Vladimir Putin’s speech, broadcast this Thursday, February 24 to announce the invasion of Ukraine, was it filmed three days earlier, when the Russian president recognized the independence of the pro-Russian separatist zones? This is the assertion widely repeated this Thursday morning in the international press. Same decor, same framing, same tie: the similarities between the two sequences are striking.
This early Thursday morning, the Russian independent media Novaya Gazeta, quoted later by Echo of Moscow Radio News and then by media around the world, announced on social networks that this video had, in fact, been shot on February 21. To affirm this, the newspaper relied on the analysis of the metadata of the sequence presented as being that of February 24.
FAKE OFF
However, the file analyzed by Novaya Gazeta lasts fifty-five minutes, the time of Monday’s speech, while the video of this Thursday, February 24 only lasts twenty-eight minutes. And the analysis of the metadata file of this last video indicates that the date of creation is that of February 24 at 3:35 am, as explained this night by our journalist Philippe Berry.
Contacted by 20 minutesa spokesperson for Novaya Gazeta confirms to us that it is indeed “an error” of the opposition newspaper concerning the analysis of the metadata. A correction should be published soon, explains this source.
“No visible evidence”
If it is possible to modify the metadata of a video (and thus to suggest that it was shot on a different date from its actual capture), “there is no visible evidence” in the video file broadcast this Thursday, explains a developer from the IT department of 20 minutes. “It would have required, for example, a different creation date and a different modification date or traces of several software,” he explains.
Despite the similarities between the two videos, there is therefore nothing to say with certainty that they were shot on the same day.