On November 29, the Russian embassy in the UK published a tweet with several photos in which a girl is being made up to look like a seriously wounded woman, applying fake blood to her skin. In one of the photos, the “wounded” poses for the camera, obviously fooling around. Diplomats added the following caption to these photos:
“Ukrainian fakes and propaganda work perfectly.”
The tweet is tagged with the hashtag #TruthonUkraine – “the truth about Ukraine”.
The diplomats were not mistaken in one thing: this is really a fake and propaganda, only not of Ukrainian origin, but of Russian. Moreover, by the time the embassy tweet appeared, the fake had already been exposed.
For the first time this collage appeared on Twitter on November 19, published by a certain Alexey (user @ah_kyly). His account was registered in October 2022 with a total of 535 followers. In less than two months, he posted about 3,500 tweets, most of them anti-Ukrainian in content and mocking in tone.
After that, the collage began to spread in social networks, and the journalists of the Georgian portal Myth Detector paid attention to it. With the help of facial recognition software, they identified the name of one of the girls in the photo and contacted her. Her name is Lyudmila Bileka (by her husband – Pautets); in 2019, she played one of the main roles in the film Atlantis by Valentin Vasyanovich, which received a prize at the Venice Film Festival. But by her main profession she is a doctor, now she leads the instructor department in tactical medicine at the Ukrainian Come Back Alive Foundation.
Bileka told Georgian journalists that the photos were taken in 2016 during a first aid training run by the Ukrainian organization TacCat , where she served as medical director. The actors portrayed the victims. For comparison: in these pictures in 2018, Bilek with another “wounded”.
And this photo from 2019 captures the working moment of the TacCat training to help victims of a car accident.
Myth Detector released their material on November 24th. The next day, Bileka wrote on Facebook:
“Enemy propagandists stole my photos from the 2016 trainings from Instagram and passed them off as successfully exposing a special operation of the Ukrainian IPSO [center of information and psychological operations] with staged videos in Kherson.”
And only a few days after that, the already exposed fake was spread by Russian diplomats in London. They clearly considered the verification of the origin of the photographs unnecessary.