This video is staged, as evidenced by the distinct Russian accent of the unknown people in military uniform. The propagandists also used the logo of the Trukha Telegram channel in the video, yet there is no such post there.
Pro-Russian Telegram channels and social media accounts are sharing a video in which Ukrainian military personnel allegedly threaten US presidential candidate Donald Trump and burn his strawman. Men in military uniform declare that Trump is a «traitor who will pay for what he has done» and accuse him of allegedly «not giving weapons» to Ukraine.
However, the video is obviously staged. First, the men in the video are not native speakers of the Ukrainian language, as evidenced by their unnatural pronunciation and wrong accents in the simplest words. This is far from the first fake of Russian propaganda, which is outed by the bad pronunciation of the actors; recently StopFake already refuted a similar clip in the story Fake: Ukrainian Soldier’s Widow Forced to Pay for the Equipment in Which He Died. And secondly, no Ukrainian source published this video, although the authors of the publications claim that they borrowed the clip from Ukrainian media. Even on the popular Trukha Telegram channel, whose logo is on the video, has no corresponding post. Thus, by applying a fake watermark, the propagandists tried to give extra credibility to this story.
Interestingly, a Google news search on this topic using the keywords «burning», «strawman» and «Trump» does turn up several similar incidents — including in Russia. Back in 2018, senior women from the political movement Putin’s Squad burned a strawman of then-President Donald Trump for «Russophobia» and threatened him with nuclear war.
