At the beginning of March 2025, a fragment of a television broadcast circulated in the Russian-language segment of social networks, in which the journalist allegedly made an offensive comment regarding the President of Ukraine. We have verified the authenticity of this video.
The 22-second video, according to bloggers, is an excerpt from a news broadcast on the British BBC channel. The correspondent comments on the negotiations between Zelensky and Trump in the White House that ended in scandal. After this, the camera switches to the presenter in the studio, but in the background the same reporter can be heard saying: “Are you finished? Fine. I came across a meme that said this is the second time the President of the United States has fucked someone in the Oval Office." Laughter can be heard off-screen. It is assumed that the emergency situation occurred due to the microphone not being turned off in time.
On February 28, 2025, a meeting took place in the Oval Office of the White House. meeting US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky. After talking with the press, negotiations and signing of an agreement on the joint development of Ukrainian mineral resources were planned, but answers to questions from journalists turned into squabble with the participation of the heads of both states and US Vice President J.D. Vance, after which Zelensky left the White House ahead of schedule.
The meeting caused a great resonance in the media and social networks. In the evening of the same day, the Telegram channel “Digital Army of Russia” posted video with Zelensky’s exit from the White House, accompanying him with the quote “During all this time, this has never happened in the Oval Office in the presence of cameras - Sky News correspondent” and his comment: “As we understand it, this means that the last time they fucked there like that was Monica Lewinsky.” Although the quote given by the blogger cannot be heard in the video itself, his own remark is obviously related to scandal the mid-1990s, when it was revealed that US President Bill Clinton had cheated on his wife with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Despite numerous jokes on this topic, sex, by wordsLewinsky, they studied not in the Oval Office itself, but in other rooms.
The person seen in the viral video is James Waterhouse. He actually works as a BBC correspondent during a full-scale war illuminates events in Ukraine. Judging by personal page Waterhouse on Instagram, he treats Ukraine, Ukrainians and Zelensky with respect and sympathy, but the journalist regards Trump’s policy towards this country repeatedlycriticized. Therefore, the quote attributed to him in the viral video looks strange, to say the least.
Video distributed across Telegram channels - fragment reportage BBC News about the meeting of the two presidents at the White House, it is available on the media corporation's YouTube channel from February 28. However, the original story does not feature Waterhouse's voiceover telling a joke about Trump and Zelensky. Nobody interrupts the TV presenter's speech.
After footage of a BBC correspondent allegedly making a joke spread V English-language social networks, Waterhouse himself reacted to the video. March 6 on his page in X journalist reported, that the video was doctored using artificial intelligence (AI), and shared a link to the original report on YouTube. Similar opinion expressed and Shayan Sardarizadeh from BBC Verify. Fact checkers from the AFP agency contacted the press service of the British television and radio company, and they answeredthat the viral video is fake. Our colleagues from the project Lead Stories confirmed this statement by analyzing the video using an AI content recognition service Hive Moderation. It turned out that a fragment of the recording where a joke about Trump and Zelensky is heard was generated by a neural network with a probability of 95.7%.
Screenshot: Lead Stories
I came to a similar conclusion Hani Farid, chief scientist at GetReal Labs, a company specializing in combating AI threats. Expert at the request of fact checkers from AFP analyzed recording using two more programs.
The earliest publication of a viral video found by “Verified” was posted on the Telegram channel “Cat Kostyan» March 4 at 20:07 Moscow time, that is, four days after the meeting between Zelensky and Trump. This channel repeatedlyfeatured in “Verified” analyzes as the primary source of misinformation. Only after “Kot Kostyan’s” post did foreign-language social media users begin to share the video.
Thus, the viral video is an edited fragment of a BBC report, into which an offensive joke about Vladimir Zelensky was added using AI.
