An image and video shows European leaders taking off their suit jackets as a show of support for Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
False. The image isn’t real. It is a still from a video that was created using artificial intelligence.
A picture that appears to show European leaders, including British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron, taking off their suit jackets in solidarity with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, isn’t real. It is a still from a video that was created using artificial intelligence (AI).
This comes after criticism President Zelenskyy faced for not wearing a suit to meet with US President Donald Trump in February.
The picture is part of a screenshot of a now-deleted post on the social media platform Bluesky captioned “European leaders taking off their jackets in a united show of support for President Zelensky”.
A number of other posts on the platform also included the fake image.
The picture closely resembles images and footage taken of a recent gathering of political leaders at Lancaster House in London, which discussed Europe’s defence and security. But Full Fact could not find any credible reports of leaders at that event taking off their suit jackets in a display of support.
Although the picture looks quite convincing, it is not real.
The volume button and InShot logo visible in the bottom right of many versions of the image indicate it comes from a video that has also been shared on social media. Professor Hany Farid, who specialises in digital forensics at the University of California, Berkeley, and is Chief Science Officer at GetReal Labs, a cybersecurity company focused on preventing malicious threats from generative AI, told us this video was “an obvious—and not particularly well executed—AI-generated video”.
“Throughout the video you can see telltale artifacts of AI-generation in which the motion is incoherent and physically implausible” he said.
For example, the face of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (third row, second from right) disappears as Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala's hand (third row, third from right) moves in front of it. The left arm of Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk (furthest right on the front row) also moves unnaturally as he removes his jacket, while President Zelenskyy appears to mimic the motion of removing a jacket despite not wearing one.
Full Fact has previously written about videos of politicians suspected to have been made with AI, such as a video of Mr Macron kissing a man.
You can read more about how to spot AI-generated videos and images on our website.
We have also fact checked a number of claims made about Ukraine, which you can read about here, along with an explainer on the recent peace talks.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as altered because the image isn’t real—it is a still from a video that was created using artificial intelligence.
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