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| - Fact Check: Zelenskyy did NOT respond to a question about Kursk with a smile, here is the truth
The viral video is from the Nato Summit 2023, where Zelenskyy was answering a question about the delivery of long-range missiles from America.
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India Today Fact Check
Viral video is from the 2023 Nato Summit held in Lithuania, where Zelensky was responding to a question about the delivery of weapons from America.
Russia launched a "counter-terror operation" in three border areas as Ukraine’s cross-border attack in the Kursk region entered its fifth day on August 10. This is Kyiv’s biggest cross-border offensive since Moscow invaded Ukraine two-and-a-half years ago, leading to the imposition of a federal-level emergency in Kursk.
Now, a video making the rounds on social media showed Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, seemingly at a public event, smiling and allegedly responding to a question about the situation in Kursk with "I don’t know".
One person shared the video on Facebook writing, "Journalist: ‘Zelenskyi, what's going on in Kursk?’ Zelemsky: ‘I don't know’".
India Today Fact Check found that this video is from the 2023 Nato Summit held in Lithuania, where Zelenskyy was responding to a question about the delivery of weapons from America.
OUR PROBE
A reverse image search of keyframes from the viral video led us to its longer version shared on the YouTube channel of The Independent, on July 12, 2023. Its description stated that this video showed Zelenskyy speaking after the Nato Summit in Lithuania’s Vilnius concluded with the declaration of support for Ukraine.
In it, the viral clip can be seen at the mark of 6:51, when a journalist asked Zelenskyy when Ukraine would receive long-range missiles from the United States. In response, Zelenskyy said "I don’t know" while smiling. He added that it was a complicated decision that had not been made at the time and that Ukraine was having a conversation about it with the Biden administration.
The two-day Nato summit, held on 11-12 July 2023, in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, was attended by Ukraine in the hopes of getting a Nato membership, but it could only get pledges of more arms and ammunition. Ukraine had long been asking the US for long-range ATACMS missiles, but the US remained reluctant, fearing escalation in the war. However, the US quietly delivered a small number of ATACMS missiles that were reportedly used by Ukraine for the first time on the battlefield on October 17, 2023.
As per reports, Zelenskyy has not made a direct reference to the situation in Kursk so far. On August 6, Zelenskyy released a video stating that Ukraine is gaining an upper hand in the usage of drones, strategically impacting the war. In another video, released on August 8, Zelenskyy said that Russia needed to "feel" the consequences of the war it brought to the land of Ukraine. He further praised the ability of the Ukrainian army "to surprise" and achieve results on the battlefield as he announced the launch of the "Army+", a new application for soldiers.
However, Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to the president’s office, made the first acknowledgement of the incursion and said that the root cause of any escalation was unequivocal aggression of Moscow.
It is thus, clear that an old video from the NATO summit was falsely linked to Ukraine’s cross-border offensive in Kursk.
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