A video of a TV series shooting is being shared with a false claim that it shows Ukrainians are faking injuries amidst Russia's invasion of the country.
The video has gone viral with the false claim after Russia launched an attack on Ukraine forcing several people to leave their homes and many others to join the ongoing fight. The social networking site, Meta (Facebook) recently, took down several Russian accounts and pages for spreading disinfomation in Ukraine about the current situation.
The viral video shows make up being applied to actors to show injuries on them and bleeding from their faces and is being shared with text in Hindi that translates to, "This is a new propaganda to create a narrative against Russia. It is not necessary that what the media shows is true, there is every possibility of it being planted."
(Original text in Hindi - ये नया प्रोपगंडा है Russia के विरुद्ध नैरेटिव बनाने के लिए। ज़रूरी नही कि मीडिया वाले जो दिखाए वो सच ही हो, प्लांटेड होने की पूरी संभावना है।)
FACT CHECK
BOOM found that the video shows the shooting of a TV series called Contamin and was first posted on TikTok in December 2021, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
We first broke the video into keyframes and a reverse image search using keywords of 'Ukraine' which showed links to fact checks done by AFP and which said the video was first posted on TikTok by a member from the show's production team.
Using information from this, we ran a keyword search on Twitter and found a tweet by a handle @cinemapeople_ who had posted a photo of the same scene as in the viral video.
Responding to queries from fact checkers, the person said he is a still photographer and had shot these photos in 2020 and that the series was about the pandemic.
Identified as Artem, the photographer also shared a link to his Facebook page where he had uploaded the same pictures and more in an album titled 'Contamin'.
In the above photo posted on December 7, 2020, the same actor can be seen getting his make up done.
We ran a Google search for the series and found a website Contamin-the series listing details about the show.
Additionally, AFP fact check in their story, quoted Daria Driuchenko, the user who had first posted the video on TikTok confirming that the video is the behind-the-scenes footage of the making of Contamin. "We are filmmakers so we have a lot of 'making-of' videos," AFP quoted Druichenko.