In mid-July 2024, a video appeared on the Internet allegedly proving that Ukraine had falsified the consequences of a rocket attack, which resulted in damage to the country’s largest children’s medical center. We have verified the authenticity of the viral video.
On the morning of July 8, Russian troops launched a massive missile attack on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities. In the capital, according to official data, died more than 30 people in total by country - more than 40. In Kyiv during the shelling there was partial destroyed the largest children's hospital in Ukraine "Okhmatdyt", where, according to the country's Minister of Health, at the time of the attack were 627 patients. Representatives of the UN monitoring mission statedthat with a high probability a Russian missile hit one of the buildings of the complex. As a result of the attack on Okhmatdyt died three people (two adults and a child), more than three dozen suffered. Talking about what happened, many foreign Media used photographs of a doctor who was sorting through the rubble in a bloody medical uniform.
On July 19, publications went viral on RuNet, according to which these pictures were staged - a video allegedly appeared on Ukrainian Telegram channels, filmed by an eyewitness in the center of Kyiv and proving the staging. In the channel post "Sanya in Florida“(471,000 views at the time of writing this analysis) it says: “In the video, a Ukrainian police officer pours blood from a bag onto a man in a doctor’s coat. The doctor is an employee of the Okhmatdyt hospital, whose photographs were published largest world media (the link provided in the post does not contain the pictures in question. - Ed.). In these photos, the doctor's back is covered in blood. Already after the first publication of photographs, Internet users drew attention to the unusual color of the blood. The video that surfaced confirmed doubts about the veracity of the pictures. The hospital employee acted as a so-called crisis actor - an actor who must believably portray a person injured and injured as a result of the incident. Once again, the Zelensky regime is trying to imitate the victims, wounded and dead, and the Western media are eagerly picking up on this.”
Author of the channel "Evil proof️” (169,000 views) expressed himself as follows: “Remember the heroic bloodied dentist, who is also a pediatric surgeon from the Okhmatdyt hospital, which was allegedly hit by a Russian missile? Here he is, the bunny, they are preparing him for filming, smearing him with canned blood. By the way, this, of course, was not invented by the Ukrainians, but by their owners.” Telegram channel Mash (1.1 million views) emphasized that the medical facility was hit by a missile from the Norwegian NASAMS anti-aircraft missile system, which is part of the Ukrainian air defense system. In the channel "Two majors” (201,000 views) added: “But the fact that real donor blood was used for the production is truly terrible. This is blood for sick children, but Kyiv doesn’t care when it can beg for more money from the West.” Similar posts appeared in the channels “Russia now"(202,000 views), "Voice of Mordor"(195,000), "Observer"(183,000), "Putin on Telegram"(183,000), "Uncle Slava"(175,000), "Voblya•news" (142,000) and "Ukraine.ru"(114,000), as well as in channels calling themselves fact-checking - Fake Control (20,000) and "Antifake | Warp"(2200).
News reports about the viral video were also published in the Russian media. For example, according to the publication Life.ru, the video shows a police officer painting a doctor's coat with paint rather than blood. “And this is done with an ordinary brush (it is not visible in the recording. - Ed.). By the way, after the first publication about that “strike by the Russian Armed Forces,” users noticed the strange color of the “blood.” It turns out that it’s not in vain,” the website says. Newspaper "Komsomolskaya Pravda” released material under the heading “Zelensky’s nightmare show: Bloodied people in the Okhmadet hospital were played by actors.” The text states that the production was obvious almost immediately: “Because blood in the air cannot retain such a bright color for so long, it oxidizes, becomes brown and “rusty,” and here a dude ... in a snow-white robe, covered with bright red blood, is present everywhere as almost the main character.” The author of the article also added that the “acting man” is not a surgeon at all, but a dentist: “No, of course, when teeth are pulled, blood also bleeds, but it wasn’t the elephant’s tusk that he tore out, and even with his back turned.” Similar publications appeared on the websites “Notebook", "Regnum" (twice: here And here), "Morning south", "Peekaboo" and in public pages on VKontakte (here And here).
To the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation claimthat statements by the Kyiv authorities about a deliberate Russian missile attack on civilian targets on July 8 do not correspond to reality. “Numerous published photos and video footage from Kyiv clearly confirm the fact of destruction due to the fall of a Ukrainian air defense missile launched from an anti-aircraft missile system within the city,” the Russian military department noted. Edition "Notebook" insiststhat many “experts quickly and convincingly proved destruction of a medical facility by NATO ammunition.” In particular, it referred to the post quasi-fact-checking project "War on fakes", which says that Russia attacked exclusively military targets, and the attack on Okhmatdyt was carried out by a Ukrainian air defense missile.
However, analysts of the investigative project bellingcat And other experts came to the conclusion that the attack on the children's hospital in Kyiv was carried out by the Russian X-101. The missile that hit one of the institution's buildings was captured on eyewitness video. When comparing the screenshot with a 3D render of the Kh-101 missile, it turned out that the two missiles have common features and are almost completely identical when superimposed. "Agency" And "Radio Liberty“Military analysts are also quoted as saying that, most likely, a Russian cruise missile hit the hospital.
On July 8, the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine published a photograph of a doctor in a bloody robe helping to clear the rubble. Igor Klimenko. The next day, a selection of similar pictures with this doctor posted in his popular (more than 600,000 subscribers) blog on the social network X, adviser to the head of the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs, Anton Gerashchenko. Quite quickly, the name of the doctor who appeared in these shots became known - Oleg Golubchenko. “During yesterday’s rocket attack on Kyiv, he performed surgery on a child. The blast wave threw him onto the operating table, but he and his colleagues (anesthesiologist Yaroslav Ivanov) managed to do everything necessary to transfer the child to manual ventilation (the child was under anesthesia). The operation was completed at another hospital. The child survived. Oleg stayed to help clear the rubble in the hospital,” Gerashchenko wrote without citing a source (previously similar post published Member of the Public Council at the Kyiv City State Administration Ivan Stepurin).
Soon after the missile attack, many pro-Kremlin Telegram channels began publishing posts discrediting Golubchenko. For example, "Ukraine.ru” (118,000 views) called the doctor “a man in ketchup.” “In a couple of hours, this miracle man managed to operate on a child, fall on his back, get blood all over his back, but not stain his pants, finish the operation in another hospital, forget to change clothes and return to Okhmatdyt to sort out the rubble, and also become one of the main characters on the covers for the Western press! Later it turned out that the star of the show is not a surgeon, but a dentist, and usually the patients in this case are in a chair, not on a table,” the post says. Channels «Russia now" And "Evil proof️“They also emphasized that Golubchenko is not a surgeon, but a dentist, and were surprised how the bloody stain ended up on his back.
On specialized Ukrainian sites indicatedthat Golubchenko is a dental surgeon and has been working in the maxillofacial department of Okhmatdyt since 2016. He deals not only with the removal of teeth and cysts, but also with plastic surgery of the frenulum of the tongue and lips. The results of the doctor's work shares on your Instagram.
Golubchenko told several Ukrainian and international media about how he spent the day of the shelling. For example, to a TSN correspondent he reported, that at the time of the attack he was conducting an operation, the end of which was about an hour away. “And then there was some kind of whistle, and I found myself on the floor, glass was flying, windows were lying down,” explained surgeon. In a conversation with an Ukrinform correspondent, a doctor clarifiedthat he woke up on the floor 2–3 m from the operating table. According to Golubchenko, due to a breakdown of the ventilator, ventilation of the lungs five month child with congenital defects persons carried out with the help Ambu bag. Patient was not injured (he was covered by doctors), they managed to take the baby out of the hospital and hand over to another medical institution, whose surgeons completed the operation.
From an interview with Golubchenko shouldthat, having received first aid and handed the patient over to his colleagues, he called his wife and ran to help clear the rubble. “I don’t know how, I didn’t feel pain,” noted the medic and added that glass was pulled out of his back. “My colleagues immediately examined me, took a picture, took out the fragments, stitched me up, and I went outside. I see that partly there is no block of one department, and doctors and staff are usually there! Everyone ran there to the rubble, there was something smoking there,” remembers Golubchenko. That is, according to the doctor, it was not the child’s blood on his uniform, but his own blood.
The above-mentioned statements of pro-Kremlin resources that the blood on Golubchenko’s uniform was supposedly a strange bright red color and did not darken do not stand up to criticism. Even to posts such channels, links to which were given Above, attached are photos and videos, where it is noticeable how the color of the blood on the doctor’s coat varies from lighter to darker shades. This is due not only to the natural darkening of blood stains on clothing, but also to the fact that different shots were taken at different times in different lighting and published in different quality.
The viral video, allegedly proving that it was not his blood on Golubchenko’s clothes, lasts only 10 seconds. During this time, the recording never shows the faces of the two people captured on it. Moreover, the video was filmed and edited in such a way that it was impossible to geolocate the shooting location, since only a piece of the wall was visible in the frame. In addition, no noise can be heard in the background sounds, indicating work rescuers in a nearby destroyed hospital building: sirens, screams, etc.
The general condition of the uniform on the “doctor” immediately catches your eye: it is heavily wrinkled, although on genuine pictures Golubchenko's clothes look ironed even after he fell due to shelling. Also, the seam on her back is not visible, which is noticeable in almost all photos and videos of Golubchenko taken on July 8. The same applies to the back right pocket on your pants. The hairstyle is also different: in the viral video, the hair is not adjacent to the man’s neck, as if it were a wig.
As for the shoes the person is wearing in the video, they are very similar to those seen in pictures with Golubchenko, but the coloring in the form of black spots is still different. In addition, on the left pant leg from the video, multiple smudges of blood are visible, which dripped while dyeing the shirt. In real photographs, drops of blood are also visible on the left trouser leg of a dental surgeon from Okhmatdyt, but not so much (the largest stain covered bottom of the shirt) and in other places.
On the back of the “medic” from the viral video, you can also see two red spots, the shape of which does not match any spots, which are located in approximately the same area of Golubchenko’s shirt and are visible in the original photographs.
Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation, which also studied video, notes that the “policeman” from the video does not have a belt system (weapon, holster, walkie-talkie, first aid kit, etc.) and a cover (helmet cover), and the placement of a chevron with the symbols of the National Police violates the rules of wearing a uniform. Representatives of the Ukrainian authorities also noticed that the policeman was wearing combat boots, although local police officers have long been issued special sneakers.
It is noteworthy that the Telegram channel associated with the Wagner PMC also called the video a fake. Gray Zone (107,000 views), who nevertheless insists that the blood on Golubchenko’s robe was not real. “The only question is why these people are wearing different suits: the top (no seams) and the bottom (no pocket). And different shoes - one is wearing sneakers (the shoes in the video do not look like sneakers - editor's note), and the other is wearing Crocs flip-flops. All this can easily be found in higher quality photos on the Internet. This, of course, does not negate the fact that in Ukrainian photos the person with imitation blood is also staged. But to make a decree on a decree, and even in such a low-quality manner (they were banned from Google, apparently) - will only harm the Russian information background,” the post says.
Many resources mentioned at the beginning of this analysis claimed that the video first appeared in Ukrainian Telegram channels, but this is only partly true. The earliest publication with a “revealing” video, which “Verified” was able to detect using keywords, appeared on July 19 at 12:57 Moscow time in the Russian-language channel “Ukraine news"(24,000 views). Service TGStat calls it Ukrainian, however, judging by the publications, its authors adhere to a pro-Kremlin position. Moreover, one day this resource will already mentioned in the “Verified” investigation in connection with the dissemination of a fake video about a wild boar attack on a resident of Ukraine (in that case, the channel also acted as the primary source of the news). A couple of minutes later, a video about painting a medical uniform with blood also appeared on the pro-Kremlin channel “Odessa for victory!"(4700 views).
Thus, there is no reason to believe that the video distributed on the RuNet shows how blood is applied to the clothes of a Kyiv doctor before he is sent to clear the rubble under the cameras of journalists and ordinary Kiev residents. The video first appeared on pro-Kremlin Telegram channels 11 days after the Russian shelling. The footage does not show the faces of the people captured, the clothes of the alleged doctor differ from those worn by the Okhmatdyt employee after the attack, and the blood stains are located differently than in the original footage filmed in the Ukrainian capital.
Cover photo: screenshot of a viral video / “Verified” collage / social networks
- StopFake. Fake: Photos of a bloodied surgeon from Okhmatdyt turned out to be staged
- Open. Il falso video contro il chirurgo simbolo del bombardamento russo all’ospedale pediatrico di Kiev
- Is it true that the Ukrainians falsified a report about the shelling of a maternity hospital in Mariupol?
- Is it true that in Gostomel the Ukrainians filmed a staged video about the “atrocities of Russian troops”?
- Is it true that a Romanian TV channel showed a staged report from Israel?
- Is it true that this CNN report about the attacks in Israel was staged?
If you find a spelling or grammatical error, please let us know by highlighting the error text and clicking Ctrl+Enter.
