Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia was forced to delete the latest suspicious evidence of “Nazis” in Ukraine after the video was revealed to be a poorly staged fake—by one of the propaganda shop first started circulating it.
The two-minute video sparked outrage of the day against Kremlinby several mouthpieces on Monday, where it was touted as irrefutable evidence of the Ukrainian military’s abuse of civilians who dared to speak Russian.
In the clip, captured by a woman’s dashcam, a car with a Ukrainian flag in the background stops before two men in camouflage jump out with rifles and one of them starts cursing. cursed the woman before shooting at her car while a child sat inside it.
The Russian Foreign Ministry captioned the video on its official Twitter account: “Once a Nazi, always a Nazi”. “This is the kind of terrorism that Ukrainians live in: witnessing the Ukrainian army berating and shooting at a mother with children sitting in the back seat, calling her a ‘pig’ & ‘scum’ just because… speak Russian. No Nazis, they say…”
Unfortunately for Russian diplomats, if the clip’s exaggeration wasn’t enough of a warning, the video was almost immediately geolocated in an area deep within Russian-controlled Donetsk. Furthermore, dash cams were banned on Ukrainian territory during the war.
Even pro-Kremlin Telegram channels admitted the video was a clumsy spoof.
“The video is fake. Ours [guys] clumsily practicing. In carrying out such communication activities, we [guys] still have to learn and learn,” wrote pro-war channel Notes of a Veteran, one of the first to start going viral.
By Tuesday afternoon, the Russian Foreign Ministry had quietly delete video from its Twitter feed but does not admit that it is a fake video.
