Is it true that Serbian students proposed naming a black hole after Vladimir Zelensky?

At the end of November 2022, media and Telegram channels reported that students at the University of Belgrade took the initiative to name one of the astronomical objects in honor of the President of Ukraine. We have verified the accuracy of such messages.

November 29 "Arguments and facts", RIA FAN, "Red Spring", "Political expert", SM News and other media reported that students from Serbia allegedly proposed naming a black hole after Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and even created a petition in support of their initiative on the popular website Change.org. However, after the petition received 30,000 signatures, the portal administration deleted it. “The Serbs are not giving up and are going to ensure that the cosmic body bears the name of the earthly “body” that devours everything around it,” note the authors of notes on this topic.

On Telegram, this news was reported, among others, by the channels “Ostashko! Important"(342,000 subscribers at the time of writing this analysis), Putin TG Team (312,000), "Uncle Slava" (183,000) and "Tsargrad-TV"(104,000). Users also spoke about the initiative that appeared in Serbia Facebook*, Twitter, "VKontakte" And YouTube.

The materials published on media websites do not contain any details about the initiative allegedly proposed in Serbia. The authors of the notes do not report which university students performed it, what their names are, or which black hole they propose to name in honor of Vladimir Zelensky. There are no links or screenshots in these publications to a petition on Change.org, allegedly created to support this idea. More importantly, we were unable to find similar reports in major Serbian and international media.

As the authors of publications in a number of publications indicate, the source of information for them was recording in the Telegram channel “Ukraina.ru” (185,000 subscribers). As evidence, attached to it, as well as to other posts about this story, is a video recording just over a minute long, which outlines the essence of the Serbian students’ proposal. Moreover, all information is given in the form of text in English, while audio accompaniment is limited to background music.

This video claims that the initiative belongs to a group of students who study at the Faculty of Physics of the University of Belgrade. We learn from a student named Radoje Markovic that the Change.org petition has received a great response. He says that he considers the removal of the petition unfair and intends, together with like-minded people, to bring his idea to completion.

In the upper left corner of the video is the logo of the German broadcasting company Deutsche Welle**. In general, the video is made in the style of publications that DW places on YouTube in shorts format - short vertical videos that can be watched without sound, focusing only on the explanatory text added during editing. The video, which was published by Ukraina.ru and other Telegram channels, uses the same font and other design elements characteristic of DW, as well as a closing screensaver with the slogan Made for minds.

However, the video, which Telegram channels relied on in their posts, contains many suspicious errors and inaccuracies:

• the video uses the phrase space object - this is a tracing paper from the Russian language, which Google Translate offers when you enter the phrase “space object”; correct translation - astronomical object (literally “astronomical object”);
• This is far from the only detail indicating the likely use of an online translator when writing text: for example, in English you cannot say to create a petition (“create a petition”), in this phrase dictionaries recommend use the verbs to start, to launch or to organize;
• in the credits, articles are omitted in several places, verbs are used in the wrong tense, as well as informal expressions uncharacteristic for the media;
• Faculty of Physics at the University of Belgrade indeed exists, however, the authors of the video missed one letter in its title (not Faculty of Physics, but Faculty of Physics).

Finally, the video allegedly published by Deutsche Welle contains inaccuracies that are not typical for this media. Firstly, the authors of its English version write verbs like immortalize (“perpetuate”) or recognize (“recognize”) precisely through z, while the spelling used in the video is through s typical for British media and British spelling in general. Secondly, DW, like many others German media, when mentioning the President of Ukraine, use the transliteration of his name from the Ukrainian language - Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and in a viral video that became the basis for news from several media outlets, the Ukrainian leader was called Vladimir Zelenski.

Moreover, we were unable to find this video on any YouTube, neither in Instagram*, where journalists also post vertically oriented short reports. But on the DW Documentary channel we found video, which, as stated in the viral video, depicts proactive Serbian students led by Radoje Markovic. But in reality it was filmed back in 2017 and dedicated to schoolchildren from the German city of Cottbus. They teamed up to protect their classmate from Afghanistan - his application for asylum in Germany was not granted, and the young man was facing deportation. The young man's name is Vali Yousafzai, and it was he who was passed off as Radoje Markovic from the University of Belgrade in the viral video.

The viral video, where schoolchildren from Cottbus are passed off as students from Belgrade, is not the first time that Russian media and Telegram channels have compared Vladimir Zelensky to a black hole, and attributed the idea of ​​such a comparison to foreigners. Previously, “Verified” already examined false reports about how the American TV channel showed Zelensky's speech instead of the sounds of a black hole, in Poland drew graffiti about the Ukrainian president sucking up money, and a German satirical magazine released similar cover.

Thus, there are no reports in any authoritative source of a petition created by students at the University of Belgrade. The only evidence used by the Telegram channels and media disseminating this news was a video allegedly made by Deutsche Welle. This video, which is not available on DW’s social networks, not only makes mistakes that are extremely uncharacteristic for such a large media outlet, but also uses footage from five years ago, which the creators of the fake passed off as recent filming.

*Russian authorities think Meta Platforms Inc., which owns the social networks Facebook and Instagram, is an extremist organization; its activities in Russia are prohibited.

**Russian authorities consider Deutsche Welle a foreign agent.

Cover photo: Office of the President of Ukraine

Fake

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

1. Is it true that an American TV channel showed Zelensky’s speech instead of recording the sounds of a black hole?
2. Is it true that 3D graffiti with Zelensky eating money appeared in Poland?
3. Is it true that the German magazine Titanic released a cover with Zelensky in the form of a black hole absorbing money and weapons?
4. Is it true that a Spanish magazine published these covers with Zelensky and NATO leaders?
5. Is it true that on three covers of Charlie Hebdo the President of Ukraine is depicted as a dog?