Latest fact checks & sources

Disinformation is part and parcel of the approach to war as seen in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

How then can the well-oiled Russian machine produce such “low-cost” disinformation? “Simply because, for the moment, the Russian authorities do not need to do better.” […] What’s more, it’s not so much the quality as the quantity of disinformation that matters. “The goal is to create so many different – and sometimes even contradictory – versions of what is happening at the border that no one can really distinguish the true from the false anymore.”

A media specialised in putting the spotlight on Russian disinformation has highlighted a false flag attack in eastern Ukraine that pro-Russian media outlets were pinning on Kyiv. Corpses likely retrieved from a morgue were used to set the scene.

Reports of a sabotage near Horlivka are a provocation spread by the DPR and Russia. Via verifying the video metadata, we found out that it had been taken beforehand. A process of verifying on the Metadata2go resource showed that the video had been created on February 8, 2022. And the militants published it as an evidence of the sabotage on February 18. That is to say, that the provocation has been prepared earlier.

Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign did not report receiving any donations from the Ukrainian government or Ukrainian nationals. Those donations would have been illegal. A spokesperson for Marjorie Taylor Greene cited a 2015 Wall Street Journal graphic that has been frequently misrepresented online. The chart shows donations to the Clinton Foundation between 1999 and 2014 by the nationality of the individuals who made them; it does not say anything about donations to the foundation by foreign governments. The Clinton Foundation said it has never received donations from Ukraine’s government. Our ruling Greene said, “Ukraine was the No. 1 donor to Hillary Clinton when she was running for president.” Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign did not report any donations from Ukraine or Ukrainian nationals ‘ a move that would have broken the law. Asked for evidence to support Greene’s claim, the congresswoman’s spokesperson did not cite any campaign donations. He pointed instead to a Wall Street Journal chart that mapped large individual donations between 1999 and 2014 to the Clinton Foundation, a nonprofit organization. The chart was a ranking of the top foreign donors by nationality, not contributions from foreign governments. The Clinton Foundation said it has never received any funding from the Ukrainian government. We rate Greene’s statement False.

Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance said the State Department’s focus on transgender rights is inflaming the conflict with Russia in Ukraine. Russia has placed as many as 150,000 troops near Ukraine’s borders. Russia has said Ukraine’s ties to NATO are a key threat to Russia’s national security. Our ruling Vance said that Biden risks war with Russia because Putin doesn’t “believe in transgender rights.” There is a risk of war, but it is because of Russia’s focus on Ukraine’s ties to the west and the buildup of Russian forces along Ukraine’s border. The State Department noted the threats against transgender people as one issue among many in a report on human rights. It gave much more space to the danger posed by Russia’s military policies in its most recent annual threat assessment. The risk of war in Ukraine is not affected by Putin’s attitude toward transgender rights. We rate this claim Pants on Fire. Update: This story has been updated to include a response we received from the Vance campaign shortly after initial publication.

Historians cite upwards of a dozen examples dating back to the 1500s in which Russia or the Soviet Union attacked another country without being militarily attacked first. • Russia may offer various justifications for why it attacked another country in these instances, but each of these examples involved militarily unprovoked actions by Russia or the Soviet Union. Our ruling Peskov said, “Russia has never attacked anyone throughout its history.” Historians cite upwards of a dozen examples dating back to the 1500s in which Russia or the Soviet Union attacked another country without being militarily attacked first. Russia may offer various justifications for why it attacked another country in these instances, but contrary to Peskov’s statement, each of these examples did involve militarily unprovoked actions by Russia or the Soviet Union. We rate the statement Pants on Fire.

Vladimir Putin’s online followers love sharing videos or photos of the Russian president that play up his strongman image. But sometimes in doing so, they share fake and manipulated videos – which then go viral. The Truth or Fake team take a look at two examples.

Whether it’s on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, there are plenty of fake accounts. People using these accounts hide behind a fake avatar and incite debates or mock other users. Sometimes even the profile pictures are completely fabricated – they’re not real people. In this episode, the Truth or Fake team shows you how to spot these fake photos. [Ed. note: As of 2024, spammers can use AI to create profile pics that can’t be identified using this technique.]

Just like on any social media platform, there’s a lot of disinformation to be found on TikTok. But whereas Facebook and Twitter have flagged some accounts as potentially biased or untrustworthy, TikTok allows these videos to pop up in people’s feeds. This week, Truth or Fake takes a look at a video about Syria doing the rounds on TikTok.

It’s a heartwarming story: a Danish humanitarian worker, Anja Ringgren Loven, helped this starving child in 2016. The moment when she offered him water was captured on camera, and the picture went viral online.

Two pictures of a white, futuristic building in a forest went briefly viral in early April with the false claim that the building belonged to Russian president Vladimir Putin.

For this section, we will look at claims that come in form of images. The images could be distorted to misrepresent an issue. It could as well be an old image shared to depict a new reality but from a different context. Whichever form an image is presented on the internet you might be able to verify it with the aid of tools for image fact-checking such as are Google Reverse Image Search, Tin Eye, InVid, Yandex and so on.

March 18 marks the sixth anniversary of Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea. Attention now focuses on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in Donbas, a conflict that has taken some 14,000 lives, but Moscow’s seizure of Crimea – the biggest land-grab in Europe since World War II – has arguably done as much or more damage to Europe’s post-Cold War security order.

NATO enlargement has been at the heart of several heated security debates. Pundits and scholars alike have conflated several ‘promises’ not to extend NATO eastward. Much of their arguments draw from the Baker-Gorbachev and Kohl-Gorbachev discussions of the early nineties. There is only one little problem with this wonderful saga of so-called ‘promises’ – it’s just that, a saga, not a fact. Here’s what actually happened: there were two separate negotiations. One for German reunification in 1990 and a second, separate negotiation for the post-1991 opening of NATO. Conflating the two negotiations is an analytical mistake that leads to spurious conclusions.

Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major and Woerner

U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

It is abundantly evident that Russian President Vladimir Putin is no fan of NATO. Indeed, he displays a pronounced – almost obsessive – antipathy toward the Alliance. He claims that NATO took advantage of Russian weakness after the collapse of the Soviet Union to enlarge to its east, in violation of promises allegedly made to Moscow by Western leaders. But no such promises were made – a point now confirmed by someone who was definitely in a position to know: Mikhail Gorbachev, then president of the Soviet Union.

As the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall approached, Maxim Korshunov of RBTH sat down with Mikhail Gorbachev, the first and last president of the Soviet Union, to discuss the historic rapprochement between East and West and the prospects for a new Cold War.

On September 20, the official Twitter account of the Permanent Mission of Russia in Geneva published a photo entitled “Modern Ukraine. Human Rights on the Upgrade”, showing a building with Ukrainian and Nazi flags. However, this photo has been “wandering” around the Network under different titles for a long time. Let us recall that it was taken during the shooting of a movie in Kharkiv in 2011.