In March 2025, news spread across the Internet that two Northern European TV channels had confused in their credits which country was headed by Vladimir Putin. We decided to check the reliability of these publications.
They wrote about the alleged mistake of colleagues from Danish and Swedish television Russia Today, "Moskovsky Komsomolets", Lenta.ru, Ura.ru, Life.ru and other Russian media. Social network users (“VKontakte", "Classmates", X, Threads) and blogging platforms (“Zen", "Peekaboo") they joked that this was a sign and that the Danish and Swedish journalists obviously knew something. Popular Telegram channels also spoke about the incidents, for example “Newsach / Dvach"(221,000 views at the time of writing the analysis), "Not Morgenstern" (112,000) and "First People's | News"(102,000). Most posts contain screenshots or photos of screens broadcasting Vladimir Putin’s speech, where he is signed as the President of the United States. Some publications indicate that mistakes were made by the Swedish television channel SVT and the Danish TV 2 News.
The main thing is how publications about alleged errors in credits differ from many fake videos and screenshots of news stories that "Verified" already sorted it out earlier, is the diversity of evidence. Usually, when such evidence is falsified, the same video or the same screenshot is spread across social networks and blogs. In this case, users share different pictures screens.
Swedish TV channel SVT
The earliest publication about the mistake of Swedish journalists that Verified was able to find is fast user @werndlstadter on the social network X. On March 13 at 23:48 Moscow time, he shared a photo showing a TV screen with the Swedish TV channel SVT2 on air. Judging by the inscriptions on the screen, at that moment the channel was broadcasting a news program called Aktuellt.
Such a TV show actually airs on SVT. The channel's website contains recordings of broadcasts, in particular from March 13, when the screenshot began to circulate. Issue started with news about negotiations on a possible ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine. The story shows footage of Trump's speech, followed by an excerpt from the broadcast of the joint press conferences Putin and President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko, which took place on the same day. At the 02:18 mark, next to the name of the Russian president, a title actually appears for a few seconds, where he is called the President of the United States.
Danish TV channel TV 2
Pictures and screenshots proving yet another oversight went viral the same day. Many media outlets that wrote about this embarrassment of journalists refer to fast in X - this time from user @MortensTweet, who posted the photo at 21:11 Moscow time.
The logo of the Danish TV channel TV2 News is actually shown in the upper left corner of the screen. At the time of filming, a fragment was shown on air meetings with the participation of Putin in one of the control points of the Kursk group, which took place on March 12. The broadcast date is not visible on the screen, but on March 13 it was published on the channel’s website article with a detailed analysis of this event and Putin’s unusual appearance. At that meeting, the politician appeared not in his usual suit, but in a military uniform, which attracted the attention of journalists.
Unlike its Swedish colleagues, TV 2 does not make recordings of its broadcasts publicly available; they can only be viewed by subscription. “Verified” turned to fact checkers from the Danish project for help Tjekdet, and they, having studied the archived broadcasts of the TV channel for March 13, confirmed that in the news broadcast at 19:00 there was indeed an error in the credits and Putin was called the President of the United States.
Such missteps do not happen very rarely, especially when it comes to live broadcasting. Often, titles, announcements of the next programs, a ticker with breaking news and other design elements are not applied in advance, during editing, but directly during the program, so human errors are not excluded. The only surprising thing is that two channels broadcasting in different countries almost simultaneously made the same mistake.
Sometimes similar errors become subjects of speculation. For example, in February 2022, the American television channel WTAE-TV Pittsburgh showed during a story about a pedophile, the announcement of a speech by former US President Joe Biden with his photograph, and almost two years later, some Internet users began to claim that journalists allegedly mixed up the pictures and showed a portrait of a politician instead of a photo of a criminal. In 2011, Fox News journalists were credited mixed names of then US President Barack Obama and terrorist Osama bin Laden, declaring that Obama bin Laden is dead. 14 years later, when CNN editors made the same mistake, their colleagues at Fox News hurried be the first to throw a stone at them.
Thus, the Swedish and Danish television channels actually aired a caption where Vladimir Putin was named the President of the United States, but such blunders are nothing more than a mistake by the employees of these media.
Cover photo: social networks
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