On November 17, Georgian– and Russian-language Facebook accounts (1; 2; 3) shared a video showing a man wearing a press vest and lying on the ground with a microphone. Speaking in English, the man says he is on the edge of the town together with local residents and that they are under heavy artillery fire. He also mentions a woman with a dog, who can be seen in the footage. According to the accompanying description, the man is a BBC correspondent reporting “under Russian fire” when a woman suddenly enters the frame and asks whether he needs help. The authors of the posts suggest that the BBC journalist was exaggerating the severity of the situation, but a local resident exposed him by interrupting the scene.
The video from a BBC report is being shared manipulatively and creates the impression that the footage is staged. In reality, the report was published in March 2022 and shows civilians moving during the artillery shelling.
The description accompanying the circulated video contains phrases such as “how the Western media covers the issue of the ‘special military operation’” and “this is all you need to know about the most ‘free,’ ‘democratic,’ and ‘truthful’ Western media.” The goal of the posts is to suggest that the BBC correspondent was lying in the report and that Western media is unreliable when covering the conflict in Ukraine.
The person seen in the footage is Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor. The report from which the footage is taken was published on March 7, 2022. It shows how, during the battle for the city of Irpin, civilians were trying to move toward Kyiv. The report includes Ukrainian soldiers assisting civilians and journalists as they evacuate. The sound of explosions can be heard constantly in the background. It also shows the moment of one such explosion and the bodies of a family killed in the shelling.
The several-second clip circulating on Facebook is taken from the part where Jeremy Bowen is lying on the ground and speaking. Even in this segment, it is visible at the beginning that the woman shown in the video is crouching as well. Other civilians and soldiers seen in the video are also taking cover from the shelling.
Therefore, the woman’s appearance in the video does not prove that the footage is not real or that Jeremy Bowen is lying or deliberately exaggerating the severity of the situation.
It is noteworthy that the video accompanied by this false description had already been circulated in 2022. At the time, it was fact-checked by AFP and Voice of America. In 2022, a photo taken from this video with the same misleading description was also shared by Dmitry Polyanskiy, Russia’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN.
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