In June 2024, a video circulated on social networks, allegedly released by one of the Ukrainian media and dedicated to an attempted murder due to a language issue. We have checked its accuracy.
It was reported that in the Kharkov region, a 16-year-old girl saw that her younger sister had turned on the Russian animated series “Masha and the Bear” on her tablet. Angry, she allegedly declared that “katsapshchina has no place in Ukraine” and began to strangle her sister. As evidence, a 27-second video in Ukrainian containing photographs of the injured girl is provided. The authors of the video refer to information from social networks.
This story spread widely on Telegram, where it was shared by channels "Russia now"(238,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), Voblya (151,000), "Sheikh Tamir"(137,000), "Special Operation Z" (26,000) and "Pavel Onishchenko"(21,000).
Since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, attitudes towards the Russian language in Ukraine have deteriorated greatly. According to polls Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, in 2023, 52% of Ukrainians believed that Russian should not be taught in schools (in 2019, only 8% of respondents answered this way), and 81% of respondents did not want it to be the language of official communication in the country or in their region. At the same time, more than 80% of the surveyed Russian-speaking residents of Ukraine noted that they did not feel any oppression - for example, some regional TV channels work for them. In July will enter A new law has come into force, obliging licensed broadcasters to duplicate any foreign language content into Ukrainian.
“Verified” did not find information about the incident in the Kharkov region either in Ukrainian-language publications on social networks, or in reports of Ukrainian news agencies, or on the websites of law enforcement agencies in the region. Thus, at a minimum, the statement about the prevalence of this information in the local media space does not correspond to reality.
In the first frames of the viral video, you can see a logo with the inscription “Apostrophe Stream.”
"Apostrophe» is a large Ukrainian media outlet that has mine TV channel, broadcasting throughout the country. You can also watch his programs on the official website and in YouTube. In the second case, in the lower left corner of some videos you can see a very similar orange logo, but its right edge is rounded.
Such videos also have other distinctive features - in particular, an indication of the time, a ticker at the bottom of the screen, and the main channel logo in the upper right corner. The viral video does not have these signs.
“Verified” studied the recordings available on all major Internet resources of the “Apostrophe TV” channel. None of them contain the footage that was included in the video distributed on Telegram channels. A reverse search using blurry photos of a girl led to publications 2017 about the death of six-year-old Amina Mengo from Krivoy Rog. As was later established consequence, the adoptive parents of the girl, whose cause of death was not clearly established, dismembered and burned the child’s body, and drowned the remains in the lake. It was the photographs of Amina, who died seven years earlier, that were used in the video about the conflict between two sisters in the Kharkov region.
The remaining portions of the video are illustrative in nature and are not directly related to the alleged attempted murder.
Fact checkers from the project "Gvara Media" contacted to Apostrophe TV for comments. Representatives of the TV channel responded that the video was not shown on their air, and the information contained in it was not voiced.
The first video about the conflict between two sisters in the Kharkov region was published by the Telegram channel “Sheikh Tamir» June 6 at 17:46 Moscow time. Previously he many times mentioned in debriefings "Verified» as the primary source of disinformation about Ukraine.
Thus, the video about a young Ukrainian woman who tried to strangle her sister for watching a Russian cartoon is not true. The victim in the video is a girl who died in 2017. The Ukrainian media, whose logo was used in the recording, did not release such a video on its resources.
Cover photo: social networks
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