A 49-second-long video purportedly showing the U.S. State Department’s spokesperson commenting on Washington’s weapons aid to Ukraine made rounds around the Internet on Friday, the New York Times reported.
The video was published online one day after U.S. President Joe Biden announced that Washington would permit Ukraine to employ U.S.-provided weapons systems against military targets located inside Russian territory.
The video, which was put together using real recordings of the State Department’s spokesman, Matthew Miller, is meant to suggest that the Russian city of Belgorod, some 50 kilometers from Russia’s border with Ukraine, was a legitimate target for Ukrainian strikes.
As NYT pointed out, the video “has an authentic feel despite telltale clues of manipulation, illustrates the growing threat of disinformation and especially so-called deepfake videos powered by artificial intelligence.”
Although U.S. officials said they had no information as to who the author of the clip is, they expressed their particular concern “about how Russia might employ such techniques to manipulate opinion around the war in Ukraine or even American political discourse.”
In the deepfake footage, Miller states that Belgorod “has essentially no civilians remaining.” This is supposed to be a response to a question from a journalist, which in turn is a complete fabrication.
“[Belgorod]’s practically full of military targets at this point, and we are seeing the same thing starting in the regions around there,” Miller is supposed to say, adding that “Russia needs to get the message that this is unacceptable.”
“The claim in the video about Belgorod is completely false,” the authors of the articles stress while also adding that the city of 340,000 has indeed been occasionally targeted by the Ukrainians, but also that its residents have not been evacuated yet.
According to NYT, “the false assertions that civilians have fled and that the city is mainly a military zone might imply a Western willingness to support indiscriminate strikes there, which is not the case.”
Meanwhile, in Russia…
As NYT pointed out, the video “has an authentic feel despite telltale clues of manipulation, illustrates the growing threat of disinformation and especially so-called deepfake videos powered by artificial intelligence.”
Although U.S. officials said they had no information as to who the author of the clip is, they expressed their particular concern “about how Russia might employ such techniques to manipulate opinion around the war in Ukraine or even American political discourse.”
In the deepfake footage, Miller states that Belgorod “has essentially no civilians remaining.” This is supposed to be a response to a question from a journalist, which in turn is a complete fabrication.
“[Belgorod]’s practically full of military targets at this point, and we are seeing the same thing starting in the regions around there,” Miller is supposed to say, adding that “Russia needs to get the message that this is unacceptable.”
“The claim in the video about Belgorod is completely false,” the authors of the articles stress while also adding that the city of 340,000 has indeed been occasionally targeted by the Ukrainians, but also that its residents have not been evacuated yet.
According to NYT, “the false assertions that civilians have fled and that the city is mainly a military zone might imply a Western willingness to support indiscriminate strikes there, which is not the case.”
Meanwhile, in Russia…
The video was published on Russian websites and spread via other media but none mention it is a deepfake.
The purported remark by Miller was repeated word-for-word on the Telegram channel of Russia’s “Human Rights Council,” a state body that is in theory supposed to advise Vladimir Putin.
The Telegram post included a furious response from the body’s chairman, Valery Fadeyev, who wrote that “Washington deliberately does not want to notice Kyiv’s obvious crimes against humanity,” and that he does not “particularly expect that this information will be conveyed to the cynic from the State Department, but the truth is ours in any case.”
The purported remark by Miller was repeated word-for-word on the Telegram channel of Russia’s “Human Rights Council,” a state body that is in theory supposed to advise Vladimir Putin.
The Telegram post included a furious response from the body’s chairman, Valery Fadeyev, who wrote that “Washington deliberately does not want to notice Kyiv’s obvious crimes against humanity,” and that he does not “particularly expect that this information will be conveyed to the cynic from the State Department, but the truth is ours in any case.”
Source: NYT
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