Did Russian President Vladimir Putin declare in October 2023 that the Kremlin will "openly help to Palestine"? No, that's not true: The footage on social media used to make the claim is a clip from a 2021 recording of Putin speaking at Russia's Victory Day parade. The video predates the 2023 Hamas-Israel conflict by more than two years. Putin makes no mention of Palestine in the brief clip of him speaking, nor does he in the full recording of that speech.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) published on Instagram on October 28, 2023. The graphic on top of the footage said:
Putin Announced Russia 🇷🇺 Will Openly Help To Palestine 🇵🇸
It continued:
Noone Can Stop Us urrrrrrraaaaaa 😮
This is what the post looked like on Instagram at the time of writing:
(Source: Instagram screenshot taken on Mon Oct 30 13:43:33 2023 UTC)
The video does not show Putin mentioning Palestine at all. As translated by DeepL from Russian, he said:
Glory to the victorious nation! Happy Victory Day! Hooray!
The footage included shots of tanks in Moscow's Red Square and military jets drawing the colors of the Russian national flag in the sky.
All of that as well as Putin's words was consistent with what Russia's annual celebration of the victory in the Great Patriotic War -- the term commonly used in Russia and some other countries to refer to World War II -- would look like.
A reverse image search confirms that: The footage shows a traditional military parade in Red Square on May 9, 2021. It was the year that marked the 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany's invasion of the USSR -- an event followed by the formal declaration of war by the USSR.
One of the recordings of the live broadcast showing that parade was uploaded on YouTube in 2021 by Komsomolskaya Pravda (archived here), a pro-Kremlin tabloid newspaper in Russia:
(Source: YouTube screenshot taken on Mon Oct 30 14:25:33 2023 UTC; the page was automatically translated to English by Chrome)
As seen in the screenshot above, the 2021 footage of the Victory Day parade is identical to that which was mislabeled in the 2023 post on Instagram, except for the fact that the reused video was horizontally flipped to avoid detection.
According to the transcript of that year's Victory Day presidential speech published by the state-run news agency TASS (archived here), the video on Instagram captured the last seconds of that address. Contrary to the claim, Putin did not make any specific references to Palestine or the long-running tensions between Israel and Hamas.
Nazi Germany's surrender took effect (archived here) at 11:01 p.m. on May 8, 1945. By then, it was already May 9 in Moscow, then the capital of the USSR, hence the May 9 date of the commemoration.
Contemporary Russia thinks of itself as a successor of the USSR, as reflected in the 2020 amendments (archived here) to its constitution.
On October 28, 2023, when the post in question was published online, news media reported that Israel announced (archived here) expansion of the ground operation in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip in response to the October 7, 2023, attack on its territory by Hamas militants.
In that context, the claim reusing the shots of Russian tanks and fighter jets implied military support to one side of the conflict.
What Putin has said (archived here), on October 10, 2023, was a public expression of support for the idea of establishing a Palestinian state as a way to achieve peace in the region.
He repeated (archived here) the same point on October 13, 2023. On the same day, Russia's UN representative said -- as reported by the government-controlled TASS (archived here) -- that Russia was ready to become an intermediary in the de-escalation negotiations in the region.
On October 14, 2023, Hamas thanked Putin for his statements, as reported by Meduza (archived here), an independent Russian-language news outlet operating outside Russia -- even though Russia's peace proposal pitched at the UN did not explicitly mention Hamas, as pointed out by the BBC (archived here.)
Unlike the Palestinian Authority, Hamas historically did not support (archived here) the two-state solution. It wanted to create one Palestinian state without Israel.
Other Lead Stories fact checks of claims about the October 2023 Hamas-Israel conflict can be found here.
