A video is being distributed online in which a former freelance adviser to the Office of the President of Ukraine, Oleksii Arestovych, allegedly accuses Valerii Zaluzhnyi of shooting down the Il-76 aircraft in order to frame the Office of the President. The video also states that there were supposedly Azov brigade prisoners of war on board of the plane. However, this is fake.

Specialists from the VoxCheck project drew attention to it. They found out that Arestovych never made such statements, and the video was a deepfake made with the help of artificial intelligence. No evidence or comments from Arestovych on social networks were found to support this story. In addition, incorrect facial expressions and the discrepancy between the term “Azov Regiment” and the actual name of the brigade indicate falsification. The results of testing the video using tools such as Deepware and AI Speech Classifier confirmed the possibility of creating it using AI. In addition, experts discovered that the footage used to create this fake was taken from a live broadcast on Arestovych’s YouTube channel, but the speaker did not mention the Il-76, and the reticence occurred the day before the event.

Propagandists create and spread such fake news to divert attention from the crimes of the Russians and incite controversy among the political elite of Ukraine.