Context: Donald Trump claimed that the United States would control Venezuela and its oil. The U.S. president promised to rebuild the country using oil revenues. Supporters of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who was detained by the U.S. military on the night of January 3, 2026, took to the streets to support their leader, while Venezuelan political prisoners began to be released.
Host Aliona Radouskaya, while discussing the situation in Venezuela, stated that supporters of Nicolas Maduro were protesting in the country's capital.
"Rallies are taking place in Caracas — let's show them. Tens of thousands of Venezuelans have taken to the streets, declaring their support for national sovereignty and constitutional order, however cynical that may sound now. And they are shouting 'free the president,'" Radouskaya stated on January 5, 2026, on Radio Minsk (Evening Political Channel YouTube channel).
While she spoke, the program showed a video presented as an illustration of these events.
Almost simultaneously, the ZhS Premium Telegram channel published a post with two video clips, also presenting them as evidence of mass support for Maduro following his detention. One of them showed the same event used to illustrate Radouskaya’s words on the Evening Political Channel. The text of the post read:
"Look at this sea of Venezuelans who have come out to support their president, who was criminally kidnapped by American gangsters."
The authors of the Telegram channel claim these videos are recent and reproach Belarusian independent media ("the fugitives' media dumps") for allegedly using fakes—old videos—when reporting on celebrations of the fall of Nicolas Maduro's regime. The Weekly Top Fake team found that the opposite is true: ZhS Premium and Aliona Radouskaya passed off old videos as recent ones.
We found one of the videos on the X (formerly Twitter) account of Nicolas Maduro. It was published in July 2024. It shows a march in support of Maduro ahead of the presidential election, for which his supporters gathered from all over the country.
We managed to find the second video in a TikTok account—it was published in November 2025. The account owner captioned it as a youth march in support of Nicolas Maduro; such an event was indeed organized in Caracas on those dates. The account owner is a Chavista and active political figure, Alexander Velasquez, a member of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela, PSUV).
The WTF fact-check showed that the footage, which Radio Minsk and the ZhS Premium Telegram channel presented as recent rallies in support of Nicolas Maduro after his detention, had been published earlier and referred to other events.