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Viral Video Of Ukraine War ‘Crisis Actors’ In Body Bags Is Totally Fake

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Have you seen that viral video on Facebook and Twitter, purporting to show a newscast about the war in Ukraine, but one of the “dead” people in a body bag starts moving? It’s gotten a lot of attention on social media lately, with one version of the video racking up over 300,000 views on Saturday alone. But the video has been altered and doesn’t show what people like right-wing commentator Juanita Broaddrick say it does.

“They need better actors that know how to play dead,” Juanita Broaddrick tweeted on Saturday.

The video, which has been digitally manipulated to show a text crawl at the bottom with figures of Ukrainian deaths, is actually from a climate change protest in Austria. The original video, which can still be viewed online, was filmed by Austrian news outlet OE24 in Ballhausplatz, Austria on Feb. 4, 2022, just a few weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. And no one was trying to pass it off as being from Ukraine until it entered the right-wing media ecosystem.

The Associated Press even debunked a manipulated version of the OE24 video back on Feb. 8, 2022, though it was for an entirely different reason. People online had started to claim the video was actually showing covid-19 “crisis actors”—the term conspiracy theorists give to people who play-act to pretend like something tragic happened when it didn’t. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones previously called the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School a “false flag” attack with crisis actors.

But Broaddrick isn’t the only one who believes the war in Ukraine is fake. Catturd2, a right-wing influencer who often has the ear of Elon Musk, tweeted a bizarre conspiracy theory on Friday insisting that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a media creation.

“With every war going all the way back to Vietnam, the press has been heavily integrated with the troops and there's thousands of hours of live video footage. In Ukraine, nothing. We get no footage, no detailed updates, no graphs explaining how the war is going, who has control of what land, etc,” Catturd2 tweeted.

While it’s true that TV images of the Vietnam War helped to turn American sentiment against U.S. involvement in that conflict, the idea that there’s no video footage out of Ukraine is absolutely absurd.

“All we get is Biden fake air raid sirens and one famous actor or politician a day happily prancing around Kiev with Zelenskyy with no helmets or body protection offering him 100s of billion of dollars. Or, Zelenskyy jet setting around the world to walk red carpets, get praised by the global elite, and pose for national magazine covers. If you question this—you're called a Putin puppet,” Catturd2 continued.

“We taxpaying citizens are sick and damn tired of these blatant lies from these evil, globalist worms. Call us whatever names you want—we know bullshit when we see it,” Catturd2 continued.

Needless to say, the war in Ukraine has been one of the most widely covered wars in modern history. Granted, some news outlets like Fox News don’t give it much attention outside of insisting Ukraine was basically asking to be invaded, as talking head Tucker Carlson often suggests. But anyone who watches PBS NewsHour knows the war is covered just about every night with new footage of the devastation and hardship people are enduring. Anyone who doesn’t believe me can scroll through the PBS NewsHour YouTube page, which has countless stories about the war in Ukraine.

Reasonable people can disagree on what the right course of action is when it comes to the U.S. government’s involvement in Ukraine. There are some people who believe sending money and weapons to Ukraine isn’t the right thing to do, fearing it may escalate into a nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia. Others point out that Ukraine didn’t do anything wrong that prompted a full-scale invasion of its country and all that needs to be done is for Russia to leave in order for the war to end.

But reasonable people also have to acknowledge the simple facts as they’re known: Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022 and the war is very real. If you don’t believe those two facts, there’s not much that can be done to help you find reality.

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