Original article (in Bosnian) was published on 29/9/2025; Author: Mladen Lakić
A video of protests in Bulgaria was posted on social media and some websites with the claim that it shows the car of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen being surrounded by demonstrators. The footage was in fact recorded hours before von der Leyen landed in Bulgaria.
European Commission (EC) President Ursula von der Leyen visited Bulgaria in late August 2025 as part of a series of visits to European Union (EU) member states. These included Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Poland, Lithuania, Romania, and Bulgaria. On August 31, von der Leyen visited an arms factory in the city of Sopot, 140 kilometers from Sofia. According to the announcement, her visit to the Bulgarian capital was scheduled for September 1, 2025.
In the context of this visit, a video was shared on social media and in articles on some portals, allegedly showing a protest in which demonstrators surrounded the car carrying von der Leyen.
On August 31, 2025, the portal Sputnik Srbija published an article about this protest, including a video in which demonstrators were allegedly shouting “nazis” at the car carrying the EC president. The clip is 17 seconds long and was posted on the Sputnik Srbija Telegram account nearly half an hour before the article was published.
The article was republished with minor edits by Informer, Epoha and IN4S. The video was also shared on Facebook and Instagram, with claims that it shows protesters in Bulgaria shouting at Ursula von der Leyen’s car (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).
What Are the Facts?
Protests against Ursula von der Leyen’s arrival were held in Sopot. This was reported by international and domestic media (1, 2, 3, 4). According to these reports, the protests were attended by Kostadin Kostadinov, a member of the Bulgarian parliament, a well-known right-wing figure, and leader of the Vazraždane party, which is close to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Two videos from these protests were shared on his Facebook account (1, 2).
However, Ursula von der Leyen was not in the car seen in these videos. More precisely, she was not in Sopot at the time of the protest, according to an analysis of the video published on September 10, 2025, by the Serbian fact-checking portal AFP Provera činjenica.
Based on flight data, Ursula von der Leyen landed in Bulgaria three hours after the video, for which is claimed to show her car surrounded by protesters, was posted.
The earliest upload of the video circulating on social media that AFP was able to find was a post published at 14:02 Bulgarian time, i.e., 13:02 Serbian and Croatian time. The leader of the Vazraždane party, Kostadin Kostadinov, shared a second video showing the same event at 16:30 local time.
To determine when Ursula von der Leyen’s plane landed in Bulgaria, AFP searched flights from Warsaw to Plovdiv on the flight-tracking platform Flightradar24, which identified the relevant aircraft as OO-GPE. In the preceding days, the same plane flew to Riga, Helsinki, and Warsaw, matching von der Leyen’s schedule.
According to Flightradar24, aircraft OO-GPE landed in Bulgaria at 17:34 local time, as shown in the screenshot below that paragraph. A reproduction of ADS-B data on the open-source tracking platform confirms the same arrival time (archived here).
Official Denials
The car in the video belongs to the Bulgarian police, AFP Provera činjenica reported.
Nikolay Nikolov, head of the General Directorate for Gendarmerie, Special Operations, and Counterterrorism at Bulgaria’s Ministry of the Interior, confirmed to AFP that he “was in the car, but without the President of the European Commission”. A spokesperson for Bulgaria’s Ministry of the Interior said in a phone statement to AFP that “the video shows an event that took place hours before Ursula von der Leyen arrived. She was not in the car”.
Bulgaria’s National Security Service told the outlet it had “no information” that a vehicle carrying the EC president had been stopped. The EC confirmed by email to AFP that “the President of the European Commission did not take part in the event shown in the viral video”.
The Serbian fact-checking portal Istinomer also wrote about the false claims that the video shows the car carrying Ursula von der Leyen, in an analysis published on September 19, 2025.Based on the facts, we rate the claim, which was published on the Sputnik Srbija Telegram channel and on its website, that the analyzed video shows a protest in Bulgaria where demonstrators surrounded Ursula von der Leyen’s car as fake news. Other posts are rated as spreading fake news.
