The fake images were shared on social media earlier this month
Images appearing to show Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy holding a Ukrainian football shirt with a swastika on the back have been debunked.
In a Facebook post on March 6, the altered image was posted alongside the words “Say it… You stand with…..??”
The images were also shared on Twitter by some users.
Since the start of the war, Vladimir Putin has made baseless claims that Russia are invading Ukraine to “denazify” the country.
The pictures of Zelenskyy appearing to hold a football shirt with a swastika on the back have been debunked as fake (Facebook)After being fact-checked by AFP, the images were found to have been digitally altered. They found pixel discrepancies around the swastika in the doctored image, indicating that the image had been tampered with.
The original image was posted to Instagram by Zelenskyy on June 8, 2021, and is a picture of him holding up a Ukraine shirt with his name and the number 95 on.
The photo was posted alongside the caption: “The new jersey of Ukraine’s national football team is special. It can shock. It features several important symbols that unite Ukrainians from Luhansk to Uzhgorod, from Chernihiv to Sevastopol. Our country is one and indivisible. Crimea is Ukraine.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/CP3d1w6hTq2/
The image was also used in a number of newspaper and online articles due to the controversy caused by the football shirt when it was launched for Euro 2020. The shirt angered Russia last summer, as it featured Crimea in a map of the country and had ‘glory to Ukraine’ stitched on the collar.
This is not the first time that the Ukrainian president has been the victim of fake news.
On Wednesday a video appearing to show Zelenskyy urging Ukrainians to surrender was removed from Facebook and debunked as a deep fake.
The video had appeared on a Ukrainian tabloid website and had been broadcast on Ukraine 24, a TV channel in the country.
“Enemy hackers” were blamed for the video’s broadcast.
Related links:
- Specially-made LEGO of Zelenskyy and Molotov cocktails raise money for Ukraine
- Footage of ‘Ghost of Kyiv’ shooting down Russian aircraft is actually from video game
- Shocking Ukraine invasion clip is actually from a video game
