Photo: Screenshot from the video
The video presented – as foreign fact-checkers found out – is not new, and was recorded before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. At the moment, the building looks different from what we see in the video material, and the traffic lights on the street were changed and are now yellow, writes Truthmeter.mk.
Under the content-sharing agreement between Truthmeter.mk and Meta.mk, we republish the text below:
We are fact-checking a post published on the social network Facebook (screenshot here) sharing a video from an alleged billboard on Times Square with the message, “No Zelensky, no war”. The description in the post says:
Banner in New York
No to Zelensky!
No to the war!
Things in the USA will drastically change if the so-called Democrats fall. Therefore, I recommend to Mickoski to stop talking nonsense.
As the fact-checkers of Myth Detector wrote, the video in the post that we are fact-checking is altered content, and numerous factors point to the fact that a billboard with the text ”No Zelensky, no war” was not placed on Fifth Avenue in New York. The video itself, Myth Detector stresses, is not new and it was recorded before the Russian invasion of Ukraine At the moment, the building looks different from what we see in the video material, and the traffic lights at the street were changed and are now yellow.
The building pointed out as the place where the billboard is, is Tiffany & Co, the jewelry shop on Fifth Avenue, and it does not have a banner with Zelensky. On 29 June 2023, the underground cables in front of this building caught fire. The Wall Street Journal video of this fire shows that the facade of the building does not have a billboard with Zelensky. In addition, the video of the post we are fact-checking shows that the traffic lights near the Tiffany building are black, while the Google Maps picture from August 2021 shows them yellow and newly installed.
The same yellow traffic lights can be seen in August 2022, several months before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The video of the fire dated 29 June 2023 shows that the color of the traffic lights was not changed and is still yellow.
Hence, the video with the black traffic lights showing the alleged Zelensky banner is not new and it was recorded prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But even older recordings cannot confirm that such a banner existed at all and cannot be found on open-data sources. As Myth Detector specifies, the video from the post we are fact-checking was first posted on 9GAG, a site that mainly publishes entertainment content.
According to the fact-checkers of Serbian Istinomer, there is another difference in the post that points to the fact that the recording was not made in recent times, but before the Russian invasion of Ukraine – and that is the fact that the building with the banner does not have reconstruction scaffoldings at the moment.
The fact-checkers of Disinfo also published that the alleged banner ”No Zelensky, no war” in New York was fake.
Due to all of the above-noted facts, we assess the post fact-checked as untrue. A billboard with text “No Zelensky, no war” has not been placed in New York.
