Hacked news program and deepfake video spread false Zelenskyy claims
A national news broadcast on the television channel Ukraine 24 was breached by hackers on March 16. The program’s news ticker was hacked to display messages to appear as though they were coming from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The messages urged Ukrainians to stop fighting and give up their weapons, while claiming that Zelenskyy “wanted to take Donbas” but was unsuccessful, so he had fled Kyiv.
The TV network confirmed that the news ticker was hacked and the messages were false. In response, Zelenskyy also filmed a short video debunking the messages and calling them a childish provocation.
On the same day, the pro-Kremlin Telegram channel “Operational” reported that hackers published to Ukrainian websites a deepfake video of Zelenskyy repeating similar messages. The Telegram channel shared a video file, which according to its metadata was created on March 16, two hours before being uploaded to Telegram. Notably, the messages shared in the ticker and the deepfake video, encouraging Ukrainians to surrender, were amplified on VKontakte (VK), the Kremlin-owned social media platform that is similar to Facebook. Some commenters in Russia hypothesized that Zelenskyy uploaded the video in desperation and then backtracked after reconsidering.
The deepfake video was debunked very quickly by Zelenskyy and was ridiculed by Ukrainians who noted the poor quality of the video and audio.