In early November 2024, a video of a church service held in Ukraine circulated on the Internet, during which the priest allegedly called on Americans to prevent “the devil from coming to power.” We have verified the accuracy of this video.
On November 5, Russian media wrote about the statements of a Ukrainian priest addressed to the then US presidential candidate from the Republican Party (for example, “Arguments and facts" And Lenta.ru) and ordinary users of social networks (“VKontakte", X). A 21-second video filmed during the sermon was widely distributed on Telegram channels: they wrote about the clergyman’s resonant statement “Operation Z: military correspondents of the Russian spring"(504,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Ne.Sugar"(267,000), Nexta Live (250,000), "Russia now"(209,000), "Observer"(195,000), etc. Some sources claim that the priest belongs to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), while others claim that he belongs to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC).
Judging by the captions superimposed on the video, the video was cut from a live broadcast that was broadcast from Ivano-Frankivsk on November 5, 2024, the day of the US presidential election. In addition to the date and geolocation, bank details for donations in favor of the Greek Catholic Archcathedral of the Resurrection of Christ are also indicated. In the video, the clergyman says in Ukrainian: “Trump is the Antichrist. With him will come the end and destruction of the whole world. No wonder they recently found an entry in an old book that Trump is the last president of the United States. So let us pray for the prudence of the American people so that they will not allow the devil to come to power.”
The cathedral where the video was allegedly filmed has its own channel on YouTube, where they conduct daily online broadcasts liturgies held in the temple. We conducted such a broadcast and November 5. It lasts almost an hour, the sermon itself begins from the 11th minute and lasts a little more than 5 minutes. However, the clergyman does not mention Trump, either in a positive or negative way. Since the broadcast was conducted from different cameras and there are edits, it can be assumed that the speech about American politics could have been cut from the air. However, if you watch the sermon carefully, you will notice that the video sequence in the viral video was taken from a recording on YouTube - the same footage can be seen starting with marks 15:36. However, at this moment the priest says something completely different: he talks about what the heart is and notes that it is in the heart that a person’s thoughts are born.
Representatives of the Ivano-Frankivsk Archdiocese of the UGCC did not ignore the viral video. Already on November 5, it was published on the official website refutation, in which the video is called a deepfake.
The earliest publication of a video with a soundtrack about Trump, which Verified was able to discover, was made in the Telegram channel Nina Vatt November 5, 2024 at 16:56 Moscow time. Within half an hour exactly the same posts appeared in a number of pro-Russian channels. This is not the first time Nina Vatt has acted as a primary source of misinformation. For example, “Verified” has previously refuted messages distributed through this resource that US presidential candidate Kamala Harris commented thwarted assassination attempt on Trump by saying he "can't even die with dignity." Moreover, at that time they also took a real video with a politician, which was provided with another audio track created using artificial intelligence.
Thus, the video of the prayer against Trump was edited with the help of AI - in fact, the priest during the church service at that moment was talking about something completely different. The American politician was not mentioned at all at that liturgy.
Cover photo: screenshot of the YouTube channel “Archical Cathedral”
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