A couple of days after the explosion on the Kerch Bridge, a story was widely circulated in the Ukrainian media and blogs about a document found at the site of the explosion, which the Russian special services allegedly passed off as the passport of one of the perpetrators of the terrorist attack, Ukrainian Semyon Khaidenko. We checked whether this is indeed the case.

The story spread extremely widely in the Ukrainian media and blogosphere; it was even published by fairly prominent media outlets, such as “Ukrainian truth» or "Censor.net», engaged in the fight against fakes "Media detector», as well as dozens of popular bloggers - for example, in the account of Sergey Naumovich fast this currently has over 800 reposts.

Noteworthy is the fact that this story is unknown to Russian media and bloggers, which is strange for Kremlin disinformation, as its distributors call it. She has never appeared in Russian official sources, nor does she appear in Russian media, even the most marginal ones. The FSB report on the terrorist attack on the Kerch Bridge names among its perpetrators and organizers the citizens of Ukraine Tsyurkalo Mikhail Vladimirovich, Kovach Denis Olegovich, Solomko Roman Ivanovich, Zloba Vladimir Vasilyevich, Andreichenko Sergei Vladimirovich, citizens of Georgia Inosaridze Sandro, a broker named Levan and a citizen of Armenia Terchanyan Arthur, as well as several Russians. Participant Semyon Khaidenko was not mentioned among them.

In fact, the passport picture shows a famous American comedian and prankster Sam Hyde. In 2015, after the massacre in Roseburg (USA), the American television channel CNN mistakenly turned on Sam's image in the shooting report. The story went viral, it was picked up by users of the 4chan imageboard, and since then, after all mass murders (so-called shootings) or terrorist attacks, comic pictures have appeared on the Internet, allegedly indicating Sam Hyde’s involvement in the events. This became a popular and widely known meme, which at one time told even the New York Times. In 2017, the erroneous accusation of Sam Hyde even appeared in a Russia 24 report about joking at a music festival in Las Vegas, followed by a meme told, for example, Lenta.ru.

Since the start of the war between Russia and Ukraine, comic posts with photographs of Sam Hyde participating in hostilities have appeared more than once. For example, he was involved in the hoax about the “ghost of Kyiv,” an urban legend about a Ukrainian pilot who allegedly shot down six Russian planes on the first day of the war. Already on February 25, they appeared on the Internet and were widely distributed. images a pilot with the face of Sam Hyde, and under the name Samuel Hyde.

Or, for example, a passport in the name of Semyon Khaidenko was published after the explosions of the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea - memes about this appeared back on September 29th. It was to create this meme that a Ukrainian passport was taken from “Wikipedia", overlaid with a photo of Hyde, most likely taken from store T-shirts with prints. Moreover, the authors of the fake did not even try to convince anyone of its truth - on the passport template they used the most primitive method (traces of editing are clearly visible) only the photo, last name, first name and date of birth were replaced - all other parameters, including even the passport number 000000000, remained untouched, and Hyde in the photo is depicted with a naked torso.

Exactly this picture with a passport on October 9 took Twitter user Will Finchman for his comic meme about the explosion of the Kerch Bridge - he only put traces of a fire on it. Moreover, Finchman clearly knew about previous versions of the meme, because in his post he mistakenly calls the passport holder Samuil Khaidenko, as in the version about the “ghost of Kyiv,” while the name Semyon is written in the picture. A fragment from this particular post (which is noticeable by the red outline) began to spread throughout Ukrainian public pages within a few hours, but with a statement about supposedly Kremlin disinformation. One of the first published Ukrainian journalist Andrey Luchkov. The meme got out of control - the joke began to spread as serious information, but completely unreliable.

Cover photo: "Media detector"