A video of Russian President, Vladimir Putin, attending a funeral is doing the rounds on social media. Many users claim that Putin attended the funeral of Yevgeny Prigozhin, chief of the Wagner mercenary group, who recently died in a plane crash near Moscow.
A Facebook user posted the viral post with a caption: “Vladimir Putin pays his last respects to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner Boss, and then declines to get into his Limousine and walks on foot from the occasion.”
You can check the post here.
FACT CHECK
NewsMobile fact-checked the viral post, and found it to be false.
Running a Reverse Image Search of the video keyframes, we identified a Youtube video on the official channel of Epsilon News Network — a video distribution channel of major news networks, dated August 10, 2013, and titled: Putin shows his respect for late mentor Rakhlin. This confirms that the video is at least 10 years old and cannot be linked to the recent death of Prigozhin.
The video keyframes match the viral clip and as per its description, President Putin attended the funeral of his former Judo trainer Anatoly Rakhlin in St. Petersburg, back in August 2013.
Searching further to know whether Putin attended the funeral of Prigozhin, our team traced an article by the Russian news agency, TASS, dated August 29, 2023. The article states that Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Putin ‘is not supposed to’ attend the funeral regardless of what arrangements are made.
Therefore, we can conclusively say that the viral video’s claim that President Putin attended the funeral of Wagner mercenary group chief Prigozhin is fake.
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