Is it true that in Deutsche Welle reports the same Ukrainian woman played a woman raped by a soldier and a nanny in Sumy?

In April 2025, a statement spread across Russian-language Telegram channels that two videos of a German media company featured not Ukrainian women affected by the war, but the actress portraying them. We tested the plausibility of this theory.

The viral posts contain four screenshots depicting posts by the Russian service of Deutsche Welle on the social network X and footage from videos published there. Two screenshots show a woman identified as Katerina Sitak, a nanny. Judging by the accompanying text, it talks about the consequences of the Russian missile attack on Sumy on April 13, 2025. Two more screenshots show a woman named Daria telling reporters how she was raped by a Russian soldier during the occupation. “The actress who yesterday played Daria, raped by a Buryat, is already today nanny Katerina, a resident of Sumy,” these screenshots are commented on in Telegram channels.

With a similar signature they were distributed by Telegram channels “Bottle"(166,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Ivan Utenkov"(126,000), Voblya (124,000), "Petya the First" (79,000) and "Falcon"(72,000).

Indeed, on April 14 at 19:00 Moscow time, X appeared on the verified page of the Russian DW service on the social network tweet about Daria Zimenko, a resident of a Ukrainian village that in 2022 found itself under Russian occupation. In the accompanying video, the girl tells how a Russian soldier took her from her home under the pretext of interrogation, and then raped her.

Zimenko - artist, designer and activist of the SEMA Ukraine organization, which unites women who have suffered from sexualized violence. Soon after the start of the full-scale Russian invasion, the girl left the Ukrainian capital for the Buchansky district of the Kyiv region, finding herself under occupation. In 2024 in Kyiv opened Zimenko's photo exhibition, based on her personal experience, a few months later she performed at a thematic conference in France. Moreover, Ukrainian investigative journalists identified the Russian military man who allegedly raped the girl in 2022, and even contacted him via Telegram.

April 15, the day after the publication of the video about Zimenko, on the DW page in X appeared a short interview with Katerina Sitak - as indicated, a nanny from the city of Sumy, who came to a spontaneous memorial to the victims of Russian missile attacks. IN result The shelling two days earlier killed 35 people, including two children, and the girl shared her feelings about what happened.

"Verified" found Seatak's profile in Facebook. It states that she studied at Sumy State Pedagogical University, so she could very well work as a nanny.

Using the PimEyes facial recognition service, we also found several photographs of the girl on the website of this university.

Unlike the first video, which was shot by DW journalists themselves, in this case a video from the Associated Press was used. Fact checkers from a German media company contacted with the agency's reporter Alex Babenko, who interviewed Sitak. He assured that he was not filming an actress, but a real resident of Sumy.

Actually, in both videos, if you watch them as a whole, and not judge by individual frames, there is not much external similarity between the two girls.

Thus, Katerina Sitak and Daria Zimenko are two different women from different cities of Ukraine, and the statement that these are two roles of the same actress is false. It was first distributed by the pro-Russian Telegram channel “Meow» April 15 at 15:55 Moscow time, approximately two hours after the DW publication about Seatak appeared.

Pro-Russian media regularly claim that reports from Ukrainian and international publications dedicated to war victims among civilians in Ukraine are staged. This narrative has been maintained since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, at least since blow at the hospital in Mariupol in March 2022.

Cover photo: social networks

Not true

What do our verdicts mean?

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