In August 2025, the news spread widely that a bird had dragged a dog into its nest, and this happened either in Ukraine or in Poland. The proof was a short video. We have verified the accuracy of this story.
In many publications approvedthat the incident happened somewhere on Volyn - in a historical region divided between Belarus, Ukraine and Poland. At the same time, the authors of some posts disagreed on where exactly the bird stole the French bulldog - or on Ukrainian territory, or on Polish. Such entries were usually illustrated by the same video. “This is not a video from neural networks. The stork somehow dragged the little dog into its nest. Well, how can you not take such cuteness for yourself?” — noted on the YouTube channel “News Collector"(135,000 views at the time of writing this analysis). TikTok video of this channel dialed 1.2 million views.
According to the TGStat service, in a month at least 110 similar Russian-language posts appeared on Telegram, which in total received more than 1.5 million views. The videos were posted by channels such as Insider UA (531,000 views), "Dog"(149,000), "Sheikh Tamir"(132,000), "Informant Ukraine"(90,000), "All-Seeing Eye 18+"(82,000), Perepichka (72,000), "Ukraine | Noviny" (63,000) and "And Graham thundered"(33,000). Similar publications in Ukrainian received several million views on Telegram. Russian-language posts can also be found on Facebook* (examples here, here And here) and Instagram* (here, here And here), in "VKontakte"and on entertainment websites.
The viral six-second video shows a nest in which a stork and a dark-colored French bulldog are sitting. All of the publications mentioned at the beginning of this analysis contain a video with a noticeable pixelated area in the center, and in some versions there is also a watermark from the InShot video editor in the lower right corner.
Since the post was most widely spread on Telegram, “Verified” suggested that previously there could have been a watermark of one of the channels in the central part of the frames. The earliest publications with videos that we found in the messenger were simultaneously published on August 16 at 16:50 Moscow time in Ukrainian-language channels “Typove Rivne"(13,000 views) and "Typical Lutsk"(12,000). Moreover, it was the video of the latter, judging by the shape and location of the watermark, that was later distributed on many other resources. This channel claimed that the video was filmed in Lutsk region, in the south of the Volyn region of Ukraine.
However, fact checkers from the Ukrainian project “Gvara Media” found out, that the real primary source was the local Lutsk publication Insider Media, which on August 16 posted the video on its pages in Instagram (4.7 million views), Facebook (2 million) and by YouTube (570,000). This version of the video lasts a second longer, and shows that the stork allegedly built a nest on a lamppost (according to the caption, in the city Gorokhov).
However, back on August 27, this Ukrainian publication admitted that the viral video with a bird and a dog sitting in a nest was generated by a neural network. Depending on the platform, the corresponding clarification appeared either in the video description or in the comments. Fact checkers from Gvara Media contacted Insider Media with a request to comment on this situation and received the following response:
“This video was created by AI. It was uploaded to social networks. Unfortunately, the editor did not specifically mark the AI. We then tried to edit the video and add the appropriate tag, but it couldn't be done. That's why we added the text "Video created by artificial intelligence!" to the description and title of the video..
We haven't uploaded any more AI-generated videos since then, and we don't plan to in the near future. In conclusion, we will add that we believe in the critical thinking of our viewers, and if not all, then most understand that this is AI.”
In addition, Gvara Media quoted a comment from a Ukrainian ornithologist and deputy director for scientific work of the Kaniv Nature Reserve Vitaly Grishchenko, specializing in the study of birds of the stork family. According to him, the situation in the video could hardly have happened in reality: “He [the stork] is physically unable to lift that bulldog, and there is nothing to lift it with, because there are no claws, like birds of prey, [and] you can’t take it with your beak. Most likely, the bulldog will kill the stork, and he sits in the nest as if at home.” Grishchenko also believes that many users who watched the video perceived “this work adequately” (that is, they understood that it was the work of a neural network).
“Verified” found another video on social networks with a bulldog and a stork in a nest, but it did not become popular, gaining a total of TikTok And Instagram just over 6,000 views. However, the author who posted this video did not hide the use of neural networks, since he added the tag #veo3 (Veo 3 is the third generation of a neural network for generating video from Google), and in description his profile warned about publishing AI content.
The authors of some false posts tried to correct their publications. For example, in the Telegram channel “Ax+» The viral video was posted on August 16 at 20:55. At first it was indicated that the recording was made in Ukraine, after 34 minutes. scene changed to Poland, and a minute later they added: “The video turned out to be generated by AI.” It is difficult to know the exact number of people who viewed the post with errors, but it is known that in the first hour the Topor+ recording read over 502,000 times.
Thus, in Volyn the stork did not take the French bulldog into its nest. This news is based on a video generated by Ukrainian media using AI.
*Russian authorities think Meta Platforms Inc., which owns the social networks Instagram and Facebook, is an extremist organization; its activities and symbols are prohibited in Russia.
Cover photo: Insider Media
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