"On July 11, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov criticized Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda’s proposal to establish permanent military NATO bases near the Russian border, claiming that Russia never moved its military infrastructure westward.
That is false.
Below is a brief catalog of Russian military progress in Europe."
There is no evidence that any weapons provided to Ukraine by Western
partners were used during the recent protests in France.
On June 28, 2023, a Russian missile hit a crowded restaurant in the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk. 13 people died in this attack, including at least 3 children and a leading Ukrainian poet and author (as of July 3).
As with pretty much every major strike on civilians, to add insult to injury, false stories immediately began being circulated by pro-Russian influencers online.
A TikTok video shared thousands of times claims to show President Emmanuel Macron apologising to France's former African colonies and pledging reparations during a UN speech in New York in April 2023. But the claim is false: AFP Fact Check traced the footage of the address to a speech from last September and found that the original English translation was replaced with a fake voiceover. Macron did not discuss Africa but talked about the Russian-Ukrainian invasion.
Sick: BBC's fact-checking team have traced false claims of "baby factories" in Ukraine back to a notorious online hoax factory.
"Who would possibly lie about something like that?" you might reasonably ask yourself. Depressingly, we have the answer to that question.
The Anti-Defamation League explains the historical context and background of the "blood libel" - a common lie used to incite mass violence against Jews throughout the Middle Ages and well into modern times. The blood libel in its modern incarnations still exists and holds sway over many today.
A false rumor on Twitter has been traced by the BBC back to pro-Kremlin propaganda channels.
The deliberately misleading Twitter post falsely claims that weapons possibly among those sent to Ukraine were used against police in the recent riots in France (summer 2023). The attached image shows a fabricated “screenshot” of a non-existent news article.
BBC News debunks several disinformation narratives making the rounds on Twitter - amplified in particular by paid "blue check" accounts:
- Weapons for Ukraine not used in French riots
- No evidence of 'baby factories' in Ukraine
- Kramatorsk missile not Ukrainian
- Zelensky has not cancelled elections
So far Newsweek has been unable to find any evidence to support the "meat cube" claims.
According to local reports, the images of slabs of meat packed in between wooden craters show leftovers of expired animal feed in Russia's Belgorod region, not the bodies of Russian soldiers.
There's been much anti-Ukraine and anti-Zelensky propaganda circulating online since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But a new billboard has just appeared name-dropping Ukraine's leader on New York's Fifth Avenue above a busy flagship store. Many factors point to the video being manipulated. Vedika Bahl explains in this edition of Truth or Fake.