In January 2023, reports appeared on the Internet that an electronic display at the Stuttgart airport displayed an appeal to the German authorities not to send Leopard tanks to Ukraine. We have checked this news for accuracy.
Numerous online publications support the news with a photograph that allegedly shows one of the premises at Stuttgart airport, where the following announcement appeared on the screen against the background of the German flag: “Let the Leopards stay in Germany!” Stop the robbery of the Bundeswehr! It is understood that this statement expresses the position of many residents of the country on the issue of transferring tanks to Ukraine.
The viral photo appeared in many Telegram channels, including “Ne.Sugar"(221,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), Voblya (169,000), "Reports by Yuri Podolyaki"(150,000), "Yakov Kedmi"(79,000), "Military observer"(60,000), Rogandar News (56,000), "Echoes of War" (35,000), "Mikhalkov on Telegram" (34,000), "Sleeve"(14,000), Pravda.ru (10,000), etc. This photo can also be found on Twitter (examples here, here, here And here), "VKontakte" (here, here And here) and on Reddit.
To begin with, we made sure that the photo being distributed was actually taken in the departure hall of Stuttgart airport - you can find it on the Internet find many pictures the same place with the same stairs, escalator and monitor.
We then looked for publications in foreign media that mentioned the presence of such banners at a German airport or featured a viral image, but we couldn’t find anything. Moreover, we were unable to find on social networks any other photo from Stuttgart airport that would have captured the same screen with a call to the German authorities as in the viral photo, neither by geotags, nor by hashtags, nor by keywords. This seems highly unlikely given how widely is being discussed the topic of German tanks inside and outside Germany and the fact that Stuttgart airport is one of largest in Germany (7 million passengers for 2022).
“Verified” turned to airport employees for comment. Under one of the English-language tweets with a viral photo, we tagged the verified account of Flughafen Stuttgart (“Stuttgart Airport”) and asked whether the photo from the post was true or a fake. Us answeredthat the photo was falsified. Our colleagues from the Ukrainian fact-checking project StopFake sent a request press service Stuttgart Airport and received a response from Beate Schleicher, Senior Media Relations Expert. In her assessment, the viral photo was edited: “The screens seen in the photo from the Facebook posts* only broadcast commercial advertisements or periodic notifications to passengers about security checks or other operational changes.”
Unfortunately, “Verified” was unable to find the original, unaltered photo that became the basis for the fake. We speculate that the original image may not have been taken in 2023 or even 2022. If you pay attention to the right edge of the viral photo, you will notice a small fragment of a certain sign. When you zoom in close and change the saturation of the image, you can see that it is divided into four parts: three black and one blue (and the order is: black, black, blue, black). After comparing the viral photo with other photographs of this place taken at different times, we established that there are signs there. However, in 2022 they looked different: in January last year there was only a blue sign hanging there, then a black one was added to it below. And four signs with the same color order as in the viral photo hung much earlier. We were unable to find recent photos for January 2023.
The earliest publication that we saw was discovered using keywords in the Telegram channel “Sexton"(87,000 views). It states that the photo was sent by an anonymous subscriber, and the post itself was published on January 20, 2023 at 17:23 Moscow time. “From subscribers. Here in Germany, banners have appeared at the Stuttgart airport calling on people not to give Leopards to Ukraine. I filmed it myself. They did it under Ramstein, I’m sure,” this is how the text of the entry begins. The post referred to international conferences of Ukraine's allies at Ramstein Air Base, the most recent of which took place January 20, 2023.
This is not the first time that the “Sexton” channel has appeared in “Checked” reviews. For example, he distributed false report that Ukrainian soldiers burned the Dutch flag, confusing it with the Russian one, issued Joe Biden's quote from a satirical publication for an authentic statement by the American president and shared a fake cover of the Spanish satirical magazine El Jueves with a caricature of Polish President Andrzej Duda. Moreover, this is not the first time that “Ponomar” has become the primary source of fakes: last August, this channel posted a fake screenshot tweet of the former Japanese defense minister and fake photo Estonian uniform for those traveling abroad. In both cases, as this time, it was specified that the materials were allegedly sent by Ponomar’s subscribers.
Around the same time as the photograph allegedly taken from Stuttgart airport, a photograph of a sign at the Berlin Zoo was circulated online, where workers allegedly asked visitors not to feed leopards with “Zelensky’s empty talk” because the animals might vomit. We checked the authenticity of the photo, and it also turned out to be fake.
*Russian authorities think Meta Platforms Inc., which owns the social networks Instagram and Facebook, is an extremist organization; its activities in Russia are prohibited.
Cover photo: social networks
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