Does a video authentically show Vladimir Putin going "past world leaders to shake Trump's hand"? No, that's not true: The version of the clip that went viral in the days leading up to Trump's second inauguration in January 2025 was edited to remove several key frames documenting one of the 2018 events commemorating the end of World War I. Multiple versions of the original footage show that in reality, Putin shook hands with leaders of Germany and France before greeting Trump and his wife.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X where it was published on January 18, 2025. It opened:
Putin goes past world leaders to shake Trump's hand.
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Mon Jan 20 16:12:13 2025 UTC)
The footage shared on X purported to show Russia's Vladimir Putin walking past former Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel (archived here) to shake hands with Donald Trump and his wife, Melania Trump.
However, some frames were cut out from the original, longer version of the video published, for example, by the Daily Mail on YouTube (archived here). At the 00:07 mark, we see France's Emmanuel Macron (archived here) turning to Putin to shake hands. At the 00:09 mark, Russia's president shakes hands with Merkel. Trump stands next to her, and Putin moves to greet him only at the 00:11 mark.
The video was not recent. Merkel left office (archived here) in December 2021 (archived here).
The footage was recorded three years before that, in November 2018, when world leaders gathered in Paris to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the World War I Armistice (archived here).
The same original footage was also published by Radio Free Europe (the fragment that is the focus of this fact check begins at the 1:33 mark) and Sky News (archived here).
The edited version of the video showed a watermark referring to an account on TikTok which appeared to have been deleted, as of this writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Mon Jan 20 16:14:47 2025 UTC)
The account that reposted the claim on X mentioned "memes" (archived here) among the types of content it published.
Other Lead Stories fact checks of the claims about Donald Trump can be found here.
