We came across the posts on the following topic on the social media platform X (1, 2):
The posts suggest that Ukrainian soldiers had burnt an effigy of US President Donald Trump after hearing news that Trump had decided to ‘cut funding’.
The posts are accompanied by a video of three men in military uniform standing around an effigy of Trump next to a thicket of trees. The men blame Trump for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy not being able to get weapons, and say Trump will never be a president again and that he is a traitor, according to subtitles included in the video.
The men then set the effigy alight, and the video ends after the effigy burns down.
Trump and Ukraine
Ukraine has been affected by Trump’s cuts to foreign aid since taking office—Trump issued an executive order suspending US foreign aid programmes for 90 days. These cuts deeply affect USAID, the agency that is responsible for managing international development aid, and of which Ukraine is a beneficiary.
In Ukraine, contributions from USAID include restoring bombed energy facilities and demining, along with financing Ukrainian civil society and independent journalism.
However, it is untrue, at the time of writing, that the cuts have affected military aid to Ukraine, which is provided under programmes that are not affected by the executive order.
Nevertheless, with tensions emerging between the US and Ukrainian leaders, there is a distinct possibility that military aid to Ukraine could be cut in the future.
Hooking the Big Fish
When we conducted a keyword search of the video, we found that there had been news reports of the video being shared by the US Republican Senator from Utah, Mike Lee, on X.
The Senator shared the video with the comments, ‘Not another dime for Ukraine’, suggesting that he would support cutting funding in response to the actions of the men in the video.
The video shared by Lee was from an account run by Derrick Evans, a Republican state representative from West Virginia who had participated in the 6 January riots at the US Capitol building.
Evan’s post had accrued over 3.8 million views at the time of writing. Evan’s and Lee’s posts appear to be the most prominent among those mentioning the video in recent days.
However, Evans later posted an update stating that he had found the video of the ‘soldiers’ to have originated from ‘9 months ago’, having seen it on a Times of India video on YouTube, and that it had never been factchecked by Google.
No similar statement of correction could be seen on the account of Lee when we checked it.
Old Bait Resurfaces
Our search of social media platforms turned up the YouTube video on the Times of India account, just as Evans had suggested.
Beyond this, however, the video could also be found on X itself, including on the account of the Malaysian right-wing influencer Ian Miles Cheong, as early as May 2024. As such, it is clear that the video is not a response to recent events.
We also found other videos of the supposed soldiers denigrating Trump, including one where the soldiers were shooting a Trump supporter mannequin before burning it, and another where soldiers insulted Trump and burnt a copy of his book.
However, we found that the video of the effigy being burnt, along with the other two videos, had been debunked separately by France24’s Observers factchecking platform in November 2024, and by AP in December 2024.
The Observers noted that while the video footage contained a logo of Tpyxa, a Ukrainian Telegram channel, journalists from the Swedish TV channel SVT Nyheter had contacted the channels administrators, who confirmed that they had not posted the video and that the logo had been used without their permission.
They also traced the video back to pro-Russian social media networks, with the earliest instance found on a pro-Russian Telegram channel on 2 May 2024.
As for the other video of the soldiers shooting the mannequin, while the uniforms appeared to be similar to that of units in the Ukrainian army, the video had originated in pro-Kremlin sources, such as the Russian state-owned media outlet, Pravda, which has been used regularly to share propaganda, along with the Telegram channel of a former Ukrainian member of parliament who had defected to Russia.
As we reported in a separate factcheck recently, the emergence in Russian propaganda channels and the imitation of legitimate primary sources are indicative of the Storm-1516 disinformation network, which aims to ‘launder’ disinformation through influencers and a false veneer of credibility to a Western audience.
Storm-1516 Taking Root
As such, we find that the claims of Ukrainian soldiers burning a Trump effigy in response to aid cuts to be false.
Not only are the cuts currently limited and not inclusive of military aid, the video can be found to have originated long before Trump returned to the presidency.
Moreover, the videos can be found to have the fingerprints of a disinformation operation, including the falsification of its origin.
With current tensions in the relationship between the US and Ukraine, such narratives appear to have taken root at the highest levels among politicians in the US.
