By Archis Chowdhury
A video of a male dancer belly dancing on stage is viral with the claim that it shows Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy belly dancing.
BOOM found this claim to be false; the video being shared originally shows an Argentinian dancer named Pablo Acosta belly dancing, and not Zelenskyy. The video has been doctored through deepfake technology to replace Acosta's face with that of Zelenskyy.
Prior to joining politics, Zelenskyy had a career as a comedian, performer and actor, thus leading to many people believing the viral video as real.
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A verified user on X (formerly Twitter) shared the video with the caption, "Definition of insanity: This is the man we gave $200,000,000,000 in cash and weapons to, expecting him to beat Putin in a war."
Click here to view an archive of the above tweet.
We searched on Facebook with keywords "zelenskyy belly dance", and found the same video being shared on the platform with various captions attributing it to Zelenskyy.
Click here, here and here to view the above posts.
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Fact Check
BOOM did a few reverse image searches with keyframes from the viral video, which led us to a clearer version of the same video, uploaded by Argentinian dancer Pablo Acosta.
In this video, we could clearly observe that the individual dancing was not Zelenskyy. The user also posted many other videos of him dancing on Instagram.
We compared the viral video with the one posted by Acosta, and found that the faces in both the videos were slightly different - the former showed a face that closely resembled that of Zelenskyy.
