Fake video: Fallen Ukrainian soldiers will be buried in biodegradable pods
The Kremlin mass media, Chinese-language Facebook accounts, z-Telegram channels, pro-Russian Tik-Tok accounts and some English-language sites are sharing a TV story allegedly released on 1+1 channel during the telethon. In the video, an off-screen voice says that fallen soldiers will be allegedly buried in biodegradable pods in Ukraine – this idea was proposed by unnamed environmentalists.
This is a fake. Such a story was not shown on 1+1 or any other Ukrainian TV channel. There is no such video on the website of the television company.
Neither there are traces of the story about the initiative of "Ukrainian environmentalists" on the TV channel’s Facebook page. This "story" is also not available on the television company's YouTube channel.
The story is a compilation of at least four videos that can be found on the Internet in open access.
The initial footage in the fake video – a field of sunflowers – can easily be found in hundreds of videos on the Internet. These pictures are even available in presentations on ecology in the public domain.
The main part of the fake story is a video about the Capsula Mundi project, developed by Italian designers Anna Citelli and Raoul Bretzel in 2016. They suggest using a biodegradable burial pod to turn the body of the deceased into useful substances for a tree that will grow at the burial site.
For the fake story, the propagandists used three frames from the original video: the schematic view of the capsule, the process of tree growth and the authors' idea of relatives visiting burial places.
Propagandists changed the color of a person in a pod from red to blue and yellow and added the same shades in the part of the video showing the process of tree growth.
It is not yet possible to bury a person in a Capsula Mundi pod – the product is still in the development phase https://www.capsulamundi.it/en/. Currently, it is only possible to bury ashes in a biodegradable urn but this is only available in the UK and a few US states where burials on private land plots are allowed https://8billiontrees.com/eco-friendly-natural-products/tree-pod -burial/.
Other frames from the fake story are about growing vegetables that are not even from Ukraine. The part of the video where the woman holds the vegetables in her hands is easy to find on English-language sites for freelance editors.
Part of the video about harvesting is taken from a Facebook video of a Vietnamese agricultural company which was filmed in April 2019.
In May 2022, the Verkhovna Rada adopted a law that provides for the creation of a National Military Memorial Cemetery to bury Ukrainian soldiers. The Pantheon of Heroes will be designed for 50,000 burial sites.
According to Deputy Minister of Veteran Affairs Oleksandr Porkhun, the construction of the National Military Memorial Cemetery will begin on a plot of land of almost 270 hectares in the territory of the Hatne rural territorial community in Fastiv district, Kyiv region, in November.
Earlier, Russian propaganda shared a fake video about a "Ukrainian" setting fire to the California DNA center over Nazism.
Andriy Olenin
