What was claimed
A video shows Vladimir Putin criticising the UK’s plans to bring more Gazan children to the UK for treatment, saying it “is not generosity, it’s PR”.
Our verdict
We’ve found no evidence Mr Putin said this, and the creator of the video has said it is a “fictional dramatisation”.
A video viewed more than 96,000 times on Facebook appears to show the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, criticising the British government for its plan to bring children from Gaza to the UK for treatment.
The video shows Mr Putin speaking, interspersed with images of scenes in Gaza, with overlaid text reading “Putin exposes British Hypocrisy on Gaza Children”.
It features audio, supposedly of Mr Putin, saying: “You airlift a handful of broken children out of the rubble you helped create and then call it compassion, call it humanity. No, this is not compassion. It is crisis management for your conscience”, adding “this is not generosity it’s PR”.
But there’s no evidence Mr Putin said this. The video of the Russian president actually comes from a recent meeting held with business leaders, in which he makes no such comments. We’ve also found no credible news reports of Mr Putin saying this.
The audio overlaid onto the clip has not been synced with President Putin’s mouth and does not sound like other clips of Mr Putin speaking English. It also appears to cut out briefly around 27 seconds in.
We’ve not been able to determine whether the clip was generated with artificial intelligence (AI), edited in some other way or is of an impersonator, but we’ve not seen any evidence to suggest it is real audio of Mr Putin.
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Full Fact traced the video back to a TikTok post, which also includes the disclaimer: “This is a fictional dramatization intended to raise awareness of real global issues. No misinformation intended.”
We have previously fact checked AI deepfake videos of global political figures, including UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and US President Donald Trump.
Before sharing content like this that you see online, first consider whether it comes from a trustworthy and verifiable source. Our toolkit and guides to spotting AI videos can help you do this.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because we’ve found no evidence Vladimir Putin said this, and the creator of the video has said it is a “fictional dramatisation”.
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