Russian sources are distributing a photo of what appears to be a billboard in New York City, which advertises recruitment for contract service in the Russian army. The text on the banner says: “Join the army of victory! Salary for the first year is 4,500,000 rubles. Sign a contract in Tatarstan!”

However, in reality, this is a fake photo, as reported by the VoxCheck project. Using Google's reverse image search function, the project's analysts were unable to find the photo that the propagandists could have used to create the fake, but they did find it in the Russian search engine Yandex.Image, which is blocked in Ukraine.

Accordingly, a reverse search showed that the photo that is being circulated these days is a still from a video filmed back in 2022. The original still frame does not contain a banner about recruitment for service in the Russian army, but an announcement from the special economic zone (SEZ) Alabuga, located in Tatarstan (Russia). The real billboard says in Russian “Time to go home”. The details of the photos are completely identical: the angle of the frame, the sky with clouds of the same shape, other advertising billboards. So, the propagandists took a screenshot from the old video and edited it.

Commenting on the original banner, Alabuga SEZ representative Daniia Utalieva told the propaganda publication Kommersant-Kazan that it is aimed at bringing back specialists in the fields of aviation, microelectronics and IT to Russia.

We have previously recorded a similar fake, which consisted of the fact that billboards in honor of Victory Day allegedly appeared in New York.