
Fact check: ‘Staging’ of air attack victims in Kyiv?
After the rockets comes the propaganda - pro-Russian voices have claimed that wounded people in Kyiv were just actors staging their suffering. But a DW fact check shows that the victims are real.

After the rockets comes the propaganda - pro-Russian voices have claimed that wounded people in Kyiv were just actors staging their suffering. But a DW fact check shows that the victims are real.

Pro-Russian accounts claim that Ukrainian "propaganda" and mainstream Western media are showing fake victims, following a Russian missile strike in Kyiv on October 10. AP and Reuters reporters on the scene were able to confirm that the civilians in the viral posts are real victims of the war in Ukraine. We tell you more in this edition of Truth or Fake.

A screenshot of a Gettr post critical of U.S. foreign aid to Ukraine has been attributed to Kid Rock, but it originated on a fan account.
We couldn't find a Gettr account for Kid Rock, and it's not listed among the social media accounts on his website. Kid Rock's website links to his YouTube account and his verified Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts.
We've previously debunked claims that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy owns a $35 million home in Florida. We couldn't find any credible sources to corroborate the claim in this Gettr post, either.
As for the claim that Kid Rock authored it, we rate that False.

Germans have not been chopping down trees in Tiergarten, Berlin, to meet energy needs. The claim is a misquote from a Bloomberg article about firewood demand.
While the article mentions that residents in the German capital did resort to felling parts of the park after the Second World War, the article clearly states that no such thing has happened today following Russia's shutdown of gas supplies to Europe.
The misquote, however, has been widely shared by pro-Russian accounts to support their narrative about the energy crisis in Europe.

A truck, a boat and an ID card - the search for clues after the Crimea bridge explosion is mired with fakes. One particularly clumsy deception comes from the Russian secret service, as our fact check shows.

Pro-Russian social media accounts have been circulating photos and a video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky standing in front of a green screen, claiming that this image offers proof that the videos that he publishes on social media are filmed in a studio and not on the ground as claimed. However, these pictures don"t prove anything of the sort - they were taken during a forum where the president appeared as a hologram.

Screenshots of a BBC news report shared on social media purport to show a journalist exaggerating the danger of a Russian attack on Irpin, Ukraine. This is misleading; the reporter has refuted the claim, and the posts ignore the shelling that took place in the area where the footage was filmed.

No, a viral dashcam video doesn't show the Crimean Bridge explosion. The video was first posted months before the explosion took place and is a compilation of multiple videos.

An image of Kim Jong Un has been shared repeatedly in posts that claim the North Korean leader visited Moscow as Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered a speech in September 2022. Some posts written in Korean also claim South Korean media ignored Kim's visit. But the claim -- which circulated as Russia pushed on with its war in neighbouring Ukraine -- is false. The posts show Kim's visit to the Russian port city of Vladivostok in April 2019 for a summit with Putin.

General Valery Zaluzhny, commander-in-chief of Ukraine's armed forces, recently posted a photo of himself on Twitter allegedly wearing a bracelet with a swastika. In fact, what appears to be a swastika is actually a Viking symbol. We tell you more in this edition of Truth or Fake.