Does this post show an 8-year-old Ukrainian girl standing up to a Russian soldier and telling him to go back to his country? No, that's not true: The girl pictured here is a Palestinian activist, she wasn't 8 and the soldier she's confronting is Israeli. This 2012 video shows a young Palestinian activist yelling at a soldier, asking him where her brother was taken, according to a journalist's tweet.
The claim appeared in a Facebook post (archived here) on February 27, 2022. The post reads:
PHOTOS: WHAT A BRAVE LITTLE WOMAN
An 8 year Ukrainian girl confronts a Russian soldier telling him to go back to his country. This is courageous.
Brave Girl...
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
Holy Spirit TV, the Facebook account that posted this, gives no source for their claim.
Lead Stories reverse image searched the photos in the Facebook post, which led to a Mirror.co.uk article. That article gave a source of the video: CJ Werleman, currently a global correspondent for Byline Times.
Werleman posted the video on his Twitter account on October 22, 2015.
10 year old girl takes on the IDF. Where did you take my brother?" pic.twitter.com/k5mH2gdqrY
-- CJ Werleman (@cjwerleman) October 22, 2015
While searching for the original video, Lead Stories came across the name and nationality of the girl in the Facebook post. According to a Vox article, she is Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi. She was 12 when the video was shot in November 2012, the article said. This is not the only time Tamimi has had a hostile encounter with Israeli troops. In August 2018, she spent eight months in an Israeli prison for slapping two Israeli soldiers. The Washington Post's YouTube channel has a video that shows Tamimi hitting them.
While the age Tamimi was in November 2012 differs from source to source, it appears to be 10 to 12.
