At the turn of 2023–2024, a video circulated on social networks in which a man in a red suit, very similar to the President of Ukraine, was dancing fieryly. We checked whether the author of the video actually captured Vladimir Zelensky.
In the 21-second video, a man with the face of the Ukrainian leader in bright robes dances dashingly to the music of the song “New Year” by the Russian group Disco Avaria. “Zelensky’s dance on New Year’s Eve,” reads the caption under the video that went viral on social networks. So, in TikTok one of the posts with the recording at the time of writing this analysis was viewed more than 8.5 million times, and the publication in the Telegram channel “Sanya in Florida" - 440,000. They also talked about this recording in the publication "Zaporozhye news feed"
None of the publications specify when the viral video was filmed. At the same time, it is striking that the man in it looks clearly younger than Zelensky in 2023 and has thicker hair.
Another strange detail in the video is the balloons with the number 18 in the background.
On the TV screen behind the dancer you can see a congratulatory text in Russian: “Happy anniversary, dear! Be happy." The date below it looks like 08/27/2020.
Through services reverse image search you can find earlier publications of almost the same video, but the dancer in it has a completely different face. For example, in 2022 the entry was published in Instagram. The music also sounds completely different, not “Disco Crash”.
There is an even older publication - I posted it in my tiktok in October 2020 dancer Vusal Mehdiev. He lives in Lipetsk and specializes in oriental dances, which he often performs at weddings and other celebrations. At different times the artist published other fragments the same performance. The video with Zelensky’s face, which appeared only at the end of December 2023, was obviously made based on Mehdiyev’s publications using neural networks.
According to Verified's analysis, the edited video was first posted on social networks on December 31 - this was done by TikTok user @zelensky__neofficial. This Ukrainian-language account regularly contains posts ridiculing Ukrainian politicians, including obvious fakes with Zelensky's face (sometimes based on his real video).
In the summer and fall of 2023, pro-Russian Telegram channels and ordinary Internet users were already distributing video, in which Zelensky allegedly performs a belly dance. It's like found out the factcheck.ge project was also created on the basis of another, real video using a video editor - this time the “victim” of the authors of the fake was a dancer from Argentina, who also publishes fragments of his performances on TikTok.
Cover photo: screenshots from social networks
Read on topic:
If you find a spelling or grammatical error, please let us know by highlighting the error text and clicking Ctrl+Enter.
