Authors
Vaibhav is a part of Newschecker’s English team, where he spots and debunks all kinds of misinformation, making the rounds on the internet. A Journalism graduate from St. Xavier's College, Mumbai, he holds an M.A degree in Philosophy and an M.Phil from Delhi University.
As Russia continues to bomb the city of Kiev and presses forward with its invasion of Ukraine, support for Ukrainian forces have been pouring in from all over the world with many protests in Russia and around the world against Vladimir Putin. While the invasion continues, social media has been overwhelmed with uncorroborated claims and conjecture about the ever changing ground scenario. In light of these events a video has been going viral claiming to show ‘Turkish football fans chanting against Putin.’
This video has been shared on Twitter by the Twitter account lagrimacanta who has around 59,000 followers on the platform. The video has garnered over 1.7 million views with 522 likes with the caption ‘Turkish football fans are highly critical of Putin.’
Newschecker found similar claims with different captions.
In the video Turkish football fans can be head chanting expletives in Turkish against Putin, including ‘“He looks like a d***k, sinister face, son of a b***h, Vladimir Putin”.
Overnight, the city of Kiev was hit with multiple blasts as Russian troops moved further into Ukrainian territory attacking from the East, North and South. Media reports claim that they have been met with strong resistance by the Ukrainian military, even as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video “We won’t lay down our arms. We will defend our state.” Ukraine has asked the European Union to impose more sanctions on Russian assets in Europe and the United States to freeze any kind of western funding Russia has on its books. Many Russian civilians also took to the streets to protest against the ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
Factcheck/ Verification
To verify the authenticity of the video, Newschecker conducted a reverse image search of the key-frames of the video on Google and found a video uploaded on the Snapchat Fenerbahce Günlugu channel on Youtube. The video was uploaded on 4th May, 2016 titled ‘Fenerbahce’s fans abuse to VLADIMIR PUTIN. | FB FANS vs PUTIN.’ The channel uploads Turkish football team Fenerbache’s fan videos from matches and outside the stadium.
Judging by the centrefield logo and stadium banners it appears the match was a Europa League match played between Turkish side Fenerbahce and Russian side Lokomotiv Moskow, highlights of which are available below.
According to the Sky Sports Football website, the last time the two sides played against each other was on 16th February, 2016 in a Europa league match at the Sukru Saracoglu stadium which is the home stadium to Fenerbahce fans. In this match Fenerbahce beat Lokomotiv Moskow 2-0 in the UEFA Europa League Round of 32.
Conclusion
According to the investigation conducted by the Newschecker team, it was found that the viral video of Turkish football fans chanting against Vladimir Putin is an old video shared out of context.
Result: False Context/ Missing Context
Our Sources
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Authors
Vaibhav is a part of Newschecker’s English team, where he spots and debunks all kinds of misinformation, making the rounds on the internet. A Journalism graduate from St. Xavier's College, Mumbai, he holds an M.A degree in Philosophy and an M.Phil from Delhi University.
