Russia’s Foreign Ministry has been forced to delete its latest dubious evidence of “Nazis” in Ukraine after the video was revealed as a poorly staged fake—by one of the propaganda outlets that first began circulating it.
The two-minute video served as the outrage of the day for the Kremlin’s numerous mouthpieces Monday, where it was touted as irrefutable evidence of Ukrainian troops abusing civilians who dared to speak Russian.
In the clip, filmed on a woman’s dash-cam, a vehicle with a Ukrainian flag on the back pulls up before two men in camouflage jump out with rifles and one of them begins cursing out the woman before appearing to fire at her car while a child sits inside it.
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“Once a Nazi always a Nazi,” Russia’s Foreign Ministry captioned the video on its official Twitter account. “This is the kind of terror Ukrainians are living in: witness Ukrainian military berate and shoot at a mother with a child in the backseat, calling her ‘pig’ & ‘scum’ simply for… speaking Russian. No Nazis, they say…”
Unfortunately for Russia’s diplomats, if the overacting in the clip wasn’t enough of a red flag, the video was almost immediately geolocated to an area deep in Russian-controlled Donetsk. Moreover, dash-cams have been banned on Ukrainian territory during the war.
Even pro-Kremlin Telegram channels admitted the video was a clumsy fake.
“The video is fake. Our [guys] are clumsily practicing. In carrying out such information operations, our [guys] still have to learn and learn,” wrote the pro-war channel Notes of a Veteran, one of the first to begin circulating the clip.
By Tuesday afternoon, Russia’s Foreign Ministry had quietly deleted the video from its Twitter feed but not acknowledged that it was a fake.
