Did Vladimir Putin recently go to South Africa, defying the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court? That's the claim made by at least two videos that have been shared thousands of times on TikTok and Facebook since late March. This footage, however, is old and doesn't in any way prove that Putin has recently travelled to South Africa.
Lights, camera, action! A viral video of soldiers falling to the ground from explosions - with cameras present - has fuelled accusations the war in Ukraine is staged. But it's simply behind-the-scenes footage of a Ukrainian short film. We spoke exclusively to the producer and director in this edition of Truth or Fake with Vedika Bahl.
A cache of documents that first appeared on the Discord server "Thug Shaker Central" appeared to contain genuine intelligence files.
Verdict: False
The claim is based on an altered document. The original document shows that the United States allegedly estimated Ukraine has suffered around 15,500 to 17,000 deaths, not 71,000.
A recent Facebook post suggests that the video featured in it shows footage of the war in Ukraine but the video in question is from a video game.
Searching for the post's video description turns up a YouTube post from about a year earlier. It has the same description, but identifies the video as being from "Arma 3," a military simulation game.
We rate claims that this clip shows real footage from the war in Ukraine False.
In Ukraine, fake news continues to fuel the information war. In recent days, a video purporting to show a Ukrainian Orthodox church on fire has appeared on social media, with captions accusing "radical Ukrainians" of arson. The claims fit neatly into a Russian narrative that accuses Ukrainians of persecuting followers of the Moscow Patriarchate wing of the Church. But as we explain in this edition, the video is bogus.
There is no such law draft on the Ukrainian parliament's website, nor is there any information about this initiative. The screenshot of the Ukrinform website is fake, as the informational agency did not publish this news either.
Did Ukrainians really set a Russian Orthodox church on fire? A video purporting to show just that has been circulating online since April 5, 2023. However, it turns out that this video was filmed in Russia more than ten years ago and shows an accidental fire.
The Russian Embassy in Kenya shared an image on Twitter on April 6 showing an exhausted-looking Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who has been incarcerated in the United Kingdom since 2019. However, it turns out that one of his supporters generated the image using artificial intelligence.
A video circulating online shows the filming of the short feature film 'Hope'. The behind-the-scenes videos were taken from the TikTok account of the director Artem Kocharyan, who currently lives in Latvia. The film is based on the real story of his Ukraine acquaintance - a pregnant girl who lost her family due to the Russian aggression.