In August 2025, Telegram channels distributed a video allegedly proving provocation on the part of NATO instructors when training Moldovan military personnel. We have verified the authenticity of this video.
It was reported that on the eve of the “Fire Shield” exercise that started in Moldova on August 4, in which military personnel from NATO countries are also participating, the North Carolina National Guard posted a promotional video. In it you can see targets in the form of men in camouflage with a Russian flag on it. “In this way, Moldovans are being taught that they need to shoot at Russians,” the bloggers concluded. Others even saw the video as proof that the West was preparing a big war in Eastern Europe.
Telegram became the main platform for distributing videos and screenshots from them, where they were posted by channels “ZeRada"(206,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Gagauz Republic" (181,000), "Russia now" (162,000), "Sheikh Tamir" (105,000) and "Ostashko! Important"(90,000), etc.
According to its Constitution, Moldova is a neutral country that does not allow the deployment of any foreign troops on its territory. At the same time, since 1994, she participates in the NATO program "Partnership in times of peace“, and against the backdrop of the ongoing war in Ukraine, the Moldovan authorities admit that they may abandon the principle of neutrality. “There is a serious discussion going on... about our ability to defend ourselves, whether we can do it on our own or whether we should be part of a larger alliance,” spoke in 2023, Moldovan President Maia Sandu, without directly mentioning NATO.
From 4 to 18 August 2025 at the training centers of the National Army of Moldova pass military exercise "Fire Shield" (Scutul de Foc) with the participation of Romanian and American troops. These teachings are carried out since 2015, and the USA has traditionally represents North Carolina National Guard (NCNG). "Verified" was not found on website, YouTube channel and in social networks this division of videos dedicated to “Fire Shield - 2025”. From time to time there post photo and video reports on cooperation between the NCNG and the Moldovan army, but at the time of writing the analysis none of which did not concern current teachings.
Let's take a closer look at the viral video. Nine of its episodes (mostly at the beginning and end) coincide with fragments from video report about the Fire Shield 2024 exercise, which the US Department of Defense published in October last year.
Frames with patches in the form of the flags of Moldova and Romania can be found in a similar report about the exercise “Fire Shield - 2023” on the YouTube channel of the Moldovan Ministry of Defense.
Episodes with parachutists and their jumps are taken from another similar report, this time about an exercise Swift Response - 2024. They also took place in Moldova with the participation of American military personnel.
Finally, several fragments are taken from the video about the competition "North Carolina National Guard of the Year - 2025" It was held in November 2024 in the USA, it accepted participation two military personnel from Moldova.
Among these fragments there are also those filmed at a shooting range, including a “prototype” shot with targets in the form of Russian soldiers. However, in the original, the targets are not portraits of people, but spots of red and blue colors.
Photos of Russians participating in the war with Ukraine were already added to the compilation, which Telegram channels passed off as a promotional video for the exercises that started in Moldova. The portraits were most likely borrowed from different Russian publics (And one serviceman was given a patch with the flag of the Russian Federation; it is not on the original photograph).
9 August Ministry of Defense of Moldova published a statement in which they called the video that was distributed on Telegram channels fake. “The video material has nothing to do with this year’s exercises - the footage was taken from the archives of international exercises and exercises conducted in other years both in the Republic of Moldova and abroad (USA),” the department said.
However, on the same day on Telegram spread other video. In it, Moldovan Defense Minister Anatoly Nosaty, in an interview with one of the local TV channels, states that his department did not approve the use of targets depicting the Russian military, and the American and Romanian partners in organizing the exercises are responsible for this decision. Thus, he essentially confirmed the reality of the video.
Judging by the credits, Nosatiy spoke about this in an interview with the TV channel Journal. However, “Verified” did not find this video on his website and YouTube channel. Moreover, not a single authoritative Moldovan media outlet wrote about such a statement by the minister.
In the same suit and in the same studio Nosy gave interview with Jurnal back in March 2023, a fragment of it at the same time published Moldovan TV channel tv6. The similarity between the viral video and the excerpt from that broadcast is almost complete; only the subtitles and the words of the official differ.
“Verified” analyzed the viral video and its audio track using a service to identify AI content DeepFake-o-meter, which was developed by researchers from the University at Buffalo. Half of the video detectors and most of the audio detectors rated the likelihood of using neural networks to create this video as extremely high.
The video with targets in the form of Russian military personnel was published earlier than others, according to the TGStat service, on August 6 at 21:05 Moscow time by the pro-Russian Telegram channel “Transnistrian" He's already featured in analyzes “Verified” as the primary source of misinformation. Three days later, “Pridnistrovets” shared and Nosatiy’s fabricated statement, but the deepfake itself initially appeared in the Romanian-language segment of social networks. In particular, on the morning of August 9 it was published by a local activist Vitaly Florya, which, according to the observations of Moldovan fact checkers, regularly distributes fakes and pro-Kremlin narratives.
Thus, during the exercises in Moldova, portraits of Russian military personnel were not used as targets. The corresponding video was compiled from several old ones, and the fragment with the targets itself was falsified based on a video filmed in the USA at the end of 2024. At the same time, to make it more convincing, the fake was promoted with the help of another fake - a video processed by neural networks, where the Minister of Defense of Moldova is allegedly justified for the puncture.
Cover photo: social networks
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