At the beginning of July 2023, information spread that weapons supplied by the United States to Ukraine ended up in the hands of French protesters, who fired at police officers with them. We checked if this is true.
June 27 policeman shot A 17-year-old boy of North African origin was detained in a suburb of Paris. Soon, mass protests began throughout France, lasting several days. They were accompanied by the burning of cars and buildings, smashing of windows and clashes with the police. At least several hundred people were detained, dozens law enforcement officers And protesters were injured.
About weapons supplied by the United States and other countries to Ukraine, and then ending up in the hands of French protesters, in early July wrote a number of Russian-language media. TV channel "Tsargrad» claimed that “in large cities of Ukraine there are illegal groups that buy supplied weapons and transport them to Europe,” the Belarusian “Nationwide television"and Russian site EADaily wrote about the seizure of two such rifles, and Arguments and Facts published article under the heading “Friendly fire. Kyiv supplies French pogrom makers with rifles.” On July 6, that weapons supplied to Kyiv end up in the hands of protesters and are used against the police, stated at a briefing, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova.
The news spread widely on Telegram. In particular, the channel’s post “Especially for RT» (291,000 views at the time of writing this analysis) on this topic shared TV presenter Vladimir Solovyov (231,000), and the channel “Ostashko! Important" (123,000) published Photos of large-caliber rifles allegedly confiscated from protesters made by Accuracy International. According to the TGStat service, such posts collectively collected at least 10 million views. Some bloggers tied up these messages are from recent plot about weapons delivered to Ukraine, which were then allegedly found in Mexico.
During the protests, cases of looting were recorded, including hacking gun store in Marseille and theft ammunition in Bordeaux. However, neither the French police nor authoritative local media reported any reports about Ukrainian army weapons and specifically about rifles falling into the hands of protesters. Russian publications, for example “Arguments and Facts”, mention that Le Figaro wrote about this, but on the website of the French newspaper generally not detected mention in connection with protests of any rifles or the company Accuracy International in the period from June 27 to the date of publication of this analysis. There is only news about the robbery of a weapons store in Marseilles with reference to shooting with a pump-action shotgun (fusil à pompe).
Reports of protesters using weapons from Ukraine did not emerge until July 1, the fifth day of unrest. All publications are accompanied by the same type of screenshot, allegedly from a certain English-language news site. The headline in the screenshot states that “French police were fired upon by American rifles that could have entered France from Ukraine,” while captions in Russian often omit the word “could” and claim that the weapons were seized by police. At the same time, no links to an English-language source are provided, and the screenshot does not contain information that would allow identifying the resource on which such material could appear.
Judging by the data search on Google, monotonous messages with an attached screenshot are not related to the media and initially began to spread in the Russian and English segment of Telegram. Presumably, the first such post was published in the channel “Signal"(566,000 views) On July 1 at 13:39 Moscow time, an indication of the company Accuracy International, which is missing in the screenshot, appeared there for the first time. By midnight, this information appeared in no less than 270 other channels, collecting over 5 million views in less than 10 and a half hours. By the evening of the same day, the post appeared in the English-language segment of Twitter (and in one of the first tweets in English indicated Russian-language source), and during the day Later — to the meme aggregator site 9gag.
Using the reverse image search tool in the service TinEye “Verified” found out that the photograph of the rifles, which illustrated the viral posts, was taken back in 2012 by the photographer Vitaly Kuzmin And available on Wikimedia Commons. In addition, these rifles are not American, they are produces British company Accuracy International. Various models of its products are available on the open market - not only to the military, but also policemen and hunters, They are used all over the world and are regularly included in the ratings of the best sniper weapons on specialized websites. Apparently, the photo of these rifles was taken to create a disinformation story solely because of the fame of the manufacturing company and last year’s publications that certain Accuracy International models may enter service with Ukrainian snipers.
Thus, open source data does not confirm the presence or confiscation of Accuracy International or any other rifles from French protesters. Not a single authoritative French media outlet published articles devoted to “Ukrainian rifles” and shooting at police officers with them, and the dissemination of these allegations began from the Russian-language segment of the Internet. The screenshot of an unknown website used as evidence is fabricated, and it uses a photo taken more than ten years ago.
Cover photo: Vitaly Kuzmin
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