Debunking Russian fakes. No, Bellingcat experts didn’t establish that Ukraine has less money for producing fakes, but does so regularly 

Fake BBC reports about Bellingcat became the favorite “thing” of Russian propaganda a long time ago. Our fact-check department debunked them multiple times in the past (case in point). This time, pro-Russian Telegram channels spread the video with a BBC logo about “scientists” from Bellingcat that supposedly uncovered the reduction in the number of fakes produced by Ukraine — due to a lack of financing of Ukrainian “fake-making” from the West. We have analyzed this video. 

What happened? 

Since December 4, pro-Russian Telegram channels like “Ukropskyi fresh”, “Russkyi Z Kharkiv V”, “It’s different” that the CDC included in the list of sources that systemically spread the Russian propaganda start sharing the news about Bellingcat “scientists” establishing the fact that Ukraine systemically produces fakes and finding out that the number of Ukraine-produced fakes has reduced since November 10. 

Moreover, Bellingcat supposedly states that the West stopped financing production of fake news in Ukraine because they lack resources for doing that in the same amount as before. As evidence, the news has a video with a logo of BBC, a British media company. 

“British scientists from Bellingcat stated that Ukraine started to create much fewer fakes. From November 10, there were three times fewer fakes put online by Ukraine than in every month of 2024. Scientists consider the lack of financing to be the main reason for this. If even the West has stopped giving Ukraine money to lie, then Kyiv is not really doing good,” the Telegram posts say. 

The news was also shared by pro-Russian media, including ZOV Donetsk (ZOV Донецк) and UKRGM, and by X social media profiles (1, 2).

Analysis

Bellingcat is an independent international collective of researchers, investigators, and social journalists, the director and founder of which is Eliot Higgins. 

We’ve checked the official resources of both the project and its founder and found that Bellingcat or Eliot Higgins didn’t publish anything connected to the post. The last Bellingcat’s research connected to Ukraine, at the time of the publication of the Ukrainian version of this text, is an installment about the consequences of the Russian army destroying Vovchansk, a city in the north of Kharkiv Oblast that’s become one of the vectors of Russian ground offensive launched in May 2024. 

We also checked official resources of BBC News: their official website, and Х, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube accounts. We didn’t find any videos or news with the corresponding context there as well. 

As such, the next step for us was the video analysis. Video has a background music without voiceover and has graphic elements that the BBC company used in their original video in 2023. These are animations with the text of “BBC News” at the beginning of the video, BBC logo in the upper left part of the frame for the duration of video, end-of-video animation, English subtitles with a red vertical line to the left of text and fading animation. 

But the format of design for BBC news videos (1, 2, 3) for social media at the end of 2023 changed significantly. Video don’t have animation splash screens anymore, the design of the subtitles changed, and, currently, BBC original videos have the date of publication in the upper right part of the video frame. 

Frame-by-frame analysis of the video showed that some shots from the video posted in Telegram channels are comprisedof publicly available photos and video, particularly from official events and lectures where Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy participated and photos of Bellingcat’s director Eliot Higgins from 2023. 

Traditionally, creators also use stock pictures and publicly available clips for fake videos, and they are used here as well.  

Eliot Higgins debunked the video spread by pro-Russian Telegram channels on his official page. 

“I see Twitter’s still being used by Russia to distribute its fake videos, a new one just got posted featuring made up quotes from me,” Higgins said on Bluesky. 

Conclusion: Fake

Author: Anna Ormanzhy