False claims about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have been circulating online, from dangerous assertions that the war is a hoax and victims of the conflict are smearing fake blood on their faces, to fake allegations that Ukraine is producing bioweapons to trigger another pandemic.
And with no sign that the dangerous spread of misinformation is slowing down, it threatens to undermine the very real horrors of the conflict. Here i takes a look at some of the claims being spread and where they came from:
A video claiming to show Ukrainian people smearing fake blood on each others’ faces is making the rounds on messaging platform Telegram, and is being used as evidence to support the false claim that civilians are pretending to be hurt and the conflict is not real.
It is the latest iteration of a popular conspiracy trope that claims actors – dubbed “crisis actors” – are being used to play victims during global catastrophes or events of war and conflict. The aim of the false claim is to undermine reality by implying the devastating situations are staged or fake.
In this instance, the content of the video is been taken from a 2020 Ukrainian TV series called Contamin.
The actor in the video can also be seen in these behind-the-scene images from the series, which were tweeted in December 2020.
Images taken four...
Russian military command has been lying for the fifth month in a row about battlefield “successes,” claiming that Russian forces are advancing west of Kupiansk in the Kharkiv region. However, this...