Is the Russian invasion of Ukraine a staged hoax created by western governments and media? No, that's not true: There are many eyewitness accounts and the war in Ukraine has been well documented by media outlets and authorities.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) which was published on TikTok on June 18, 2023, with the hashtags in Czech #prahaneboukrajina, #ceskojenase, #ukrajinojdidomu, translated by Lead Stories staff as #pragueorukraine, #czechiaisours, #ukrainegohome. A person speaking Czech can be heard in the video, saying that the images shown are from Prague's Florenc bus station, with stalls of bus companies offering tickets to Ukraine with signs in Ukrainian.
The video opened in Czech:
So buses go to Ukraine, also to places where there is supposedly a war. Well, that is all staged, there is no war there. And they turned Florenc into Ukraine. Everything is being Ukrainized and occupied by them, instead of leaving it Czech.
(Translation from Czech to English by Lead Stories staff).
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Jun 22 10:01:21 2023 UTC)
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced in a video on February 24, 2022, a "special military operation" against Ukraine. The Russian military then launched a full scale attack on the country, with Russian paratroopers landing in Kyiv, as CNN reported. There has been footage from a number of reputable media outlets in different countries from the Ukrainian front line since the war has began, including the BBC.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine has been condemned by international bodies such as the United Nations. The European Union and the United States have imposed number of sanctions on the country. The United Nations Human Rights Council also said on March 16, 2023, that Russia had committed war crimes in Ukraine, including the continued killings of civilians, torture or rape, and unlawful transfers or deportation of children.
The narrative claiming that the war is fake, which has been present since the fighting began in 2022, surged again on social media on the first anniversary of the attack, the BBC reported. In March, France 24 channel debunked a video proving that the war in Ukraine was staged as a fake.
The Czech Republic is one of the EU countries hosting the most of the Ukrainian refugees. Florenc is a bus station in the center of Prague, where operators offer rides to Ukraine, including Kyiv. It has been also one of Prague's travel hubs for Ukrainians returning to their homeland, or refugees fleeing the war, Bloomberg reported.
More Lead Stories fact checks on the war in Ukraine can be found here.
