are continuing in this northeastern part of Ukraine’s territory. Part of the Kharkiv region is still under Russian occupation. Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said that after all Ukrainian lands currently occupied by Russian troops are liberated, reconstruction work will begin immediately.

During a Russia-24 news segment, broadcasters claimed Ukraine was using mannequins to exaggerate the civilian death toll. The clip they shared is from a TV show set.

Therefore, the Kremlin’s claim that they presented a set of evidence to the UN which proves Ukraine’s crimes in Bucha is fake. That which the Russian Ambassador presented at a special press conference and the UN Security Council are impossible to be considered as “evidence.” Most of them are easily verifiable false claims and the rest is absurd allegations which are not considered as evidence in any format.

A serial number is not proof that the Tochka U missile fired on the Kramatorsk train station belongs to the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Other objective evidence indicates that the strike was carried out from territory controlled by Russian Federation troops.

A report by the Digital Forensics Research Lab (DFRLab) has accused Yandex of succumbing to Russia’s domestic regulations by suppressing Ukraine war information for its users in Russia.

The aforementioned posts voiced the assertion that no corpses can be found in the video published by the National Police of Ukraine. In fact, two bodies do appear in the selected shots of the video. […] Notably, the account “Find the truth” does not publish the full version of the video. In the post, the scene showing the first body has been cropped out.

Thousands of social media users shared a made-up quote in which Tucker Carlson appeared to question the authenticity of images from Bucha, Ukraine.

Bodies everywhere: on the roads, on the side of the road, and in makeshift mass graves. That’s how you can describe photos and videos from the Ukrainian town of Bucha, located very close to Kyiv. The images were seen by people around the world and shocked many. Russia, which was in control of the town, is trying to prove that its troops had nothing to do with it. They use the usual disinformation tactics: they launch several false theses at once in order to confuse everyone as much as possible. Euroradio refutes Russian propagandists’ fakes about the massacre in Bucha.