You're reading: Here’s how Putin got the fake Syria footage he showed Oliver Stone

Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to pass off video shot by U.S. forces in Afghanistan as footage of a Russian air force operation in Syria even after the faked video had been exposed as a hoax a year ago, according to a former Ukrainian government official.

Putin showed the video to U.S. filmmaker Oliver Stone to demonstrate how Russian air forces is attacking militants in Syria. The episode made it into Stone’s four-part series “The Putin Interviews” released on Showtime in the U.S. in June.

“This is how our air force operates,” Putin tells Stone as he plays the fake video on an iPhone.

The video shows running men being shot at from the air. Putin said they were Syrian militants, and emphasized how well they were armed in the video. Part of this scene can be seen in the teaser trailer for part three of the series.

But when the series was released in June, it was quickly pointed out that the video that Putin says is of Russians in Syria is actually a doctored 2013 video showing U.S. troops shooting at Taliban fighters in Afghanistan from an Apache helicopter.

A comparison of the video that Russian President Vladimir Putin demonstrates in "The Putin Interviews" series to the footage of the American attack on Taliban in Afghanistan, available on YouTube. (YouTube)

A comparison of the video that Russian President Vladimir Putin demonstrates in “The Putin Interviews” series to the footage of the American attack on Taliban in Afghanistan, available on YouTube. (YouTube)

The faked version has audio of Ukrainian fighter pilots operating over the Donbas in 2014 dubbed on top of it, and can still be found on YouTube. The description of the faked video says it shows Russians shooting the militants in Syria from a Russian Mi-28 attack helicopter.

But even after it was revealed that Putin had shown Stone a faked video, Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, said the claim was “total nonsense,” and continued to insist the obviously faked video was real. The video, Peskov said, had been given to Putin by the Russian Defense Ministry.

False claims

In fact, the first attempt to pass off the video as a Russian attack in Syria was made over a year ago, when LifeNews, a pro-Kremlin news website, published it in March 2016.

LifeNews at the time falsely claimed that “the video … shows an attack by Russian forces on a terrorist base in Syria.”

However, on the same day it was published by LifeNews, several Internet users, including popular Russian blogger Ilya Varlamov, pointed out that the video was in fact archive footage of U.S. forces attacking the Taliban in Afghanistan.

LifeNews promptly deleted the video from its website.

Soon after, Tetiana Popova, the then-deputy minister of information of Ukraine, wrote a Facebook post in which she claimed that the fake video had been given to LifeNews by “friends of her friends in Russia” who wanted to check how well the Russian media verify information before publishing it. The faked video was entitled “The Achievements of the Russian Air Force in Syria,” and LifeNews had indeed published it without verifying it, Popova said.

That could well have been the end of the story. But a year later, the very same video surfaced in “The Putin Interviews,” where it was once again falsely represented as showing Russians in Syria.

But this time it was President Putin himself making the false claim, and unlike LifeNews, which deleted the video after it was shown to be fake, the Kremlin doubled down.

Even after the Moscow-based investigative outlet Conflict Intelligence Team showed that Putin’s video from the documentary was identical to archive footage shot by U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Putin’s spokesman Peskov still claimed that the video was authentic and that any claims to the contrary were “nonsense.”

Popova, learning that the faked video had surfaced again a year later, said that the Russian government apparently “doesn’t care” whether what they show is true or not.

“A nice picture is all they care about,” she told the Kyiv Post. “And now they’re shooting themselves in the foot.”

Flattering documentary

Oscar-winning filmmaker Stone was granted unprecedented access to Putin in 2015-2017, interviewing the Russian president numerous times. The resulting four-part documentary premiered on June 12 in the United States and on Russian state TV on June 19. It provided insights into Putin’s relations with the United States, his rise to power, and revealed some of his personal thoughts.

In the United States, Stone came under criticism from media for not taking a more critical approach to the interviews and not questioning Putin’s responses.

In an appearance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” Stone defended Putin, saying that the Russian president had been “insulted and abused” in the Western media. That claim was met with gasps of amazement and disbelief from the audience.

“Anything about him negative you found? Or does he have your dog in a cage somewhere?” Colbert then asked, as the audience laughed and applauded.

Colbert then said he was surprised that Stone had any respect for Putin, whom Colbert said was an oppressive leader who suppresses the press and arrests his enemies.