At the beginning of September 2023, a video of a man masturbating and other photo and video materials circulated on the Internet, in which, allegedly, one can see a candidate for the post of head of the Ukrainian military department. We checked whether this is really Rustem Umerov.
September 3, 2023, President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky put forward For the post of Minister of Defense, the candidacy of the former chairman of the State Property Fund, Rustem Umerov. On the same day, pornographic photos and videos of a person resembling this official began to spread on social networks. As stated in the caption, the footage was already several years old and they were “waiting in the wings.”
This information was disseminated by some Russian propaganda sites (“Ukraine.ru", "Forpost-Sevastopol", Topnews.ru, Rubaltic.ru, "Notebook"), as well as Telegram channels: for example, "Russia now"(347,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Uncle Slava"(229,000), "First People's"(170,000), Voblya (167,000) and "Petya the First"(136,000). The compromising evidence against the Ukrainian minister was also discussed in the program “60 minutes"on the TV channel "Russia 1".
There were four materials in total: two photos and two videos, shot, judging by the format, on a mobile phone.
At first glance, Umerov appointed parliament for the post of Minister of Defense of Ukraine on September 6, does not look very much like the person from the distributed photographs and recordings - the shape of the hair on the head, eyebrows and eyes look different.
However, this is a subjective assessment—technical tools help give a more objective answer about the personality of the person depicted in scandalous materials. One of them is service search4faces, which, based on a given portrait, searches for similar people on the social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki. A search in the first of them showed that we have a high probability of a person named David Kasaev.
Kasaev (judging by his profiles, a native of Sochi, who later moved first to Georgia and then to Israel) has several profiles on VKontakte and accounts on dating sites, he is subscribed to many pages with erotic and pornographic content.
Search through another facial recognition service, PimEyes, brings a similar result: the same David Kasaev.
Moreover, two photographs from profile Kasayev in Odnoklassniki were filmed against the same background as one of the scandalous photos.
Viral photos and videos, as stated in some Telegram channels that distributed them, were taken eight years ago. However, even in 2015 Died looked nothing like the man in the pictures. Most likely, the pornographic materials distributed on the Internet were taken from Kasayev’s profile on one of the relevant sites.
The first scandalous collection mentioning Umerov was posted on September 3 at 22:53 Moscow time by the Telegram channel “Pozdnyakov 3.0" This resource repeatedly was spotted in the dissemination of false information related to Ukraine, and it is led by Vladislav Pozdnyakov, the creator of the “Male State” movement, which promoted gender inequality, organized persecution of people and organizations and was declared extremist in Russia.
Cover photo: social networks and PACE
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