Original article (in Serbian) was published on 21/03/2022
“A dead Ukrainian civilian, one of the civilian victims of the Russian bombing, is smoking while the camera crew arranges the corpses for filming”, one Twitter user wrote on March 17. The video he shared shows bodies in plastic bags in a truck trailer, and the head of a man smoking a cigarette is “peeking” out. Two men place the bodies in the appropriate position for filming. However, the video has nothing to do with the attacks in Ukraine. It was taken from a video set for the song of the Russian rapper Husky, published in September 2020.
The video was shared more than a hundred times in a few days, and more than 400 people liked it. In response to some of the comments suggesting that it was a fake video made during the pandemic, this user wrote to them to “address the Ukrainians and ask them why they are using it”, even though he is the one who uses it.
However, the video has nothing to do with the coronavirus or the war in Ukraine, except that it is now used on social networks to imply that there are no civilian casualties in Ukraine due to Russian aggression.
As we determined by searching the video, it was first shared by the Russian set designer and artistic director Vasya Ivanov, on his TikTok in March 2021. Along with the clip, he wrote “Filming the Husky clip – Never again”, and included hashtags such as “backstage”, “Husky”, “rapper Husky”, “filming”.
It represents a detail from a video set for the song “Never Again” by the Russian rapper Husky. This song was published on YouTube in September 2020. As can be seen in the video, this particular scene does not exist because it was filmed “backstage”, that is, it shows the preparations for the filming process. However, in the last frames of the video, the same building and the same truck can be seen as in the video from Twitter. The fact that Vasya Ivanov really participated in the production of this video can be seen in the last frame from YouTube, where he is signed as a set designer.
Below the video on his TikTok account, there are comments from last year where TikTokers from Brazil wrote that this same video was being used on social media at the time (March 2021) as evidence for claims that the coronavirus pandemic was staged. A year later, the same video is circulating again, but this time in the context of the war in Ukraine.
Several more clips from the “backstage” can be found on the account of this Russian set designer. For example, one video shows how a scene was filmed in which a crane lifts a dozen bodies in plastic bags, connected by a cable. The second clip shows the same scene with the bodies and features an orange truck. Since this video appeared in the wrong context even earlier on social networks worldwide, other fact-checking organizations such as Reuters and AFP also dealt with it. Fact-checkers of the AFP agency determined by geolocating the video that it was made in Shchepkina Street in Moscow.
This is not the first time that footage from videos or commercials has been used as “evidence” for fake claims. Thus, filming a promotional video for the Israeli hospital was claimed to be proof of staging the pandemic, and the same claims followed the shooting of a video for Orbán’s campaign. We also noticed a case where the media in Serbia believed that the masked men in one video were Veljko Belivuk and his team, but, in fact, they were extras filming a domestic show.