Have Ukrainian soldiers threatened the Bulgarian party Vazrazhdane (Revival) by writing a message in Bulgarian on the Ukrainian flag, declaring their intention to come and purge Bulgaria of the party? No, that's not true: The photo has been manipulated, which is also confirmed by the leader of the pro-Russian party Vazrazhdane, Kostadin Kostadinov, who calls the image a "collage" in a post on his personal FB profile.
The claim appeared in a video on TikTok (archived here) published by @antongeorgiev925 on August 5, 2023.
Shown in the photo, Bulgarian text that can be read on the Ukrainian flag is translated as:
We are coming to Bulgaria soon to cleanse it of Vazrazhdane
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Thu Aug 17 05:47:50 2023 UTC)
In a press conference held at the Bulgarian National Assembly on July 20, 2023, Kostadinov showed the manipulated photo, defining it as a collage and anti-Bulgarian. During the press conference, he stated that he is going to file a complaint with the General Directorate Combating Organized Crime (GDBOP) and the State Agency for National Security (DANS) against Isak Passy, the son of the Former Bulgarian Foreign Minister Solomon Passy, founder and President of the Atlantic Club in Bulgaria for having published the photo in question on his FB profile.
The photo published by Isaac Passy and later removed was a consequence and a response to the scandal that broke out earlier because of another post on social media that connects Vazrazhdane with a photo collage depicting Solomon Passy in an unacceptable way defined by the Organization of Jews in Bulgaria "Shalom" as anti-Semitism and hate speech.
A reverse image search performed by Lead Stories on August 17, 2023, found that the original photo can be traced through various media outlets to a Twitter post dated June 12, 2023, showing the Ukrainian Navy's 35th Marine Brigade in a Ukrainian village they liberated. The raw image doesn't have captions on the Ukrainian flag.
The reverse image search results can be located by following the link and pressing 'Find image source.'
