{"id":11769,"date":"2025-09-30T08:52:50","date_gmt":"2025-09-30T07:52:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/seecheck.org\/?p=11769"},"modified":"2025-10-16T08:56:50","modified_gmt":"2025-10-16T07:56:50","slug":"the-viral-video-does-not-show-bulgarian-protesters-surrounding-ursula-von-der-leyens-car","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seecheck.org\/index.php\/2025\/09\/30\/the-viral-video-does-not-show-bulgarian-protesters-surrounding-ursula-von-der-leyens-car\/","title":{"rendered":"The Viral Video Does Not Show Bulgarian Protesters Surrounding Ursula von der Leyen\u2019s Car"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Original article<\/a>\u00a0(in Bosnian) was published on 29\/9\/2025; Author:\u00a0Mladen Laki\u0107<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a> an arms factory in the city of Sopot, 140 kilometers from Sofia. According to the announcement<\/a>, her visit to the Bulgarian capital was scheduled for September 1, 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On August 31, 2025, the portal Sputnik Srbija published an article<\/a> about this protest, including a video<\/a> in which demonstrators were allegedly shouting \u201cnazis\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The article was republished with minor edits by Informer,<\/a> Epoha<\/a> and IN4S<\/a>. The video was also shared on Facebook and Instagram, with claims that it shows protesters in Bulgaria shouting at Ursula von der Leyen\u2019s car (1<\/a>, 2<\/a>, 3<\/a>, 4<\/a>, 5<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Are the Facts?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Protests against Ursula von der Leyen\u2019s arrival were held in Sopot. This was reported by international and domestic media (1<\/a>, 2<\/a>, 3<\/a>, 4<\/a>). According to these reports, the protests were attended by Kostadin Kostadinov<\/a>, a member of the Bulgarian parliament, a well-known right-wing figure<\/a>, and leader of the Vazra\u017edane party, which is close to<\/a> Russian President Vladimir Putin. Two videos from these protests were shared on his Facebook account (1<\/a>,<\/a> 2<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a> of the video published on September 10, 2025, by the Serbian fact-checking portal AFP Provera \u010dinjenica.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The earliest upload of the video circulating on social media that AFP was able to find was a <\/em>post published at 14:02<\/em><\/a> Bulgarian time, i.e., 13:02 Serbian and Croatian time. The leader of the Vazra\u017edane party, Kostadin Kostadinov, shared a <\/em>second video<\/em><\/a> showing the same event at 16:30 local time.<\/em>
<\/em>To determine when Ursula von der Leyen\u2019s plane landed in Bulgaria, AFP searched flights from Warsaw to Plovdiv on the flight-tracking platform <\/em>Flightradar24<\/em><\/a>, 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\u2019s schedule.<\/em>
<\/em>According to Flightradar24, aircraft OO-GPE landed in Bulgaria at 17:34 local time, as shown in the screenshot below that paragraph. A <\/em>reproduction of ADS-B data<\/em><\/a> on the open-source tracking platform confirms the same arrival time (archived <\/em>here<\/em><\/a>).<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Official Denials<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The car in the video belongs to the Bulgarian police, AFP Provera \u010dinjenica reported.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nikolay Nikolov, head of the General Directorate for Gendarmerie, Special Operations, and Counterterrorism at Bulgaria\u2019s Ministry of the Interior, confirmed to AFP that he \u201cwas in the car, but without the President of the European Commission\u201d. A spokesperson for Bulgaria\u2019s Ministry of the Interior said in a phone statement to AFP that \u201cthe video shows an event that took place hours before Ursula von der Leyen arrived. She was not in the car\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bulgaria\u2019s National Security Service told the outlet it had \u201cno information\u201d that a vehicle carrying the EC president had been stopped. The EC confirmed by email to AFP that \u201cthe President of the European Commission did not take part in the event shown in the viral video\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a> 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\u2019s car as fake news<\/strong>. Other posts are rated as spreading fake news<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Original article\u00a0(in Bosnian) was published on 29\/9\/2025; Author:\u00a0Mladen Laki\u0107 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":11770,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[316],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fact-checks"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/seecheck.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/seecheck.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/seecheck.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seecheck.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seecheck.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11769"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/seecheck.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11769\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11772,"href":"https:\/\/seecheck.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11769\/revisions\/11772"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seecheck.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/seecheck.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seecheck.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seecheck.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}