Last week, Russian media reported that a weather forecast on Polish television showed a map of the country with regions of western Ukraine included there. We verified the authenticity of the photo that was presented as evidence.
The viral photo shows a TV allegedly showing the weather forecast on the Polish TV channel TVP1. The frame behind the presenter shows a map on which part of Western Ukraine is included in the Polish state. “Lviv is marked on it as part of Poland. Also, Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk, Volyn, Chernivtsi, Rivne, Zhytomyr, Khmelnitsky, Vinnytsia and Transcarpathian regions of Ukraine are designated as Polish territory,” - January 17, 2023 wrote "News". “In essence, Polish citizens are being taught the idea that Lviv and other territories of Western Ukraine will soon “return” to Poland,” the publication believes.Military Review" Also about the viral photo with a link to the Telegram channel post “Pool No. 3"(199,000 views at the time of writing the analysis) told"Gazeta.ru" And "Ren-TV" At the same time, they clarified that there is no confirmation of the authenticity of the photo, since it was sent by subscribers. Among other media outlets disseminating news about a map of Poland with new territories, they noted “Moskovsky Komsomolets", "Moscow 24", "Channel 5", "Pravda.ru", "Federal News Agency" And "Economy today"
On Telegram, publications about the Polish map collected 115,000 views in the channels of TV presenters Oscar Kucera And Ruslana Ostashko (it is indicated that the news is from a subscriber who saw it on a Polish TV channel). Similar posts can be found in the channels “Russia now"(341,000), "Scott Ritter on Telegram"(186,000), "From the scene" (145,000) and "Paragraph"(41,000). In the channel "The world of Mikhail Onufrienko”(335,000 views) believe that “Poland is determined to fight with Russia for the right to fight in Ukraine,” and in the now deleted post “Reporter Rudenko V🇷🇺“(88,000) it was written that Vladimir Zelensky “for supporting his beloved self” gave part of the country to Polish President Andrzej Duda. A similar idea was expressed in the channel “Ilya Kiva - zov blood“(30,000): “Once again I declare: Zelensky in 2020 agreed and sold the western regions to Poland!” The virus map was shown on VKontakte (here, here And here), Twitter, "Zene"and on YouTube.
All the publications we found featured the same photo of a TV with a frame of a weather forecast broadcast, and none of the entries indicated the date and time of this broadcast. Considering that by the end of 2022 TVP1 took first place among the most popular TV channels in Poland, it seems extremely unlikely that there is not a single other screenshot of the broadcast of that program on the Internet.
We watched several episodes special weather forecasts for farmers (“Agroweather”), as well as some issues standard forecasts broadcast on TVP1 over the past few years. All of the videos featured graphic design that was very different from what was shown in the viral footage. Their only similarity is the same TVP1 HD logo in the upper right corner of the screen. At the same time, in all the episodes we watched, the forecast was shown only for Poland; accordingly, only the official map of this country was presented on the screen.
January 18 in the “Fact-checking” section on the website of the TVP Info information channel it turned out a refutation in which responsibility for creating a map of Poland with the territories of Ukraine was assigned to Russian propaganda. “This material is fabricated and is intended to convince the Russian public of the theses disseminated by Moscow. TVP never had such material, but the logo was superimposed,” the official statement said. It is also reported that a genuine photo of the presenter of the Trwam TV channel was used for falsification, but in the original program she appeared against the background of a completely different map, where only Poland was shown without neighboring countries.
Our colleagues from Georgian fact-checking projects came to the same conclusions “Myth detector" And "Fact meter" They found out that the viral footage shows a journalist Joanna Wysocka, which actually worked on the Polish TV channel Trwam. The weather forecast we are interested in is spent back on March 27, 2020, as can be seen from the same hairstyle, clothes and pose (at the mark 1:09 and on preview video on YouTube), as in the viral photo. In the original recording of the broadcast, only a map of Poland is highlighted in the background of the presenter, and within the officially recognized borders.
In addition, Georgian fact checkers noticed that the names of countries and cities on the map are misspelled in Polish: the words are missing the corresponding Polish letters, such as ń, ł, ó or ś. For example, the name of the city Minsk on the viral map is written as Minsk, although it is correct writing —Mińsk.
It is problematic to establish the exact source from which the viral picture was spread, since many publications indicate that the photo was sent by an anonymous subscriber. We found the earliest entry on VKontakte - in the public page “I am Russian” (32,000 views), where the photo posted January 17 at 10:57 Moscow time. “Now it remains to find out what it was: a fee for weapons, a coincidence, or just a technical problem,” the author of the post wondered.
Thus, the weather forecast footage on the Polish TV channel TVP1, distributed in the Russian media and social networks, is a fake. To create it, an unknown author superimposed the mirrored figure of the presenter of another channel on a background with a fake map of Poland, which included the territories of Ukraine and where errors were made in the spelling of Polish names of geographical objects.
This is not the first fake related to TVP1. "Verified" already sorted it out a fabricated story about Poland's plans to create LGBT military units. In addition, we wrote about other fake materials spreading the narrative that Poland will annex part of Ukraine. Among them photo boxes with ballots for a referendum on the secession of the Lviv region from Ukraine and its annexation to Poland, as well as snapshot the front page of a Polish newspaper with the headline “Vladimir Zelensky wants to return Ukraine to Poland.”
Cover photo: social networks
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