A doctored video is circulating online making an outrageous linguistic claim against Ukrainians. StopFake analyzed the video and found it to be doctored. Russian propagandists edited a false claim into the ticker of a legitimate news story from Ukrainian television.
Certain Russian media are disseminating fake stories claiming that Ukraine is about to ban the use of a word – rusak- a term typically used for the common European hare (Lepus europaeus) because the word is associated with Russians and Russia. As proof of this outrageous claim, the ultra-right Russian publication Tsargrad refers to a 22 second video allegedly taken from a live show on the Ukrainian 1+1 television channel. The video in question is from a news story about the 2014-2015 Ukrainian defense of the Donetsk airport, the news ticker running at the bottom of the screen during this item says “The gray hare will not be allowed to be called rusak – Ukrainian parliament”.
This claim is complete nonsense.
The news clip that Russian publications such as Komsomolskaya Pravda and Tsargrad base their fake on has been doctored, the phrase about the rusak hare has been edited in. This can be easily verified by watching the original newscast from January 16. Approximately at 6:18:55 the story about the Donetsk airport battles begins. There is no ticker that reads “The gray hare will not be allowed to be called rusak – Ukrainian parliament” during this item. Instead, the ticker reads: “According to CNN, the White House says Russia’s latest attempts to demoralize Ukrainians have failed.”
Furthermore, there is no mention of any such initiative anywhere in Ukrainian media or on the Ukrainian parliamentary website.
Stories about a banning the word rusak when referring to the common hare began circulating in mid-December of last year, after the satirical group Panorama jokingly posted this idea on their page on the Russian social media platform VKontakte.
This is not the first time that Russian propagandists have resorted to such manipulations. Previously, StopFake analyzed an doctored news story on the Spanish TV channel RTVE, in which a false message was also added to the ticker to discredit Ukrainians seeking asylum in Spain because of Russia’s war against Ukraine.
