Original article (in Serbian) was published on 09/04/2022
Sputnik published an article entitled “Another fake news from reputable Western media”. This “analysis” is based on the insinuation that the photograph used on the cover of the Financial Times (FT) does not faithfully show the crisis in Ukraine because the refugees in the photo are darker-skinned.
The text is based on a post of the editor-in-chief of the news agency Rossiya Segodnya and RT television, Margarita Simonyan, on the Telegram network. Simonyan described the cover photo and the title of the FT text as follows: “Here is what refugees from Ukraine look like in the opinion of the FT”. Over 122,000 Telegram users saw this post, and the photo was deceptively extracted from the site adapted for mobile phones, where some passengers were cut from the original photo.
According to the 2001 census, more than 130 nationalities and ethnic groups live in Ukraine.
Since the photo is the only element of the content Sputnik used to accuse the FT of sharing fake news, we contacted the photo’s author, Dan Kitwood, who confirmed its authenticity. He said that he thinks he had members of the Romanian community in the shot, but he is not completely sure about that since there were people of various nationalities fleeing the war at the train station, so he named them all “passengers”.
“It is amazing how people do not understand that people of different nationalities live together in Ukraine, who are now leaving their homes together. I would say that there is a clear hint of racism in this re-examination of photography”, Kitwood told FakeNews Tragac.