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| - Fact Check: Video implicating Zelenskyy for war on New York billboard is digitally altered
The extended version of the viral video on YouTube was uploaded on July 15, 2021, months before Russia launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It did not contain the billboard.
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India Today Fact Check
The extended version of the viral video doesn’t contain the billboard as seen in the latter. The video in question was digitally altered.
During the two-day summit in Lithuania, where the leaders of NATO’s 31 member nations met, US President Joe Biden told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, “The United States is doing everything we can to get you everything we can.” Biden during a speech at Lithuania’s Vilnius University expressed support for Ukraine and NATO unity on June 12. “We will not waver,” he said.
But Biden’s continued support for Ukraine and Zelenskyy has been widely criticised by many in the US, especially members and supporters of the opposition, the Republican Party. So, a little more than a week before the Lithuania summit, a video that was widely shared on social media showed a massive billboard declaring "No Zelensky, No War".
Sharing the video, a Twitter user wrote, "So apparently some Americans are fed up with the bullsh*t warmongering rhetoric coming from Washington. ‘No Zelensky, No War’ (Advertising Banner in New York)." Its archived version can be seen here.
India Today found that the viral video was digitally altered to change what was being displayed on the billboard.
Our Probe
A reverse image search of the video’s keyframes on Google led us to its extended version on YouTube, uploaded on July 15, 2021, months before Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The video’s description read, “Walking in New York City 4K. 5th Avenue. People, Cars and Street Sounds.”
In both videos, we observed the same set of people crossing the road at an intersection before the camera panned upward to the Tiffany & Co. flagship store. A blonde woman in a black dress could be seen walking her small dog across a busy street. A few more people with cream and red backpacks were also visible in both videos. A comparison between the two videos can be seen below.
There was one noticeable difference, however. The billboard in the YouTube version did not contain any message about Ukraine or Zelenskyy. It featured a portrait of a model.
When was the video shot?
As the camera in the YouTube panned across towards the Tiffany & Co. store and the billboard, we observed a black-coloured traffic light in the background. This Tiffany & Co. store, we found, is located on New York’s Fifth Avenue. Using Google Street View, we located the store and found the angle from which the viral video was shot.
We noticed that in the latest Street View available for this location — June 2022 — the traffic light was yellow in colour, unlike the video where it was black.
With the historical imagery available in the Street View, we browsed through photos captured on earlier dates. The latest photos of the spot with black traffic lights as seen in the viral video were recorded in June 2019, almost three years before Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
So, while we couldn’t find the exact date the video was shot, it’s evident that footage was digitally altered to show a billboard that declared: “No Zelensky, No War”.
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