Two videos of a man dressed as a Ukrainian soldier being filmed in a forest have been shared widely on social media suggesting he is a reservist being used to stage or exaggerate the country’s crisis.
The first clip has more than 5,400 likes on Twitter (here) and shows the man kneeling in front of a separate camera, pulling his hair as if in distress.
“Ukrainian reservist doing some sort of acting for the camera?” the tweet asks in its caption.
In the second clip, also seen on (here) Twitter, the man is being filmed while walking through a wooded area with a gun.
“Everything is staged in #Ukraine. Everything is fake, their claims are fake, fake narratives etc,” the user writes.
But the videos are not evidence of a real-world crisis being faked; they were captured as part of a shoot for a music video.
Reuters traced the clips back to the TikTok account of Peter Sherekin (here and here) who is the man dressed as a soldier in the videos and is indeed an actor (here , ru.kinorium.com/name/4629025/ and www.kinopoisk.ru/name/5348998/).
On Oct. 14, he posted a 10-minute video to his YouTube channel showing the same and similar scenes in the forest as part of a “backstage” view of his shoot which he says is a music video for Ukrainian singer Anna Khanina, who also appears (here).
Reuters spoke to Khanina via Facebook messenger. She also said the clips were from a music video shoot for her new single. “I was present at the shooting when these shots were being taken for my new song ‘Lullaby’,” she said.
The final cut is yet to be released online, Khanina said, adding: “The song is about the pain for all the inhabitants of Ukraine that the war causes.”
It can be heard on Spotify here and YouTube here.
VERDICT
Partly false. The videos show an actor dressed as a soldier being filmed for a music video.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here.
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