Does a TikTok video show a Ukrainian military column of armored vehicles with white flags surrendering to the Russian army? No, that's not true: The footage on TikTok is edited and shows only a small part of the original video shot by Ukrainian journalists. The original video tracks and documents the process of exchanging prisoners of war (POW) between Russia and Ukraine.
The claim appeared in a video on TikTok (archived here) published by @batival on September 15, 2023.
The Russian caption text at the top of the video, translated by Lead Stories staff reads as:
Dozens of Ukrainians are surrendering
The Russian text in the middle of the video, translated by Lead Stories staff reads as:
Russia Power. Vladimir Putin is the best.
The Bulgarian text placed at the bottom of the video, translated by Lead Stories staff reads as:
Right decision
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Tue Oct 10 06:41:37 2023 UTC)
A Google search (archived here) with screenshots of different frames from the TikTok video, conducted by Lead Stories on October 10, 2023, was misleading as it couldn't find the original video (archived here) of the Ukrainian journalists. This is due to the extreme manipulation of the original video. The Google search led to the manipulated video and found erroneously that it shows a military column of Armenian separatists from Nagorno-Karabakh surrendering after an agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
An essential element of the manipulated video is the white flags on the vehicles. According to the Red Cross and the International Humanitarian Law Database website, the white flag can also be used during a temporary truce for negotiations or for an exchange of POW.
Detailed searching for videos with white flags which excluded the surrendering argument led to the original video showing an exchange of POW between Russia and Ukraine. It revealed that the original footage had undergone extensive digital editing. This manipulation consists of cutting most of the original footage of the video, replacing the colors of the vegetation shown in the frames, replacing the sound, and cropping and manipulating the aspect ratio and size of the video.
The length of the original video on YouTube is 27:50 minutes. It was published on May 27, 2023. The footage shown in the TikTok video starts to match the original video after minute 7:30. The authors of the original video are the Ukrainian journalists Volodymyr Zolkin and Dmitry Karpenko. The recorded documentary covers the exchange of POW between Ukraine and Russia and the handover and exchange of the remains of soldiers who died in combat.
