Is it true that the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine banned calling a gray hare a hare?

In January 2023, Russian media reported that Ukrainian deputies banned residents of the country from calling a hare a hare. A fragment of a broadcast on a local TV channel was cited as evidence. We have verified the accuracy of these reports.

In mid-January 2023, a 22-second video went viral on the Internet, the author of which was filming a TV showing a story from a Ukrainian TV channel about defense Donetsk airport in 2014–2015. At the 0:08 mark, the following news is visible on the ticker at the bottom of the screen: “The gray hare will be prohibited from being called a brown hare - Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine” (translation from Ukrainian). In the upper right corner of the screen on which the broadcast was taking place, the “1 + 1” logo is visible.

There is a note about this on the website of the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper came out On January 17, under the headline “Brown hares will be banned in Ukraine,” while the text notes: “There has been no official confirmation of this news yet, but, you see, it fits perfectly with the whole logic of actions in the Square.” Headlines “In Ukraine it is forbidden to call a hare a hare” on the websites of TV channels “TV Center" And "Tsargrad-TV"imply that the decision of the Verkhovna Rada has already entered into force. The news about the ban on calling a hare a hare is also found on othersnews websites.

On Telegram, posts with viral videos are posted in the channels of TV presenters Vladimir Solovyov (270,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), Ruslana Ostashko (113,000) and Oscar Kucera (114,000), publications "Ukraine.ru" (89,000) and "TV Center" (12,000), as well as "Ax Live" (2,200,000), "Live broadcast" (640,000), "KB"(237,000), "Media Russia is not Moscow"(210,000), "Scott Ritter on Telegram"(183,000), Voblya (162,000), "Sheikh Tamir"(160,000), "Yuri Podolyaka"(132,000), "Zergulio 🇷🇺"(120,000), "Uncle Slava"(107,000), "What happened?"(100,000), etc. Moreover, in some posts there is a clarification that this news is “not Panorama and not a joke.” Publications about an unusual ban can be found in public pages on VKontakte (examples here, here And here), V Twitter, on YouTube (here And here), "Peekaboo", V "Zene" And LiveJournal.

Let's start with the fact that on the websites of the Ukrainian media we could not find a single news item that the Ukrainian parliament voted for a similar ban on the name of the eared animal. Moreover, on the official website Verkhovna Rada, as in its official Facebook And twitter, there is no mention of prohibitions associated with brown hares.

All the publications we discovered use the same video recording, which shows a TV broadcasting a news program. On some resources note, that it was broadcast “on the main television channel of the country” (“1 + 1” is really regular takes first place in the ranking of the most popular TV channels in Ukraine). It seems unlikely that in this case only one user was able to record and post the moment mentioning the ban on the ticker.

In addition, we could not find an official recording of the broadcast with a similar ticker. The program, a fragment of which went viral on the Internet, was broadcast on the channel “1 + 1 Marathon"as part of the telethon "United News". This broadcast took place on January 16, 2023; we found its eight-hour recording in the official Facebook TV News Service (TSN) program. At 6:01:52 the news broadcast of the parliamentary TV channel “Rada” began, engaged covering the progress of plenary sessions, the activities of parliamentary factions and deputy groups, as well as meetings of Verkhovna Rada committees, where bills are considered and the implementation of adopted laws is analyzed. In the recording, the story about the battles for the Donetsk airport begins at 6:18:55, but the phrase about the prohibition of calling a gray hare a hare is missing in the running line.

Video: screen recording “Verified” / @tsn.ua

It is noteworthy that in the official community of the satirical news agency “Panorama” on VKontakte as early as December 19, 2022 went out a humorous post about the fact that in Ukraine they are going to rename the brown hare. This publication publishes completely fictitious news, about which warns: “All texts on this site are grotesque parodies of reality and are not real news.” At the same time, neither on the website nor on the social networks of Panorama are there any records of the Rada’s ban or the viral video, so it is impossible that the publication became their primary source. Although earlier Panorama jokes repeatedly were accepted for real news, and then diverged on the web.

“Verified” was unable to establish the original source from which the wave of messages about the fictitious ban began. The earliest publication that we were able to find appeared on January 16, 2023 at 17:27 Moscow time in the Telegram channel “Eyewitness | Donetsk | Lugansk"(4000 views). On VKontakte, the earliest post appeared on the same day at 18:00 in the public “I am an eyewitness to Donetsk"(10,000), while the video itself loaded to the social network server at 16:56. Both of these resources have the same authors.

By the way, there is a video on TSN’s Facebook with a recording of the broadcast loaded January 16 at 7:01, that is, even before the earliest publications with a viral video appeared on the Internet. Therefore, a situation in which the recording of the broadcast was corrected after the media drew attention to the error in the ticker, and then an edited version was posted, is excluded.

Thus, based on all the above arguments, we can say with confidence that the recording of the broadcast with a ticker about the ban in Ukraine on calling a gray hare a hare was falsified, and the ban itself was made up.

Cover photo: frame from the cartoon “Well, Just Wait!” / processing “Checked”

Fake

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