Did Vladimir Putin really defy his arrest order to travel to South Africa? In short, nope

Issued on: 14/04/2023 – 16:18

If you only have a minute:

• There are rumours circulating on TikTok and Facebook claiming that Russian president Vladimir Putin travelled to South Africa in late March even though he is under an international arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court. 
• However, there are elements of the videos that indicate the images were not filmed in March of this year, but much earlier.
• It turns out that this footage isn’t recent. One video is from May 2015, when former South African president Jacob Zuma met Vladimir Putin in Moscow. The other is from July 2018, taken during the 10th summit of the BRICS nations  (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) held in Johannesburg.

A BRICS meeting from 2018

Posts featuring two videos said to show Russian President Vladimir Putin travelling to South Africa, in defiance of an international arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court, have been shared thousands of times on Facebook since late March. The first video was viewed more than 775,000 times on Facebook, while the second garnered more than 260,000 views on TikTok.

The video was posted online around a month after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin. The Russian leader is accused of war crimes in Ukraine, including the illegal deportation of the population, which his government denies.

In late August, South Africa will host the 15th summit of BRICS nations, which include Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Putin would normally attend the BRICS summit. However, the arrest warrant is “obviously a matter of concern”, said South African Minister for International Relations and Cooperation Naledi Pandor.

The footage in the viral video shows Vladimir Putin on the tarmac of the airport, escorted by South African officials. “Meanwhile President Putin landed in South Africa yesterday while the USA Vice President Harris Kamala lands in Zambia today. Interesting,” reads the caption.

This caption, however, is wrong, as our colleagues on the fact-checking team at the French press agency AFP Fact Check established in this article, explaining that the video is several years old.

The footage is from 2018. It was broadcast by the South African public television channel SABC during the 10th BRICS summit held in South Africa that year, as indicated by the white banner at the bottom of the screen, which reads “President Putin arrives in SA for the 10th BRICS summit”. The original TV package was published on the YouTube site of a South African media outlet here on July 26, 2018.

Vladimir Putin met his South African counterpart at the Kremlin in 2015

“Putin is now in South Africa, he is currently in South Africa,” proclaims the author of a video posted on TikTok on March 26, 2023. 

The man filming speaks directly to the camera in French. Behind him, a photo moves from left to right on the screen, showing Putin shaking the hand of a man wearing a suit.

“The Russian president Vladimir Putin is now in South Africa: where is the International Criminal Court?” reads the caption, in French, on the video shared on Facebook.

Some of the comments ridicule the ICC, claiming that it is powerless against Vladimir Putin.

The images of the Russian president visible in the backdrop of the video are, at first, difficult to distinguish. However, there are some clues (including the typography, symbols and name of the account) that suggest that they were published on TikTok with the title “Putin welcome to Africa”.

Our team ran a search using keywords on social media and found the video, posted online on March 24, by a user with more than 800,000 followers.

We did a reverse image search of screengrabs from the video posted on TikTok (click here to find out how). Result: these images were posted on May 11, 2015 on the YouTube channel of the South African government.

You can see the two people visible in the background of the TikTok video.

“President Jacob Zuma holds bilateral meeting with President Vladimir Putin, 9 May 2015,” reads the caption. 

This meeting was also documented by photos published in May 2015 on the Kremlin’s website, where it states that “Vladimir Putin and Jacob Zuma discussed current issues of bilateral relations and cooperation in various international formats, including within the framework of BRICS” on May 9, 2015.

The official photos shared on the Kremlin’s website show the same floral arrangement and the same clock that appears in the TikTok video

This footage is thus from 2015, when Jacob Zuma was still president of South Africa. When Zuma resigned in 2018, Cyril Ramaphosa became president. He still holds that office today. 

An article by the Guardian published in May 2015 also says that the Russian president welcomed several heads of state, including Jacob Zuma, to Moscow on the 70th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany.