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.
Russian media are circulating a video purporting to show the torching of an
Orthodox Church belonging to the Moscow Patriarchate in the Mykolaiv region
by Ukrainian "radicals". The video was actually taken in Russia ten years
ago, in 2013.
Miscaptioned.
Context: The video being shared was posted on YouTube around 10 years ago and is reportedly of a church being burned in Russia.
Russian media are disseminating a video claiming it shows a Ukrainian
soldier shooting at a car with a woman and child inside because the woman
was speaking Russian. This poorly staged video was shot in Russian occupied
Ukraine near Donetsk. The alleged Russian speaking woman and child are
never seen, the location of the alleged incident is a spot where Ukrainian
military simply could not be present, all and the cross painted on the back
of the alleged Ukrainian military vehicle - a symbol that has never been
used by the Ukrainian military, all point to the the video being yet
another Russian fake.
An air raid alert signaling an enemy drone detected near Kyiv sounded, and the drone was subsequently shot down by Ukrainian air defense.
StopFake located the video being circulated in Russian media claiming to show children being sent to the front. The video turned out to be of an adult Ukrainian National guard serviceman.
Videos purporting to show the Ukrainian army making or using chemical weapons keep surfacing on pro-Russian accounts. We debunk two of them in this edition of Truth or Fake.
The war in Ukraine has been accompanied by a ferocious battle of disinformation, waged in particular by pro-Russian agitators seeking to distort and shift the blame for many atrocities on the ground. They have sought to depict the Ukrainian side as Nazis or suggest that Western support for Kyiv is evaporating. Here are some of the main narratives, false or misleading, that have been fact-checked over the past year by AFP's digital verification teams.
On February 24, 2022, Russia began a full-scale invasion into Ukraine, triggering a war on the ground, but also an information war online. Since then, the FRANCE 24 Observers team has debunked 115 pieces of misinformation that have been shared in photos or videos online. But what are the main themes in these false narratives? And what techniques are used to misinform? Here's a look back at this year in fake news.
An audio recording is being circulated online as "evidence" of Ukrainian
"sabotage", however the recording first surfaced online at least in 2018
when it was widely circulated in Kazakhstan.