In mid-October 2023, the story of Tel Aviv’s confectioner, supposedly baked a cake in the form of a gallows with a hanged president of Ukraine, became a viral. We checked whether there are reason to trust these reports.

The publications that Avi Melamedson, “The most famous pastry of Tel Aviv,” created a cake with hanged Vladimir Zelensky, began to spread on October 12. Most of these posts contain a video that shows an object similar to the cake in the form of a gallows with a suspended figure - in it you can find out the president of Ukraine. The subtitles say that Melamedson made this cake, as it was disappointed with Kyiv’s policy: “The high level of corruption of the Zelensky government led to the fact that Ukrainian weapons were transferred to Hamas.” In Telegram, videos and stop-frames from it were shared, in particular, channels "Russia now"(337,000 views at the time of writing this analysis),"Putin in Telegram"(190 000), Voblya (183,000), "Sheikh Tamir"(141 000) and"Military university 🅉 Medvedev"(67 000). The plot has become popular among users and public in "VKontakte" And "Classmates", Shared history also in Facebook And X (former Twitter). Notes About a cake with hanged Zelensky published row pro -Russian websites.

The video used as evidence is imitated by the design of the videos, which is published by the Israeli English -language newspaper The Jerusalem Post - in the upper left corner you can notice the publication logo. However, neither on the official sitenor in Accounts The Jerusalem Post in social It was not possible to detect networks of such a plot, and the design of a viral video differs from the media used by this. 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 uses its logo in them, over the past four months it has appeared on the video only Once. In addition, the viral video used old Logo: Since April 2023, The Jerusalem Post replaced it with another, and the video on Facebook is equipped with a logo with the full name of the publication.

Left-a frame from a viral video, on the right is a stop frame video from The Jerusalem Post on Facebook page

In the profile of Avi Melamson in Instagramwhere he allegedly posted a video with a cake-vice and critically spoke in Zelensky, “verified” also failed to detect images of the product shown in the viral video. At the same time, the confectioner quite actively uploads photos of the desserts he prepared and records Reels videos. Video message Melamedson, a fragment of which was used in the dispersed plot attributed to The Jerusalem Post, “tested” found in his Facebook account. In the original, the Tel Aviv Confectioner speaks of the language of hatred, which bloggers use in relation to Jews. The video was posted on October 9, two days after the attack of Hamas militants on Israel and the first response blows of the Israeli army on the gas sector. In the viral video, the corresponding video road was shown without sound, and replicas about Ukraine and Zelensky are given in subtitles. In a conversation with representatives of the Georgian factor project "MIF Detector" Melamedon reportedthat his bakery did not make a cake of a vice, and called the video that was dispersed along social networks "a purposeful provocation aimed at inciting enmity."

The fact that the video is falsified is evidenced by grammatical errors made by its authors, uncharacteristic for such a large edition as The Jerusalem Post. So, at the 00:05, the name of the Ukrainian president is presented in transliteration with Russian (vladimir Zelenskiy), and at 00:17 and then - already from Ukrainian (Volodymyr), while the newspaper itself calls Politics 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.

Also at the mark of 0:43 shows from the previously previously spreading misinformation video on the supply of Hamas weapons from Ukraine, which has already been “verified” Disassembled. It, as the analysis of publications in social networks showed, received very limited attention in the Middle East and first appeared in the Russian -language segment of the Internet. Although there is no evidence of weapons from Ukraine into the hands of militants, this statement is actively distributed, including with the help of fake videos, attributed large foreign media or teams of independent investigators. Some of these videos, as in the case of the Israeli confectioner, are devoted to the reactions of famous people to statements about the transfer of Kiev to the help received from the West, in favor of Hamas.

The earliest of the discovered "verified" publications with a video about the cake-visellar appeared October 12 at 10:24 pm Moscow time at the Sheikh Tamir Telegram channel, already dozens of times mentioned In ours parsing. Later, a number of publications were released on Spanish And EnglishBut the 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 had ever prepared a cake with hanged Zelensky or spoke about corruption in Ukraine, allegedly leading to the supply of Western weapons to the Hamas militants. The video attributed to The Jerusalem Post and used as evidence of this statement is falsified.

Photo on the cover: frame from viral video