At the end of June 2025, a video appeared on the Internet in which Olga Stefanishina speaks in support of a partial ban on foreign travel for some Ukrainian women. We have verified the authenticity of this video.
A video in which Olga Stefanishyna, Minister of Justice and Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration, allegedly states the need to prohibit young girls from leaving the country, circulated on June 25. The video is a fragment of a telephone interview with an official, allegedly shown on the Freedom TV channel. On the recording, Stefanishina says: “When young girls leave for Poland or Germany, we lose not only them, but also the children they could have given birth to. I would legally prohibit girls of childbearing age, from 18 to 27 years old, from leaving Ukraine.” The caption to the video notes that this initiative has already been supported in the Verkhovna Rada.
The video was published by the publication Lenta.ru, as well as Telegram channels "Pozdnyakov 3.0"(360,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Ne.Sugar"(201,000), Colonelcassad (171,000), "Ukraine.ru"(123,000), "Typical Odessa"(120,000), "Voblya • news"(113,000), "Ostashko! News"(92,000), etc.
Despite claims that the idea of restricting young Ukrainian women from traveling abroad has already been supported in the Verkhovna Rada, Verified did not find news about this either in the Ukrainian media or on website Ukrainian parliament. There are no publications on this topic and on verified Stefanishina's pages on social networks.
In the upper right corner of the viral video there is a logo of the Ukrainian TV channel “Freedom”, and the QR code in the lower corner opens a multi-link to its resources. Although "Freedom" broadcasts in Russian, Stefanishina and the presenters in the viral video speak Ukrainian.
Most viral publications do not indicate exactly when the minister made the resonant proposal. In a note Lenta.ru on this topic there is a link to video on the YouTube channel “Freedom” on June 25, but during all ten hours of broadcast Stefanishina did not appear on it. Minister on this day accompanied President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky on his trip to the NATO summit in the Netherlands. In addition, other presenters were on air on June 25, and none of the news indicated in the viral video ticker corresponds to that broadcast. For example, reports that the United States is insisting on a ban on uranium enrichment in Iran, and Tehran is urgently exporting oil due to the threat of Israeli strikes, showed aired June 20. At the same time, the final part of the viral video, where the presenter thanks Stefanishina for the comment, completely coincides with the video, published two years ago on the YouTube channel “TV Channel “Rada””.
At the same time, the speech of the official from the viral video sounds unnatural: for 30 seconds she speaks without hesitation and with even intonation. This suggested that the audio track was created using AI. “Checked” analyzed the audio through a specialized DeepFake-o-meter detector, and it assessed the likelihood of using neural networks as extremely high.
Most likely, the author of the viral video took the original video from a week ago from the Freedom YouTube channel, inserted a photo of the minister, added a generated audio track and the final screensaver from the story of the Rada TV channel.
The earliest post that contained a fake video that was found by "Verified" appeared in the Telegram channel “Shaman Rahu” on June 25 at 14:30 Moscow time. Then it was distributed through other channels - both Russian- and Ukrainian-language. "Shaman Rahu" often appears in analyzes “Verified” as the primary source of fakes about Ukraine.
That evening Olga Stefanishina published on Facebook, a post in which she called the post that went viral on social networks a deepfake. However, this did not prevent further dissemination fragment.
Thus, the Minister of Justice of Ukraine did not propose to legally prohibit young women from leaving the country. This claim is based on an AI-generated video.
Cover photo: X/ @StefanishynaO
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