Russian bus video falsely presented as showing drunk Ukrainians in Poland

A video from Russia was falsely presented as showing drunk Ukrainians on a Polish bus after an attack on Ukrainian girls in Poland's southern city of Bielsko-Biała.

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Ukraine's Center for Countering Disinformation said the clip was recorded in Yaroslavl, Russia. It circulated with Polish captions claiming the men were Ukrainians behaving "as though Poland were their own country" and that passengers were afraid to intervene.

The center traced the original video to "June 2026." The bus interior matches vehicles manufactured by the Minsk Automobile Plant (MAZ) and used in Russia, it said. One of the men is also holding "an Essa beer," a Russian product that is not sold in Poland.

The original video carried a Russian caption meaning "convicts are listening to music."

The center said posts containing the altered version attracted unusually high activity from Russian bot accounts, automated profiles used to amplify online messages.

The misinformation spread following an incident on July 11 on a municipal bus in Bielsko-Biała, southern Poland. A 54-year-old man verbally attacked a Ukrainian teenager and her friends, using aggressive and vulgar language.

Prosecutors charged him on Tuesday with insulting three Ukrainians, including two 11-year-old girls, and making unlawful physical contact with one of them.

Polish police said they had identified and detained the man after a video appeared to show him verbally abusing a Ukrainian teenage girl and her friends on a bus in the southern city of Bielsko-Biała on July 11. Image: policja.pl

Polish social media analytics firm Res Futura said about 6 percent of online comments about the attack claimed it had been "staged by Ukrainian representatives or security services."

Analysts found that some accounts posted almost identical statements in several places at the same time, suggesting coordinated activity.

Another false claim used a screenshot of a purported Facebook comment alleging that the girls had spat at the man and insulted him. Posts also claimed that local media had confirmed the account.

Bielsko-Biała's Municipal Transport Company rejected those allegations after reviewing surveillance footage from the bus. It said the recording showed only that one of the girls had stretched her legs toward a friend sitting in a lower seat.

"Although this departed from accepted standards, it did not differ from behavior seen daily among young people on our buses," the company said. It added that the girls were mainly using their phones and had not disturbed other passengers.

Res Futura said a further 9 percent of online reactions blamed the incident on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's policies and the alleged "Banderization" of Ukraine. The polemical term refers to claims that Ukraine glorifies Stepan Bandera, a wartime nationalist leader whose movement is associated in Poland with massacres of Polish civilians.

Analysts said such comments were spread by people associated with the Confederation party led by Sławomir Mentzen and Krzysztof Bosak, Grzegorz Braun’s Confederation of the Polish Crown, and some supporters of the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has condemned the Bielsko-Biała incident, calling it a "disgusting" incident and warning that increasingly hostile political rhetoric toward Ukrainians was fueling such attacks.

(rt/gs)

Source: PAP