Antifake / Factcheck

20 September

‘BBC News Published Piece with Thousands of Facts About Ukrainian Nazism’. Ivan Eismont Backs up His Claim with Fake Video

We found a photo of two men with tattoos on the Instagram of one of them. He published it before the war, in August 2020.

Head of state-run TV “Belarus 1” Ivan Eismont proposed sanctions against the British Broadcasting Corporation BBC. The reason is that the media outlet allegedly counted thousands of instances of Nazism by Ukrainian forces after invading the Kursk region of Russia and published a piece about it. As proof, Eismont showed a video. The Weekly Top Fake team found out where the video came from.

Ukrainians, facts of Nazism manifestation, and sanctions against the Belteleradiocompany — all that topics were highlighted by  Ivan Eismont, the head of the TV channel “Belarus 1”, on the air of his program “Editors' Club” on September 6, 2024.

“Sanctions have been imposed on our company. <...> One of the main accusations against us, one of the main points - is that we associate the Ukrainian authorities with Nazism: ‘Unfair, far-fetched. This is propaganda. It supports Putin, well, and Lukashenko too’. 

Well, I propose to impose sanctions against the British BBC TV company as well. Because they have just released a piece in which they say that they counted thousands of facts of the use of Nazi symbols among the Ukrainian troops that invaded the Kursk region, Ukraine”,  Eismont said. At the end, he apparently misspoke, meaning Russia.

The viewers were shown a video to confirm the claim. On the frames, there is a car with a swastika, people with tattoos, and clothing with Nazi symbols. The WTF team was unable to discover this content on the BBC website and social networks. However, it is available on the Russian-language YouTube channel New_video. And the video was fact-checked by the WTF team.

Thus, the photo of a car with a swastika has been circulating on social networks since March 2024, that is, six months before Ukraine invaded the Kursk region.

The man in a cap with a Nazi symbol is a Russian who went to fight in Donbas as early as 2014.

The Russian authorities declared him wanted. The photo was published in 2016, 8 years before the events in the Kursk region.

We found a photo of two men with tattoos on the Instagram of one of them. He published it before the war, in August 2020.

In fact, the tattoos on the men in the photo are not Nazi symbols. The figure of three intertwined triangles is called valknut — this is a Scandinavian pagan symbol. The tattoo on the right shoulder is a Scandinavian compass vegvizir. The trident on the chest is the coat of arms of Ukraine.

The facts presented in the video have nothing to do with the Kursk region.

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