Vladimir Putin makes a televised address in Moscow (Picture: Reuters)
Mystery is swirling around the latest video of Vladimir Putin, in which he threatens Ukraine and the West with his allegedly unstoppable ‘Oreshnik’ missile.
Sat behind his desk, the Russian president is seen in an almost motionless position during his nationally-televised speech on Thursday.
His hands do not even flinch as he confirms the use of hypersonic missiles in a strike on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro.
This has fueled theories circulating on social media that the Kremlin’s film is a ‘deepfake’ aimed at concealing issues with the leader’s health.
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The controversy emerges at a critical moment for Putin as he responds to Ukraine’s use of US and British missiles capable of striking much deeper into Russian territory.
While no concrete evidence has been presented, the allegations have since gained traction, prompting Metro to examine them.
What are the ‘deepfake’ claims about Putin’s address?
Ukrainian internal affairs adviser Anton Gerashchenko was one of the first to raise questions about the clip online.
Alongside a sped up video viewed 1.5 million times, he wrote on X: ‘If you speed up the video, it is visible that Putin’s hands are not moving and look like they are separate from his body.
‘The sound and lip movement do not correspond at times.’
How do deepfakes work?
Deepfakes are realistic digital manipulations of video, audio, or images created using artificial intelligence (AI) techniques.
They can mimic a person’s voice and facial features to make it look like it actually happened.
To make it believable, they require a large dataset of their subject.
For a video deepfake, this typically includes multiple angles, expressions, and lighting conditions to train the AI model.
Documentary filmmaker Christopher Shoebridge also criticised the Kremlin for putting out a ‘totally faked video’.
‘Someone else’s hands have been composited in, and the unnatural, robotic head movements suggest the use of AI,’ he said.
All this follows reports that the president has not been seen in public for at least two weeks, after his last appearance at a conference in Sochi.
Is Putin’s televised address a ‘deepfake?
Even AI experts struggle to determine with certainty if Russia has indeed cooked up something.
Shweta Singh, assistant professor of Information Systems and Management at the Warwick Business School, told Metro: ‘It is really hard via speculation and suggesting if this video is deepfake or not.
‘Despite the fact that Putin gesticulates a lot in his other speeches and in this one his hands don’t move.’
Deepware, an AI detecting tool, did not detect a deepfake. Another similar programme, Attestiv, gave it an overall suspicion rating of 26, suggesting a low-to-moderate level of concern that the footage might be manipulated.
This means ‘parts of the video are probably safe,’ but that some anomalies or indicators of potential tampering have been determined.
These are not definitive enough to confidently classify the video as fake.
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