00:03Welcome to The Cube, Euronews' fact-checking show.
00:06At first glance, this appears to be a Euronews report about a deadly shooting during a NATO exercise in Latvia.
00:14It claims that a Ukrainian soldier opened fire on NATO servicemen, killing three before taking his own life.
00:22But there's one problem. This event never happened.
00:25The video is a fake that copies Euronews' name and visual identity.
00:30It was shared on the 14th of August, but never appeared on Euronews' website or on any of our official
00:37social media accounts.
00:39The people behind this video did anchor their fictional story to a real event, though.
00:43NATO's Baltic Trust exercise indeed took place in Riga in early August.
00:48It ran from the 3rd to the 14th of August and involved testing and training with technology designed to counter
00:55drones.
00:56There was no deadly shooting at the event.
00:59The post gained so much traction on social media that Latvia's armed forces directly denied the claim,
01:05saying that no such incident had occurred.
01:07They say the post is tied to a disinformation campaign linked to Russia.
01:12The exercise, they said, continued without incident and no credible media outlet reported on the alleged deaths.
01:19This isn't the first time Euronews has been impersonated to spread false stories.
01:23Earlier this year, fabricated Euronews videos falsely accused Ukrainian refugees
01:29of robbing one of our crews at the Milan-Kortina Winter Olympics.
01:33In other cases, artificial intelligence was used to imitate the voices of real Euronews journalists
01:39and promote false claims about Ukrainians in Europe.
01:42The latest video follows the same playbook.
01:45Copy the branding of a trusted news organization,
01:48combine a real event with an invented scandal
01:51and use it to target Ukraine to undermine support from its allies.
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