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At the end of June 2023, a video was circulated on social networks, allegedly showing a large poster on Fifth Avenue, which states: without the Ukrainian president there will be no war. We found out if this video is genuine.
The eight-second recording went viral on June 29. It shows people crossing an intersection, allegedly in New York. On the facade of one of the nearby houses there is a large advertising banner on which the phrase “No Zelensky no war” is written twice (“No [Vladimir] Zelensky - no war”).
This video was posted by pro-Kremlin Telegram channels “Ne.Sugar"(308,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Putin on Telegram"(232,000), "Zakharevich"(107,000), "Polite people 🅉 SVO"(67,000), "Front line"(44,000), "I'm shocked"(33,000), "Denazification UA"(25,000), "Observer👁live"(25,000), "Echoes of War"(24,000), "My country is Russia 🇷🇺"(24,000), "Summary" (18,000), "Pavel Onishchenko"(13,000), etc. Similar posts are found on other platforms - in "VKontakte"(examples here, here And here), Twitter And "Odnoklassniki", as well as on Rutube (here And here) and some news websites.
The location where the video was filmed is indeed New York, namely the intersection near the flagship store jewelry brand Tiffany & Co., located at the intersection of 57th Street and Fifth Avenue. At the same time, the video that went viral shows scaffolding that was removed at least several months ago. At the end of April 2023 took place grand opening ceremony of the store after almost four year old repair.
How noticed our colleagues from the “Myth Detector” project, coincidentally on the morning of June 29, that is, on the day the video with the banner began to be distributed, next to this store happened fire. An underground transformer caught fire, but the fire went inside the building, the New York City Fire Department said. has not spread. The fire extinguishing was captured by numerous local residents on social networks and shown by American media, including CBS New York, ABC News, The Wall Street Journal And Fox Business - on all the photo and video materials they published on the facade of the Tiffany & Co. building. there is no scaffolding, no banner about the war and Zelensky.
After analyzing the viral video, fact checkers from the dpa agency installed, which is based on a fragment of a 43-minute video called “Walking around New York [in] 4K. Fifth Avenue. People, cars and street sounds." The original was published on the CoolVision YouTube channel on July 15, 2021. The passage we are interested in begins at 01:06, while on the building visible a banner with a picture of a girl, and not with the words “No Zelensky - no war.” Apparently, unknown authors modified the original footage using a video editor.
We found the earliest entry that “Verified” tracked in the Telegram channel Putin TG Team (70,000), where the video was published on June 29, 2023 at 12:15 Moscow time. This channel is well known to our regular readers because, as the primary source and distributor of fakes and other disinformation, it mentioned in more than 40 texts “Verified”.
Update July 12, 2023. The Verified editors discovered Telegram channels in which the video appeared earlier than in Putin TG Team. For example, in the channel “TalipoV 𝐎𝐧𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞 🅉” (59,000 views) the post was published June 29 at 11:12 Moscow time.
The list of major channels that posted the fake video is also not limited to those listed at the beginning of the analysis. This same video was also posted by “Sanya in Florida"(378,000), "Uncle Slava"(186,000), "Bullet" (158,000), "Scott Ritter on Telegram" (158,000), "What happened?" (127,000), "Ostashko! Important"(115,000), "Ivan Utenkov"(110,000), "Bocharik (yep, that same one)" (108,000) and "From the scene"(94,000).
This is not the first fake video related to the placement of banners about Zelensky in New York. For example, we previously refuted reports of videos allegedly appearing on media facades in Times Square, where the President of Ukraine was called “black hole" And "Pis Duke"
Cover photo: screenshot “Verified” / social networks
- Is it true that graffiti with Zelensky in the form of a locust appeared in Madrid and New York?
- Is it true that on May 9, projections with inscriptions about Russia’s victory appeared on the White House, the Reichstag and the UN headquarters?
- Is it true that New York's homeless are being encouraged to fight in the Ukrainian International Legion?
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