In May 2025, media and Telegram channels reported that the “Immortal Regiment” action took place on the streets of the German capital in an unusual digital format. Several videos and photographs were used as evidence. We have verified the authenticity of this story.
On May 7, one of the largest Russian-language Telegram channels reported about the proposed action “Live broadcast"(754,000 views at the time of writing this analysis). “Despite all the prohibitions, the Immortal Regiment took place in Germany yesterday. Street billboards in cities display images of veterans and the inscription: “After 80 years, they are back in Berlin,” said the post, which included four videos and two photos. TV channel "Tsargrad-TV"(81,000 views) noted that photographs of Soviet veterans were allegedly shown on screens in different areas of the city at different times. “Whose action this is and who the organizer is is not specified. Perhaps Russian hackers will be blamed again,” the channel added.Pool N3"(70,000 views).
According to the TGStat service, about 300 similar posts appeared on Telegram, which in total received more than 2.3 million views. Channels wrote about photos and videos of Berlin billboardsTruthfulness"(143,000 views), "Cat Kostyan"(86,000), "Bullet"(72,000), "Special Operation Z" (56,000 And 60,000), "Z-News | Army 🅉 18+"(59,000), etc. Similar posts can be found on VKontakte (examples here, here, here, here And here). The RT agency talked about this in Telegram (194,000 views) and "Zene" Reports about the proposed action in Berlin became popular on “Peekaboo"(161,000 views).
To begin with, “Verified” tried to determine the original source of the news about the digital “Immortal Regiment” in the capital of Germany. There was no mention of such an action in the German press. The earliest post that we were able to track appeared on the RT Telegram channel mentioned above. May 7 at 08:35 Moscow time there published A 42-second compilation of three videos allegedly filmed the day before in Berlin. They depict how portraits of World War II participants from the USSR are shown on various advertising screens. The images were accompanied by a logo movement “Immortal Regiment” and an inscription duplicated in German and Russian: “After 80 years they are again in Berlin.” It was reported that this footage was shared with RT by an unnamed subscriber.
However, RT cannot be called a full-fledged primary source, since the publication of the Russian state news agency cited only three records, and “Verified” found many times more similar materials (and not only videos, but also photos). For example, less than half an hour later in the Telegram channel “Pool N3» posted two photographs and four different videos showing similar billboards with pictures of Soviet veterans, and only one of them was used in the RT compilation. In total, we found 12 similar videos in different Telegram channels, of which seven were in vertical format, and five were in horizontal format. Some were filmed by passers-by, others from a car, and others are allegedly fragments of recordings made by CCTV cameras.
Despite the variety of materials, they were all filmed in three locations. “Verified” determined that most of the videos captured the Berlin Videowall billboard hanging above store chain C&A on the crowded Kurfürstendamm street. Reportedthat it is the largest digital billboard in the center of Berlin and is visible to more than 181,000 people every day. Several more videos and two photos were allegedly taken nearby from the Berlin TV Tower and near East Side Gallery - a surviving fragment of the Berlin Wall covered in graffiti.
The billboard, which is located next to this open-air gallery, serves the sports and concert complex Uber Arena (formerly Mercedes-Benz Arena), located across the road. Fact checkers from the StopFake project contacted to the Senior Director of Sponsorship Sales Stefan Kusche. He said that the company conducted an internal audit and found out that the viral materials with their billboard were fake, since such images were not broadcast on the Uber Arena advertising platform. This information was later confirmed to our colleagues by the press service of the complex. StopFake also asked for comment from Limes - the company servicing Berlin Videowall, but at the time of publication of the material did not receive a response. "Verified" wrote in Stroer, whose logo is visible on a billboard near the Berlin TV Tower, and received the following comment from the press service: “We can say with confidence that this video is not shown on our screen.”
According to the TGStat service, more than three hours after the publication of his post, RT edited, adding the phrase: “The video appeared to be generated by AI.” Fact checkers from StopFake also suggested that the authors of the recordings used neural networks for editing. “Verified,” in turn, has no doubt that the videos and photos presented above were fabricated, but does not believe that they were created by AI. We did not find any signs characteristic of the operation of the neural network: the streets look the same as in the panoramas in Google Street View, and there are no noticeable distortions in the figures and faces of people.
If you carefully study viral videos, you can find many editing artifacts typical of “man-made” fakes. For example, in one of the recordings, for some time, a pole blocks an advertising board. If this fragment is examined frame by frame, then white areas can be seen for a moment near the outline of the pillar.
In another video, a woman’s head blocks the bottom of the screen, and at the moment when her hair begins to block the billboard, its border seems to flicker for a short time.
In the video, which is supposedly a recording from an outdoor surveillance camera, you can see that the reflections from the billboard in the windshields of nearby cars do not correspond to what is supposedly shown on the screen at that moment.
Pikabu user Backnibbler, who also did not believe in the theory of creating a video using neural networks, even published a remade version of one of the videos being distributed and wrote: “Offhand, if you get confused, you can do just as good a montage.”
The subject matter of the viral materials, as well as the method and time of their spread, are similar to the fakes that “Verified” previously examined. For example, May 8, 2023 in Runet published a series of photos and videos taken from different angles, which supposedly show the Victory Banner hoisted over the Reichstag. The next day in the media and social networks got infected a video in which the inscription “Grandfathers won - grandchildren will win” was allegedly projected onto the facade of the same building. A year later Telegram channels reportedthat the Victory Banner was projected onto the Brandenburg Gate on the night of May 8, and several photographs and recordings also served as proof then. However, in fact, all such materials turned out to be falsified, and no such actions were held in the German capital.
As for the real march of the Immortal Regiment, it was not banned in Berlin in 2025, contrary to viral posts. How reported Russian media, the action took place in the capital and other cities of Germany on May 9. According to the correspondent TASS, hundreds of people joined the march in Berlin. Participants gathered at the Brandenburg Gate and moved to the nearby Soviet memorial in Tiergarten Park, where they laid flowers. At the same time, the German authorities warned that such actions on May 8 and 9 forbidden bring Soviet and Russian flags, symbols of the invasion of Ukraine and St. George ribbons, and you cannot come in military uniform, in white-blue-red and black-orange clothes.
Thus, on May 6, 2025, in the German capital, photographs of Soviet veterans with the slogan “After 80 years, they are again in Berlin” were not shown on billboards. Videos and pictures illustrating this news were doctored. This is confirmed by both visual analysis and the companies that operate two of the three advertising screens captured. Although the action allegedly took place in crowded places near major Berlin transport hubs, the local press, as well as residents and guests of the German capital, reported nothing about it.
Cover photo: social networks / RT
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