In mid-October 2023, a story about a pastry chef from Tel Aviv who allegedly baked a cake in the shape of a gallows with the hanged President of Ukraine went viral. We checked whether there are reasons to trust these messages.

Publications that Avi Melamedson, “the most famous pastry chef from Tel Aviv,” created a cake with a hanged Vladimir Zelensky, began to spread on October 12. Most of these posts contain a video showing a cake-like object in the shape of a gallows with a suspended figurine - it can be recognized as the President of Ukraine. The subtitles say that Melamedson made this cake because he was disappointed with the policies of Kyiv: “The high level of corruption of the Zelensky government led to the fact that Ukrainian weapons were transferred to Hamas.” On Telegram, the video and still frames from it were shared, in particular, by the channels “Russia now"(337,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Putin on Telegram"(190,000), Voblya (183,000), "Sheikh Tamir" (141,000) and "Voenkor 🅉 Medvedev"(67,000). The plot became popular among users and publics in "VKontakte" And "Odnoklassniki", shared the story also in Facebook And X (formerly Twitter). Notes published about the cake with the hanged Zelensky row pro-Russian websites.

The video used as evidence imitates the design of videos published by the Israeli English-language newspaper The Jerusalem Post - the publication's logo can be seen in the upper left corner. However, neither on the official website, neither in accounts The Jerusalem Post in social networks could not find a similar story, and the design of the viral video differs from that used by this media. Although the visual content of The Jerusalem Post does not have a single design code, the videos published by the publication have a characteristic detail - recently the Israeli newspaper has practically not used its logo in them; over the past four months it has appeared on videos only once. In addition, the viral video used old logo: as of April 2023, The Jerusalem Post has replaced it with another, and videos on Facebook are equipped with a logo with the full name of the publication.

On the left is a frame from a viral video, on the right is a still frame from a video from The Jerusalem Post’s Facebook page.

In Avi Melamedson's profile Instagram, where he allegedly posted a video with a gallows cake and spoke critically of Zelensky, “Verified” was also unable to find images of the product shown in the viral video. At the same time, the pastry chef is quite active in posting photos of the desserts he has prepared and recording Reels videos. Video message Melamedson, a segment of whom was used in a viral story attributed to The Jerusalem Post, was discovered by Verified on his Facebook account. In the original, a Tel Aviv pastry chef talks about the hate speech that bloggers use against Jews. The video was posted on October 9, two days after the Hamas attack on Israel and the first retaliatory strikes by the Israeli army on the Gaza Strip. In the viral video, the corresponding video track was shown without sound, and remarks about Ukraine and Zelensky were given in subtitles. In a conversation with representatives of the Georgian fact-checking project “Myth Detector” Melamedson reported, that his bakery did not make the gallows cake, and called the video that went viral on social networks “a deliberate provocation aimed at inciting hostility.”

The fact that the video is falsified is also evidenced by the grammatical errors made by its authors, which are uncharacteristic for such a large publication as The Jerusalem Post. Thus, at the 00:05 mark the name of the Ukrainian president is presented in transliteration from Russian (Vladimir Zelenskiy), and at 00:17 onwards - from Ukrainian (Volodymyr), while the newspaper itself calls policy exclusively Volodymyr Zelensky. At the 17th second, the word Internet in the credits is written with a lowercase letter, although according to the rules of the English language it should be written with a capital letter.

Also at the 0:43 mark, footage is shown from a previously disseminated disinformation video about the supply of weapons to Hamas from Ukraine, which has already been “verified” sorted it out. As an analysis of publications on social networks showed, it received very limited attention in the Middle East and first appeared in the Russian-language segment of the Internet. Although there is no evidence that weapons from Ukraine fell into the hands of militants, this statement is being actively spread, including through fake videos, attributed to major foreign media or teams of independent investigators. Some of these videos, as in the case of the Israeli confectioner, are devoted to the reaction of famous people to statements about Kiev transferring aid received from the West to Hamas.

The earliest discovered "Verified" publication with a video about the gallows cake appeared October 12 at 10:24 Moscow time in the “Sheikh Tamir” Telegram channel, dozens of times already mentioned in our debriefings. Later, a number of publications were published on Spanish And English, but a search and analysis of social networks shows that the video has not received any significant distribution in these languages.

Thus, there is no evidence that Avi Melamedson ever made a cake with Zelensky hanged or spoke out about corruption in Ukraine, which allegedly led to the supply of Western weapons to Hamas militants. The video attributed to The Jerusalem Post and used as evidence for this claim is fraudulent.

Cover photo: still from viral video