In another fabricated video with a logo of the Polish channel TVP World, a Ukrainian performance artist was supposedly brought to court and found guilty because of his false reports that made the country’s police exhume 420 graves.
What happened?
From June 10, Telegram channels that systemically publish Russian propaganda, such as Bear (“Медведь”), Shvarka 2.0 (“Шкварка 2.0”), Shaman Rakhu (“Шаман Раху”) and others, began to spread the information that in March 2025 in Poland, Ukrainian performance artist Oleh Lebedenko was arrested and then convicted. Because of him, supposedly, Polish police exhumed 420 bodies of dead Poles.
The authors of the post say that since 2022, Oleh anonymously reported unreliable data about the wanted criminal who was “killed and then put into an existing grave” to the police, which is why Polish police had to exhume bodies in the country — to check. As proof of their words, the post offers a video with a logo of TVP World, background music, and English subtitles.
“The goal of the Ukrainian idiot was to make Poles ‘recall how the corpses look like.’ Is it Schizophrenia or just Ukrainianness?” the post ponders.
Analysis
First, we’ve checked the resources of English-speaking Polish media TVP World that is represented by official website, social media Х, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
We’ve found that the media company didn’t publish video or news related to a Ukrainian man, Oleh Lebedenko, who was supposedly guilty of providing police with unreliable information that led to the exhumations.
Moreover, we found no related information or information about similar incidents on official resources of Poland’s police or in credible media.
For the next step, we looked at the video itself, comparing it to the original content produced by TVP World for Instagram (because the shared video has the same format.)
We figured that the video the pro-Russian channels spread doesn’t contain live reporting or live sound from the place where events are happening like original videos of TVP World.
We’ve analyzed the frames from the video shared in pro-Russian posts. To create it — like in all cases we’ve previously gone through analyzing fake videos — authors used stock photos (1, 2). Then, the subtitles with the false information and background music were added.
We also found publicly available photos and videos in the shared video. In particular, they contain fragments of the footage from the Constitutional Tribunal of Poland (Trybunał Konstytucyjny) with the head judge Julii Przyłębska that was actually taken from the video for 2021. These fragments debunk any claims about “sentencing a Ukrainian artist in 2025” because Julii Przyłębska held the position of the head judge until 2025. In December 2024, she retired (1, 2), and since December 10, 2024, she hasn’t been included in the list of judges of the Constitutional Tribunal in Poland.
One of the especially cynical things pro-Russian authors added to the fabricated video are the photos made in September 2022 during the exhumation of bodies of victims of Russian attacks — and Russian occupation — in the mass grave in Izium, Kharkiv Oblast, after it was liberated by Ukraine’s army (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).
In Izium’s forest, 447 bodies were found. Among them, 414 civilians and 22 soldiers, and 11 unidentified bodies. Most of the dead, including civilians, died violently. The evidence of torture was found on 30 bodies.
Conclusion: Fake
Authors: Anna Ormanzhy
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