Frames allegedly from a staged video have spread on Telegram, in which Ukrainian special forces soldiers storm a building occupied by Russian soldiers. This video was supposedly supposed to boost the morale of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. We checked what is actually happening in these frames.
A video showing the filming process of staged battles appeared on social networks on April 4, 2023. In short clip soldiers in the uniform of the Ukrainian Armed Forces storm a dilapidated house, dodge explosions and shoot at an invisible enemy. The entire process is filmed by camera operators, and at the end of the video you can hear the director’s command: “Let’s start!” Within a few days, the video spread across more than 250 Telegram channels and received about 1.5 million views (Colonelcassad — 340,000 views on the day of publication, “Jumbo" - 106,000, "PMC "Wagner" on Telegram" - 85,000). The video was also published by several Russian media outlets (“News", "Ren-TV", "Vesti FM") and dozens of users "VKontakte" And Facebook.
According to "Izvestia", this staged video was the reaction of the Ukrainian Armed Forces to "successes» Russian army in Bakhmut in early April 2023. Thus, Ukraine allegedly tried to raise the morale of its army and inspire soldiers to counter-offensive with footage “about the effective actions of Ukrainian boys.” Social network users assumed, that this film was supposed to be Ukraine’s report to Europe: “We are effectively outmaneuvering the Russians, give us more pennies.”
This 20-second video is a montage of three short TikTok clips by Artyom Kocharyan. Kocharyan is a Ukrainian operator of a Latvian news portal who moved to Latvia after February 24, 2022 Rus.LSM.lv. Kocharyan decided to shoot a short feature film “Hope” in a new place about a Ukrainian girl who lost loved ones during the war. Kocharyan told, that the plot is based on the story of his friend, who lost her parents on the first day of the bombing, and then her boyfriend and the father of her unborn child were killed at the front. Filming passed in several cities of Latvia, both Ukrainian actors and Latvian police took part in them.
On his TikTok account, Kocharyan published videos he recorded on the set during the making of the film. The viral Telegram video about the allegedly staged actions of the Ukrainian Armed Forces special forces was stitched together from three TikTok clips: here soldiers in Ukrainian uniform enter a residential building, here run along the corridor towards the film crew, and here the operator gives the command “Start!” The Telegram video uses the same soundtrack as the TikTok clips - song Ukrainian musician YarmaK “My Country”.
On March 26, 2023, the portal Rus.LSM.lv published reportage about the filming of the film "Hope". There, the actors and participants in the filming, who can also be identified in the Telegram video, tell journalists about the film and their experience of filming in the film.
The earliest video of “special forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine” that we were able to find was published in the Telegram channel U_G_M April 4 at 11:40 Moscow time. All subsequent publications already contained the logo of this channel superimposed. The video began to gain popularity after it was published by the Colonelcassad channel. The author of the channel, Boris Rozhin, who calls himself an “expert at the Center for Military-Political Journalism,” has appeared in our analyzes more than once (for example, here And here).
Thus, the video, which was distributed by Telegram users as evidence of staged filming of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, was actually made on the set of the feature film “Nadezhda.” And this film tells not about “the effective actions of Ukrainian boys,” but about the experiences of a Ukrainian girl who lost her loved ones in the war.
Cover photo: Telegram
Fake
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