FAKE: Ukrainian migrants show the highest level of hostility towards each other abroad — Deutsche Welle

Russian Telegram channels circulated a video allegedly from Deutsche Welle, claiming that Ukrainian refugees abroad exhibit the highest level of hostility toward each other compared to other migrant communities. Supposedly, this conclusion comes from a study by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research.

This is fake. Deutsche Welle did not publish this video on any of its platforms, and the Hamburg Institute for Social Research never conducted such a study. The video itself was edited using publicly available photos and videos that are unrelated.

Deutsche Welle did not publish this video on their website, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

Deutsche Welle uses different design styles for its short videos and does not use the font seen in the propagandists’ video.

We found no studies regarding Ukrainian migrants on the Hamburg Institute for Social Research website, nor on its Facebook or Twitter pages.

Sociologist Wolfgang Knöbl does indeed work at the institute and is its director. However, we found no evidence that he made any statements about particularly negative attitudes among Ukrainians towards each other.

Using Google reverse image search, we found that the fight shown in the video took place in 2013, and Ukrainians were not involved. The subtitles indicate that the events occurred in the Netherlands, which is confirmed by the yellow license plate on a car in the footage.

We have debunked similar fakes spread by Russian propagandists disguised as Deutsche Welle reports. For instance, previous false claims included that Zelenskyi staged a fake assassination attempt on his own children to blame Russian intelligence and that Serbian students supposedly proposed naming a black hole after Volodymyr Zelenskyi.