In June 2023, an image of an allegedly dark-skinned Russian soldier with a politically incorrect nickname appeared on social networks. We checked whether this is a real shot and whether such a person exists.
The viral image shows a dark-skinned man in a vest with military equipment in the background. The caption on the image states that this man is a squad leader with the call sign Coal, and some publications specify that he is from Angola. The authors of the viral posts emphasize that this is not a shot from “another Netflix series,” and joke that “Western liberals would be sick of it right now.”
Such recordings are posted in Telegram channels "Rhymes and punches 🔞+"(91,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "What's going on?"(39,000), "Before everyone else. Well almost. Special operation" (14,000), "Goose farm"(13,000), "News and reports of the DPR Donetsk | SVO" (12,000), "Chick"(3000), etc. The most viral post that "Verified" was able to find appeared on VKontakte in the public "Rhymes and Punch": at the time of writing this analysis it collected over 300,000 views and 7,200 likes. On VKontakte you can find other posts about Coal (examples here And here). In addition, relevant publications are in “Zene", and one of the English-language tweets with a viral image received over 93,000 views.
The image that has gone viral is not an independent photo - it is a screenshot of a video recording, in the upper right corner of which there is emblem Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. In the official Telegram channel of the department “Verified” found video clip, published back on June 10, where the squad commander with the call sign Coal was actually shown - he told what the work of the repair battalion is. However, in the video, this soldier looks completely different from the viral posts.
The skin color, nose and some other details of the face of the fighter nicknamed Coal are different in the original footage. Judging by the fact that the viral image shows the same head position, gaze and mole on the cheek as the person from the video of the Russian Ministry of Defense, the author of the fake used one of the many applications by changing the appearance of people in the photo. At the same time, it turned out sloppy, since part of the neck of the hero of the video was left with a different skin tone.
The earliest publication found by "Verified" was posted on June 12, 2023 at 10:43 Moscow time in the Putin TG Team Telegram channel (62,000 views). This channel is one of the record holders for the number of mentions in our analyses. For example, Putin TG Team published fake photos from anonymous subscribers, fake TV channel video reports And celebrity stories, mounted rollers, satirical news under the guise of real, fake website screenshots And video from the streets, images of non-existent textbooks, graffiti And covers foreign magazines - and this is not a complete list. Moreover, this channel is not the first time turns out the primary source of misinformation.
Cover photo: social networks
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