Russian propaganda has a motive for spreading disinformation for and about the United States, one of the key Ukrainian allies in the full-scale war. One of the key methods it uses is producing fakes that aim to worsen the relationships between America and Ukraine. As such, recently, pro-Russian channels “reported” on a baseball game in the USA, where an announcement for a movie called The End of Ukraine was advertised. We’ve received a request to fact-check this information — and here’s what we’ve found out. 

What happened? 

On January 18, pro-Russian Telegram channels Олеся Лосєва (archive), Одесское Общественное Телевидение Z (archive), and Александр Семченко (archive) shared posts saying that an advertisement announcing the release of the movie called The End of Ukraine was spotted during an American baseball match. 

The date — April 18 — and a logo of Amazon’s on-demand video service, Prime Video, were under the movie’s title. 

Read our other fact-checking pieces: No, Politico Didn’t Release a Story About Zelenskyy’s Popularity Dropping by 63%  

Analysis 

We started with using reverse image search on Google. We saw a similar image on TikTok, in a video (archive) posted by a user @jimchrisman. 

Among other things, the video caught our attention because, instead of The End of Ukraine title from the post, the ad had the words “NATIONALS vs BRAVES.”

In a video, it’s said that one of the baseball players broke a video camera lens. 

Next, we used reverse image search again. This time, we’ve searched for a screenshot with an image of a broken camera lens. 

We’ve found a platform for sports blogging, SB Nation, and an article about a baseball player Adam Jones damaging a camera. 

And, following the keywords, Adam Jones broke camera ball, we found a fragment of a baseball match between the New York Yankees and Baltimore Orioles from September 14, 2014. The video was published on the official YouTube channel of the professional baseball league of North America, Major League Baseball (MLB).

The video confirmed that where we saw an ad for The End of Ukraine movie in propagandists’ posts, another text entirely was actually present. 

So, propagandists took a 10-year-old snapshot from a match of the American baseball league and edited the ad’s text on one of the banners in the video. 

Conclusion: Fake 

Author: Ihor Sum

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