Side-by-side screenshot of videos being shared on social media to suggest the war in Ukraine is ... [+]
Have you seen a video doing the rounds of a woman pushing a stroller with a caption about Ukraine? The viral video shows a split screen of the woman walking along a typical road in a European country, alongside that same woman with a completely different background showing a war-torn city. But it has nothing to do with Ukraine.
Many people who support Russia and its invasion of Ukraine have posted videos over the past year supposedly showing that the war is staged for TV cameras. Some people even suggest the war is like Wag the Dog, the 1997 movie starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert DeNiro, where they make up a completely fictitious war shot in front of green screens.
The images being shared on social media trying to suggest the war in Ukraine is fake.
One Twitter user, who goes by the name “nikola 3,” posted the video of a woman with her stroller to Twitter on Monday, implying that all the devastation we’ve seen coming out of Ukraine is somehow fake. The video is very pixelated, which makes it much harder to figure out what’s happening for the average Twitter user.
A tweet sent in order to spread conspiracy theories about Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
But the rubble and destruction in Ukraine is very real. And this video trick was created by a person named Konstantin Kovalenko who does visual effects for a living. You can see his work over at ArtStation where he has more mock-ups of the effect he applied to the woman pushing the stroller.
As the Twitter debunking account HoaxEye points out, the video appears to have been shot in Malta, though that couldn’t be confirmed. All we know for sure is that nobody is trying to pass this off as a “fake scene” from Ukraine.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and so many people in the country have needlessly lost their lives. There have been 21,965 civilian casualties in the country, including 8,231 people killed and 13,734 injured, according to the latest figures from the United Nations. And that doesn’t even count the military casualties on both sides.
AVDIIVKA, UKRAINE - MARCH 23: A view of the damaged residential buildings due to the Russian strikes ... [+]
What does Ukraine actually look like right now? It’s heart-breaking, to say the least. The recent photo above from Getty Images is real, no matter what pro-war Twitter trolls might have you believe.
