In August, a video, supposedly from the Euronews TV channel, was circulating online. It reported on a Ukrainian man who snuck into a store in Poland to rob it but froze to death in the refrigerator. Our fact-checking department figured out if it’s true.
What happened?
On August 20, a pro-Russian Telegram channel “Kot Kostyan — the official channel” spread (archive) a news story stating that a Ukrainian broke into a store in Poland to rob it but froze to death in the refrigerator. This news was accompanied by a story that looked like a video from the Euronews TV channel.
“The story of a Ukrainian in Europe: he broke into a store to rob it, saw a police car passing by, hid in the refrigerator, couldn’t get out of the refrigerator, and froze to death. That’s it,” the post reads.
Telegram channels “The World Today with Yuriy Podolyaka Live” and “Bocharik (yes, the same one)” and X accounts @OlgaBazova, @bocharik, and @ValentinaMihay5 also shared the news.
Analysis
We could not find any information about the death of a Ukrainian man in a refrigerator during a robbery.
Next, since the video on Telegram contained the EuroNews logo and captions in English, we contacted the official resources of their English-language editorial office.
EuroNews is an international 24-hour European news channel founded in 1933 and headquartered in Lyon, France.
EuroNews has an official website and pages on social networks Х, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Flipboard, Dailymotion, LinkedIn, and a YouTube channel.
A video distributed in Telegram was created in a format the EuroNews uses on Facebook and X. After analyzing these platforms, we did not find any news with the relevant context. We also did not find information about it in another format on the website and other media platforms.
In the next step, we analyzed the video sequence and found that various publicly available sources were used for the footage. For example, the footage from the store’s refrigerator is from a video published three years ago on the Hamid Paresh YouTube channel (archive), which shows meat racks and overhead storage systems.
The footage of the man is from a video published (archive) by the Australian TV channel 9News. In that news report, journalists referred (archive) to the local police reporting that, in Melbourne, a man snuck into a butcher shop, cooked some meat, stole $410, and fled.
So, this is a fake story created by Russian propagandists. To illustrate it, they used footage from a 2021 Australian news media outlet and footage from a meat storage from 2020. To make the fake news more credible, the propagandists used the logo and graphic design of EuroNews. Such fakes are created to defame Ukrainians worldwide.
Conclusion: Fake
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