The video is of Putin at the funeral of his former judo coach in 2013.
This post on X (formerly Twitter) with a video, purportedly of Russian President Vladimir Putin paying his last respects to Wagner ex-director Yevgeny Prigozhin, is FALSE.
The post reads: “Vladimir Putin pays his last respects to Yevgeny Prigozhin the Wagner Boss and then declines to get into his limousine and walks on foot from the occasion.”
Russian authorities confirmed Prigozhin’s death after a private jet he was travelling in crashed on 23 August 2023, killing everyone on board. The Wagner chief was buried in a private ceremony at St Petersburg cemetery on 29 August 2023. Putin did not attend.
A reverse image search of a screenshot from the recording on Yandex established that the video dates back to 2013.
The recording was featured in an article on a Russian news site with a headline translated to; “After saying goodbye to the coach, Putin wanted to be alone.”
According to the article, the deceased, identified as Anatoly Rakhlin, was Putin’s judo teacher, and “the president was part of the first youth group that Rakhlin recruited in 1964.”
Rakhlin’s funeral was widely reported by the media and more images from the ceremony are available on Getty Images.
PesaCheck has looked into a post on X (formerly known as Twitter) with a video, purportedly of Russian President Vladimir Putin paying his last respects to Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, and finds it to be FALSE.
This post is part of an ongoing series of PesaCheck fact-checks examining content marked as potential misinformation on Facebook and other social media platforms.
By partnering with Facebook and similar social media platforms, third-party fact-checking organisations like PesaCheck are helping to sort fact from fiction. We do this by giving the public deeper insight and context to posts they see in their social media feeds.
Have you spotted what you think is fake or false information on Facebook? Here’s how you can report. And, here’s more information on PesaCheck’s methodology for fact-checking questionable content.
This fact-check was written by PesaCheck fact-checker Peris Gachahi and edited by PesaCheck senior copy editor Cédrick Irakoze and acting chief copy editor Francis Mwaniki.
The article was approved for publication by PesaCheck managing editor Doreen Wainainah.
