At the end of February 2024, a video allegedly filmed by an indignant Ukrainian made the rounds of the Runet. It is reported that he did not like the fact that banners with portraits of the presidents of Turkey and Russia were placed on a house in a certain Turkish city. We verified the veracity of the viral video.
The five-second video was reportedly filmed in an unnamed Turkish city and included flags of that country hanging above the street. At the same time, two banners with images of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Vladimir Putin are stretched on the wall of a multi-storey building. The posters also feature the inscription Refah için işbirliği (“Cooperation for Prosperity”). In posts on social networks approved, that the author of the video is a Ukrainian who fled from mobilization to Turkey, and a man’s voice sounds behind the scenes: “Wonder, what a p***et” (“Look, what a p***et”).
Similar publications were widely distributed on Telegram, where the channels “Pozdnyakov 3.0"(285,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "KB"(233,000), "Truthfulness"(215,000), "Observer"(213,000), "Uncle Slava"(195,000), "Putin on Telegram"(161,000), Voblya (154,000), "Sheikh Tamir"(144,000), Rus_criminal (144,000), etc. There are viral videos on VKontakte (examples here, here, here, here And here), TikTok and X (here And here), as well as on some news websites.
“Verified” was unable to find videos or photos on the Internet in which the posters would have been captured from a different angle. The Turkish media did not report them either. The earliest publication that we were able to detect using keywords appeared on February 26 at 17:34 Moscow time in the Telegram channel “Freshness"(46,000 views). This channel has already been featured in the “Checked” reviews, and a significant part of these texts was devoted to fabricated videos and more than once they appeared for the first time in “Freshness”.
After taking a screenshot of the video, “Verified” conducted a reverse search from the image and found out that the video was filmed in Istanbul. The building where the posters were allegedly placed located on Muellif Street, and during the recording the author of the video was on the nearby Meshrutiyet street.
On March 7, “Verified” asked a resident of Istanbul to go to the same address and take a photo of this location. It turned out that at that time there were completely different posters hanging on the wall without the image of Putin - they were dedicated to the local elections, which will pass March 31, 2024. The banner on the right shows Erdogan and the presidential party's candidate for Istanbul mayor Murat Kurum, and on the left is the head of the Beyoglu district - Haydar Ali Yildiz.
The placement of posters on this house in March that differed from those featured in the viral video could be explained by the fact that a week and a half had passed since the start of the video’s distribution, so the banners could have been changed. However, on the website of the German photo agency Imago presented A photo taken almost in the same place on February 26th. The same posters with Turkish politicians without Putin are depicted there.
The viral video also shows less obvious differences with the photographs taken in Istanbul at the request of “Verified”. For example, in these pictures there are no Turkish flags hanging, people are wearing warmer clothes, and the trees have less foliage. Using a reverse image search, Verified found that similar banners were hanging on the same building in 2023. They were dedicated to the presidential elections, which passed in May. On those posters only Erdogan was depicted (he was then running for his third term) and the phrase “Doğru zaman. Doğru adam" ("Right time. Right person"). Photos of the wall of the same building with propaganda banners were published in April and May 2023 Reuters, The Economist, "Komsomolskaya Pravda", Sputnik Turkiye and other publications.
Thus, Telegram channels and social network users distributed a edited video: unknown persons superimposed images of the Russian President on a video filmed in Istanbul last year. The creators of the fake also added a voice-over commentary in Ukrainian, probably in order to reflect in the caption to the video the narrative popular in pro-Russian channels about Ukrainians “escaping mobilization.”
Cover photo: social networks
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