Following Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's virtual meeting with US Congress, social media posts shared hundreds of times claimed he was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a "Nazi symbol". In fact, the symbol represents the Ukrainian military, according to an image comparison. A representative for the Ukrainian embassy in Thailand said it did not relate to Nazism.
A TikTok video of a man smoking a cigarette in what appears to be a truck full of body bags has been viewed thousands of times in Facebook posts suggesting that deaths are being staged in the war in Ukraine. The claim is false; the clip shows the behind-the-scenes making of a music video for a song released by Russian rapper Husky in September 2020.
The soldiers seen in the video don't appear to be wearing Russian uniforms, an expert on land warfare said.
The uniforms appear to match those worn by soldiers in the Kenya Defence Forces.
A longer version of the video says the soldiers are members of the Kenyan military.
Our ruling
A video claimed to show Russian soldiers fleeing for safety after failing to fire a rocket-propelled grenade.
One expert told us the soldiers in the video don't appear to be Russian, based on their uniforms and lack of armbands. The uniforms do not seem to match ones in photos we found of Russian soldiers.
The uniforms appear to match those worn by the military in Kenya, based on images and a longer version of the video found on YouTube. We rate this claim False.
Yes, the U.N. General Assembly can expel a member country, but it's never happened. Russia's removal from the U.N. is unlikely, experts say.
A number of viral posts on social media have claimed that a Canadian sniper, dubbed "the world's deadliest sniper", was killed within hours of arriving in Mariupol, Ukraine, where he had gone to fight. However the man, nicknamed Wali, is still alive and well. He told the FRANCE 24 Observers team that he thinks the disinformation around his death serves to dissuade foreign fighters from going to Ukraine.
Multiple social media posts purport to show a photo of a Ukrainian farmer stealing a Russian rocket. However, the image has been doctored. The original photo was taken by NASA in 2018 and shows a rocket towed by a train, not a tractor.
A video of soldiers jumping out of a plane with parachutes has been shared tens of thousands of times on Facebook in South Africa alongside a claim that it shows US paratroopers joining the war in Ukraine. But this is false: the footage, which has been viewed millions of times, has been online since at least 2016 and features US soldiers performing parachute drills at the Pope Army Airfield in North Carolina.
The aftermath of the attack on a maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, was captured on video and in photos showing that it was an actual attack.
A Pentagon spokesperson called OAN host Pearson Sharp's claims "ridiculous." Several independent experts who spoke to PolitiFact agreed that it was completely without merit. Russian officials have conceded the attack occurred.
Our ruling
Sharp said the attack on the Mariupol hospital had "the makings of yet another false flag operation" by the U.S.
There is no evidence that the attack was staged or a false flag carried out by the U.S. Its aftermath was documented by workers, witnesses and journalists on the ground.
We rate OAN's claim Pants on Fire!
Russia has leaned on claims that Ukraine has killed Russian speakers in the country and that Russians are the targets of genocide there, but there's no evidence to support that.
Ukraine appealed to the U.N.'s International Court of Justice in the Hague to rule on the Russian government's claims of genocide "in the Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts of Ukraine," calling them false. The court ruled 13-2 on March 16 that the Kremlin's justification for the war was unjustified and ordered Russia to stop its invasion. Judges from Russia and China were the two dissenting votes.
We rate this post False.
Several videos and photos are circulating online, lending credibility to Russian claims of a serious neo-Nazi problem in Ukraine. The problem here though is that the images and videos are a distortion of reality and, in some cases, completely fictional. We take a closer look in this edition of Truth or Fake.