Does a video on social media show an address by the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, calling on the Ukrainian army to come out of the trenches and march toward Kyiv to overthrow President Zelenskyy? No, that's not true: The footage shown in the TikTok video is heavily edited and does not correspond to the original video, in which General Zaluzhnyi is seen congratulating Ukrainian soldiers on Armed Forces Day in 2022.
The claim appeared in a video on TikTok, no longer available but (archived here) published by @nikolaynikolov257 on November 13, 2023, with a caption translated into English from Bulgarian by Lead Stories staff that reads:
Zaluzhnyi called on the Ukrainian army to come out of the trenches and march toward Kyiv.
The video clip shown in the post shows General Valery Zaluzhniy giving a speech, with a voice track that is inauthentic and out of sync with the movement of his lips, saying in Russian:
It is me again!
I call on our defenders to leave the trenches and go to Kyiv. It's time to overthrow Zelenskyy's power! In connection with this. I declare a peaceful march of justice.
We will leave in one column in a few days and go to Kyiv. I already have two thousand fighters at my disposal who disagree with the existing government, several tanks, and armored personnel carriers.
Since Ukrainian channels refuse to broadcast my message, I am forced to do this through Russian channels. I am posting this message through a popular Russian telegram channel Zлой Пруф️
This is what the post looked like:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Nov 15 07:21:06 2023 UTC)
A search (archived here) by Lead Stories staff conducted on November 16, 2023, using a Google reverse image search found the original video from December 2022, showing General Zaluzhnyi addressing soldiers on Ukraine's Army Day, celebrated on December 6.
The original video address and the script of the general's speech translated into English can be seen in this article on the 'Censor' website published on December 6, 2022. Furthermore, a link in the article leads to a social media post from December 6, 2022, made on Zaluzhnyi's official Telegram channel, where the same video and the original script of the speech can be seen and additional posts of the original video can be seen here and here.
The digitally altered TikTok video claims the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces is carrying out a military coup in Ukraine. But the altered video uses a voice that is not Zaluzhny's, the audio is out of sync with the movement of his lips, and the content of the altered post does not match the information from the original video published on multiple sites in 2022.
