On the day of the USA’s election, the pro-Russian Telegram channels spread the news that, in Ivano-Frankivsk, during the service in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church cathedral, seemingly in a shared prayer, people asked for Republican candidate for the American presidency, Donald Trump, to lose the election because he’s the “antichrist” and “devil.” Our fact-checkers have debunked this claim.
What happened?
On November 5, Telegram-channel Shkvarka News (Шкварка News) systematically spread Russian propaganda. They published a video of 21 seconds, where the priest spoke about the service in the Greek Catholic Cathedral says the following:
“Trump is an antichrist. With him, the end and the death of the entire world will come. It’s not an accident that recently, a phrase that Trump is the last president of the USA was found in an old book. Let’s pray for the clear judgment of the American people so that they won’t let the devil come to power,” the priest supposedly said.
The video was shared by other pro-Russian Telegram channels such as First Kharkivskyi (Первый Харьковский) and Operation Z: War correspondents of Russian spring (Операция Z: Военкоры русской весны), Russian online media Lenta.RU (archive), Russian spring (Русская весна, архів), Eurasia Daily (archive), and Russian social media VKtontakte and Odnoklasniki (1, 2, 3), and on video platforms available for Russian audience (1, 2, 3).
Analysis
First of all, seeing an unusual facial expression of the priest in the video, which is typical for content created via artificial intelligence, we started to look for its source.
The service in The Holy Resurrection Cathedral of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church from November 5 was translated live through YouTube on their channel. We’ve found a recording of this event and checked the video.
In general, the church service was live for an hour. The part with the preaching, the fragment of which was used in the video included in the Telegram post, where Father Stepan Balahura speaks, lasts from 11m20s to 17m10s. He makes no mention of Donald Trump in his speech.
Then, we checked the official records for the Ivano-Frankivsk archeparchy of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. On the website from November 5, they’ve published a debunking of the video, spread by pro-Russian propagandists. In the archeparchy, they said that the video is fake and was created through deepfake technology.
“We officially claim that the contents of this video are absolutely false and created with the aim of manipulation. We urge people not to trust these fake materials and pay attention to the source of this information,” the archeparchy’s representative said.
So, the shared video is a fake and deepfake, created by pro-Russian channels to discredit the Ukrainian priests and faith and promote the narrative that “Ukraine doesn’t make its own decisions and is dependent on the USA,” particularly that it’s dependent on the results of the elections in the States.
Conclusion: Fake, deepfake
Author: Olha Yakovlieva
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