2:39 p.m. ET, March 28, 2023
Russian video claiming to show Ukrainian military intimidating woman and child revealed as fake
From Gianluca Mezzofiore and Josh Pennington
A Russian propaganda video purportedly showing the Ukrainian military firing at a car with a mother and child after hearing the woman speaking Russian has been debunked as fake, a CNN analysis shows.
The staged footage starts with a man wearing a Ukrainian military uniform stopping the car for “violating traffic rules” before telling the woman in the car: “Scumbag, give me your documents.”
After hearing the woman speak Russian, the man in uniform calls her a “pig, stupid scumbag” and fires several rounds with his rifle, scaring the child in the car. Both the woman and the child can be heard screaming.
The dashcam video was shared widely on Russian Telegram accounts and even on official Twitter accounts, such as the Russian ministry of foreign affairs and the Russian embassy in London.
However, open-source analysts on Twitter (
@Tatarigami_UA,
@PStyle0ne1 and
@EjShahid) geolocated the footage as well within Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine’s Donetsk region.
A CNN analysis confirmed the location as on the outskirts of the city of Makiivka, about 30 kilometers (20 miles) from the front line.
Local people even went to the site and took a
picture of the tree branches, which have a distinctive shape, further corroborating the geolocation of the video.
A pro-Russia Telegram channel with more than 300,000 subscribers,
Veteran Notes, admitted that the video is fake.
"This video is fake. This was a botched exercise. We still have a lot to learn about such information operations," it posted.
After being debunked by the open source community, Russia’s official ministry of foreign affairs Twitter account took down
the video, without acknowledging the incident was fabricated.
The Russian Embassy in the UK still had the
video up as of 12 p.m. ET.