Fact Check: This Picture Of A Crying Girl Does NOT Show The Consequences Of Russia's 2022 Invasion Of Ukraine

Fact Check

  • by: Uliana Malashenko
Fact Check: This Picture Of A Crying Girl Does NOT Show The Consequences Of Russia's 2022 Invasion Of Ukraine Wrong Country

Does a picture of a grieving girl hugging a tombstone stem from the 2022 Russia-Ukraine conflict? No, that's not true. The photograph first appeared on a Georgian-language website in January 2019. The original image contained a Georgian-language inscription, but it was cut out from the later versions of the picture, adding more ambiguity about where the photograph was taken.

The claim appeared on Twitter on June 17, 2022 (archived here). It opens: "All Ukraine is in this photograph... Her pain and her tears .."

This is what the tweet looked like:

Crying girl Eng 01.png

(Source: Twitter screenshot June 28, 2022 16:27:24 UTC)

This English-language claim also appeared here and here. A reverse-image search shows that the same picture has been circulating on social media since 2019. Moreover, both Ukrainian (here and here) and Russian (here and here) accounts have used the picture of this crying girl to promote opposing views of the Russian-Ukrainian armed conflict that has been going on since Russia's forcible annexation of Crimea in March 2014.

So in 2022, some commentators suspected that the picture might not show the consequences of the escalated war that began with Russia's February 24, 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

In fact, this photograph was first published on January 19, 2019. The caption did not discuss Ukraine. Instead, its Georgian-language title read, "It doesn't have to be this way." The Georgian website, Intermedia.ge, where this image appeared, describes itself as a platform for user-generated content that allows account-holders to earn money from their uploads. The website calls this "citizen journalism," although it remains unclear whether it enforces any verification standards or other standard journalism practices.

Here is what the original image looked like:

Crying girl Eng 02.png

(Source: Intermedia.ge screenshot June 28, 2022 15:16:04 UTC)

The picture shared many times on social media had a substantial difference -- it showed a cropped version of the original that cut out a tombstone inscription in the language identified as Georgian by the fact-checking website Stopfake.org. This raises legitimate doubts about the place where the photograph was taken. Additionally, not a single comment below the original image referenced Ukraine. One social media user, however, pointed out that publishing a picture of a minor in tremendous distress might be unethical:

Crying girl Eng 03.png

(Source: Intermedia.ge screenshot June 28, 2022 15:23:20 UTC)

Other Lead Stories fact checks related to the 2022 Russia-Ukraine conflict can be found here.

Want to inform others about the accuracy of this story?

See who is sharing it (it might even be your friends...) and leave the link in the comments.:


  Uliana Malashenko

Uliana Malashenko is a New York-based freelance writer and fact checker.

Read more about or contact Uliana Malashenko

About Us

International Fact-Checking Organization Meta Third-Party Fact Checker

Lead Stories is a fact checking website that is always looking for the latest false, misleading, deceptive or inaccurate stories, videos or images going viral on the internet.
Spotted something? Let us know!.

Lead Stories is a:


@leadstories

Subscribe to our newsletter

* indicates required

Please select all the ways you would like to hear from Lead Stories LLC:

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. For information about our privacy practices, please visit our website.

We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By clicking below to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy practices here.

Most Read

Most Recent

Share your opinion
https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2022/06/fact-check-this-picture-of-a-crying-girl-does-not-show-the-consequences-of-russias-invasion-of-ukraine.html
leadstories.com
CC-MAIN-2024-22
102444
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:NSWXB4MO44HTB536DOYKVXNXIIM5DTME
<urn:uuid:25727e76-a125-43c6-a833-f4c883344637>
2024-05-18T03:29:06Z
172.67.28.131
text/html
sha1:UTQQ7LC4Y2D75GNSKAAJARYWW6EQXJ4H
<urn:uuid:257a4984-c7b5-4256-9d61-16e292cd1dbb>
https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2022/06/fact-check-this-picture-of-a-crying-girl-does-not-show-the-consequences-of-russias-invasion-of-ukraine.html
response
<urn:uuid:a7ae9d8d-65ab-400c-868c-550b805bb68a>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2024-22
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for May 2024
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-80
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.5-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/