Belgian Deputies Laughed at Zelenskyi During a Press Conference in Brussels — France 24

A video is being circulated online with the logo of the French media outlet “France 24”, claiming to report on a press conference attended by the President of Ukraine in Belgium. In one of the frames, men in suits can be seen laughing in the back rows of the hall. Propagandists claim that these are Belgian deputies laughing at Volodymyr Zelenskyi.

However, this is fake. France 24 did not publish such a report, and the video was edited from clips available in open sources.

In the propaganda video, you can see footage from a joint press conference between the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyi, and the Prime Minister of Belgium, Alexander De Croo, which took place on May 28 in Brussels after the signing of a security agreement between the countries. However, France 24 did not publish this report — there is no such video on the official media resource website, nor on the France 24 English Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (X), TikTok, or YouTube pages.

A reverse search for the video with the supposed Belgian deputies yielded no results, but other details indicate that the frame was not made during this press conference. In reality, the chairs in the conference hall where the press conference was held are different from those where the men in the propaganda video are sitting.

Furthermore, we reviewed photos of all the deputies from the two chambers of the Belgian Federal Parliament — the House of Representatives and the Senate. The faces of these men are not on the list of deputies for the 2019-2024 term, so they are not current members of parliament.

The video was edited from clips available in open sources. We found broadcasts of the press conference on other media platforms and discovered that a Reuters report contains identical frames with Zelenskyi. It is likely that the fake creators used these for the beginning of the fake report.

The final frame drew attention because the presenter mentioned that the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyi, gave a conference together with the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, and the Prime Minister of Belgium, Alexander De Croo. However, on May 28, Zelenskyi held a press conference only with the Prime Minister of Belgium. By searching with key phrases, we found the original video from which the report was edited — it is a France 24 English report of a joint press conference of the President of Ukraine and the Prime Ministers of the Netherlands and Belgium, which took place on May 4, 2023, in The Hague. Propagandists took an old report and overlaid it with a different news stream.

Therefore, the video circulating online turned out to be a compilation of three unrelated video fragments: a frame from the press conference of Zelenskyi and De Croo in Brussels from the Reuters broadcast on May 28, 2024, a frame of the supposed “Belgian deputies” from another hall, and part of the France 24 report from a year ago.

Russian propaganda has created similar fakes with the France 24 logo to discredit the President of Ukraine. Earlier, we debunked a fake claiming that France 24 reported that Ukrainian special services, on Zelenskyi’s orders, planned an assassination attempt on French President Emmanuel Macron during his visit to Kyiv.