Fact-Check: This Video Does Not Show Zelenskyy Dancing, It’s a Deepfake!
The video is a deepfake. The original video shows an unidentified dancer performing at a party.
The video is a deepfake and does not show Zelenskyy dancing.
(Source: Altered by The Quint)
A video, which purportedly shows Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy performing a dance in a red outfit, has gone viral on social media.
An archive of this post can be seen here.
How did we find out?: We divided the video into keyframes using InVID, a video verification tool, and ran a reverse image search.
This led us to a Telegram group named 'dance.gif' which shares GIFs of people dancing, where a similar clip was shared on 23 October 2023.
A similar clip was shared on Telegram.
On observing the video, we saw that the man dancing in this video was not the Ukrainian president.
The original video does not show Zelenskyy.
We repeated the process of dividing this video into frames and carrying out a reverse image search, which led us to an Instagram post on the account 'gamgam.tv'.
This account carried the same video, which showed another person, not Zelenskyy, dancing. It had shared this video on 7 February 2022.
The Quint has reached out to this account for more details regarding the viral video, and will updated this report as and when we receive them.
Zelenskyy has previously been targeted with similar deepfakes, which show him performing, over the course of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. You can read our other fact-checks with similar claims here and here.
Conclusion: The viral video is a deepfake. The original video does not show Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy belly dancing.
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