Does This Image Show Putin Reading the Bhagavad Gita? No, It’s AI-Generated

While PM Modi did gift President Putin the holy book, there are no official photos of the latter reading it.

An AI-generated image is being shared to falsely claim that it shows Russian President Vladimir Putin reading a copy of the Bhagavad Gita.

(Source: X/Altered by The Quint)

An image showing Russian President Vladimir Putin reading what appears to be a translated version of the Bhagavad Gita, a holy book in Hinduism, is being shared on social media.

The claim: The photo is being shared to claim that it shows Putin reading a copy of the Gita translated into Russian, which was gifted to him by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the former's two-day state visit to India from 4 to 6 December.

An archived version of this post can be seen here.

(Source: X (formerly Twitter)/Screenshot)

(Archived versions of more posts sharing this claim can be seen here, here, and here.)

Is it true?: While PM Modi did indeed gift President Putin a copy of the Bhagavad Gita in Russian, the image in this claim is an AI-generated one.

How do we know?: We first carried out a keyword search about Putin and the Bhagavad Gita.

• This led us to news reports from The Times of India and Hindustan Times about PM Modi gifting Putin a copy of the book in Russian, Assam tea, Kashmiri saffron, among other objects during his recent visit to India.

• PM Modi's verified X account also shared a photo of him gifting a Russian-language copy of the Gita to Putin.

• A reverse image search on the image in the claim led us to several social media posts which were sharing it, but none of them were credible or official sources.

• We also noticed that the text on the cover of the copy in the photo shared by PM Modi differed from that of the book in the viral image, which showed garbled text.

The text on both covers differs.

(Source: X/Altered by The Quint)

• This detail is indicative of the image being an AI-generated one.

Is it AI?: To check whether the image was made using AI tools, we ran it through content detectors.

• Hive Moderation's tool said that there was a 99.9 percent likelihood of the image being an AI-generated one, pointing towards the possibility of it being made using Google's Gemini 3.

It was 99.9 percent sure about the image being AI-generated.

(Source: Hive Moderation/Screenshot)

• Similarly, Sight Engine, too, pegged the likelihood of the image being an AI-generated one at 99 percent.

• It also mentioned that the image may have been made using Google's Imagen.

It showed a confidence score of 99 percent.

(Source: Sightengine/Screenshot)

Conclusion: An AI-generated image which shows Russian President Vladimir Putin reading a copy of the Bhagavad Gita is being shared as a real photo.

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