A viral post on Facebook claims to show a convoy of NATO military advisers being destroyed by Russian missiles. While many users believe that the images represent actual fighting, they were actually taken from a war video game series called Arma 3. We tell you more in this edition of Truth or Fake.
Pro-Russian social media accounts have been widely circulating a video over the past few weeks that shows a man dressed as a Ukrainian soldier acting out a scene in front of a camera. These accounts have claimed this video is proof that people are staging scenes of the war in Ukraine. Turns out, however, the video was filmed during the shooting of a music video by a Ukrainian artist whose music represents the "pain of war".
This photo was altered. In the original, Zelenskyy is holding a jersey that has the number 95, not a swastika.
The original image was distributed by the Ukrainian Presidential Press Service in June 2021. According to a caption on Agence France-Presse's website, it shows him "posing with a jersey of Ukraine's national football team."
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has pushed the idea that the effort is one of "denazification," a narrative historians have decried as "false and destructive."
We rate claims Zelenskyy was holding a jersey with a swastika False.
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, repeated false claims have appeared on social media alleging that the entire conflict is being staged. FRANCE 24's fact-checking team debunk the latest example: two videos that show a man in Ukrainian army uniform being filmed, as he appears to act out a scene on the battlefield.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The explosion on the Kerch bridge to Crimea triggered many theories online regarding who or what caused the explosion. Was it a boat, a missile or a truck? We tell you more in this edition of Truth or Fake.
After Moscow announced in September 2022 that it would call up some 300,000 reservists to fight in Ukraine, a video was viewed tens of thousands of times in social media posts that claim it shows a suicide bombing in Russia that targeted a recruitment officer. The claim, however, is false. While there were protests against the "partial" mobilisation in Russia, this video has circulated since at least 2021 in reports about a bombing in Syria.