Fake video of Vladimir Putin declaring peace with Ukraine seeks to cause chaos online

The clip shortly follows a deepfake of Volodymyr Zelensky surrendering to Russia

(SPUTNIK/AFP via Getty Images)

A video showing Russian president Vladimir Putin declaring peace with Ukraine has been found to be a fake.

In the video, Mr Putin states that he has “managed to reach peace with Ukraine” and that Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014, will become a republic inside Ukraine.

The address was, in fact, spliced together using other clips of Mr Putin from 21 February with a new audio track replacing the original speech.

“Putin makes a slight hand gesture at 00:08 seconds in the edited video which can be seen in the original footage at 00:10 seconds into the video”, Reuters, which debunked the video, states.

“Further, on comparing the two videos side by side, Reuters found that Putin’s hand gestures, the position of his hands on the desk and the tilt of his head all match the source footage. A few wide-angle shots are included in the edited clip which do not exactly correspond with the timestamps in the original video. They can instead be seen later in the original footage.”

As well as the fake video of Mr Putin, a deepfake of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was also spread on social media.

The video showed Mr Zelensky claiming that he had ordered troops to stand down. The video was aired in a news broadcast on the television channel Ukraine 24, apparently due to hackers that breached the station, and appeared on the website for Segodnya, a Russian-language Ukrainian tabloid newspaper.

“It was easily debunked because of three factors - firstly the deepfake itself is of poor quality, secondly the Ukrainian authorities had done extensive prebunking warning of this scenario and thirdly they had the power of instant rebuttal across social media channels from Zelensky himself,” Sam Gregory, disinformation expert and Program Director of international non-profit organization WITNESS, said.

Nathaniel Gleicher, head of security policy at Meta, Facebook’s parent company, tweeted on Wednesday that the Zelensky video had been removed from the company’s platforms after it was shared for violating policy against misleading manipulated media.

“We are not going to lay down any weapons until our victory,” Mr Zelensky said in a post shared on his Telegram account, calling the deepfake a “childish provocation”.