Did Greta Thunberg ask Russian President Vladimir Putin to "stop killing Leopards?" No, that's not true: The picture of the Swedish climate activist allegedly holding a sign with that inscription has been digitally altered from an older post taken from her Twitter account.
The video (archived here) published by TikTok on June 16, 2023, by @doktoregg2 uses the altered image of Greta Thunberg, holding a sign saying:
Putin! Stop killing Leopards! (How dare you?)
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Fri Jun 23 07:32:00 2023 UTC)
The photo of Greta Thunberg used in the post above has been altered. The original version, a Twitter post on Thunberg's official account, is from May 14, 2019. It shows her holding a different sign that reads "Let Russia Strike for Climate," calling on Russia to join environmental protests. In addition to the forged statement about Putin and leopards, the image has been altered with various phrases and spread across social networks including Twitter, Telegram, and VKontakte, a reverse image search shows.
The hashtag on the original Twitter post #Fridaysforfuture is a tag from a youth-led global strike movement "Fridays for Future," also known as "School Strike for Climate," which Greta Thunberg initiated in 2018. In Russia, a country that ratified the Paris Climate Agreement in 2019, four years after it was signed, the movement remained subdued. While millions of people participated in environmental rallies around the world in September 2019, the protests in Russia remained quieter, as Russian authorities often refuse to give permits for pickets with more than one person, Deutsche Welle reported.
Leopard is the name of the powerful tank supplied to Ukraine by Western allies: the first batch was sent in March to help to deter Russian aggression, BBC reported. Leopards are German-manufactured tanks that have been in service in Europe. The altered post, which circulated on Russian forums and media sharing pro-Kremlin propaganda, is aimed at discrediting Greta Thunberg and at suggesting that Ukrainians will allegedly lose, as explained by the Ukrainian website Detector Media, which monitors disinformation.
