Wildly firing Ukrainian soldiers, a Russian-speaking mother begging for her life, a child crying in panic…
They are terrifying shots. They should show how Ukrainian soldiers brutally and cruelly threaten a woman and her child. BUT: What was spread on the Internet by numerous Russian ministries on Monday is nothing more than perfidious Russian propaganda.
The Russian Foreign Ministry also shared the video on Twitter – and used it to insult Ukraine as a Nazi state.
“Once a Nazi, always a Nazi,” wrote the ministry of Sergei Lavrov (73, nicknamed “Lying Lavrov”). The Ukrainian soldiers called a mother and child a “pig” and “scum” and shot her “just because she speaks Russian”.
But the video is a fake! This is confirmed by the analyzes of independent experts.
The two-minute video begins like a normal traffic stop. A VW SUV with a Ukrainian flag and a “cross” overtakes a car, two armed soldiers in Ukrainian riot gear get out. One comes to the vehicle and asks unfriendly in Ukrainian for the documents.
The woman reacts nervously. “What’s happening? What are you doing?” she can be heard saying in Russian.
After the woman asks in Russian that the soldier should be polite, the situation escalates: the soldier insults the woman in the worst possible way, and after almost two minutes he starts firing his assault rifle in the air and right next to the car.
The Russian Foreign Ministry published the video on Twitter. After it got more than a million clicks, the Russians deleted their post
“I have a small child,” the woman calls out and sobs. Mother and child scream in panic, begging the alleged Ukrainian to stop shooting. His comrade ignores the situation. Then they both drive away, leaving the broken woman and her child crying.
︎ The tweet from the Russian Foreign Ministry alone received over a million clicks by Tuesday morning. It was clear hours before: It is a nasty propaganda lie of the Putin regime!
Experts carefully watched the video, analyzed the environment and found out: The two-minute scene takes place in the Russian-occupied territory. But not where the Russians invaded in recent months. But in an area that Russian troops have been occupying since 2014.
For their analysis, the observers compared road markings as well as vegetation and power poles visible in the video.
▶︎ Your clear result: The brutal sequence took place near the town of Makiivka. East of the city of Donetsk, which has been occupied by Russia since 2014. An area that Ukrainian soldiers have not set foot in for almost nine years.
This leaves only one conclusion: RUSSIAN actors – probably soldiers – impersonated the alleged Ukrainians. A RUSSIAN woman – or at least a collaborator – played the crying woman. The child was forced into the brutal scene – against his will, of course.
All this so that Russia’s state propaganda can accuse Ukraine of committing crimes against the Russian-speaking population. And so that they can defame Ukrainians as Nazis. It’s an accusation that Russia has used for years to justify its war of annihilation against its much smaller neighbor.
After more than 18 hours, the Russian Foreign Ministry deleted his lying tweet on Tuesday morning. Numerous other Russian channels kept the propaganda video online.