Is a child who was slammed onto the floor at the Sheremetyevo airport an Iranian citizen? No, that's not true: According to the Iranian ambassador to Russia, the child seen in the viral video is Afghan. Earlier, a Russian regional commissioner for children's rights said that the critcally injured toddler comes from an Afghan family with Russian citizenship that resides in Moscow.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X on June 25, 2025. It opened:
BREAKING:
🇮🇱🇮🇷 A Jewish Belarusian man, Vladimir Vitkov,was the man who violently assaulted an 18-month-old Iranian toddler at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport, slamming him headfirst onto the floor.
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot by Lead Stories)
On June 25, 2025, Iranian Ambassador to Moscow Kazem Jalali denied that the critically injured toddler was an Iranian citizen, according to posts by that country's embassy here (archived here) and here (archived here). According to the posts, Jalali said, as translated from Russian, the original language of the entries on Telegram, to English:
We immediately contacted the Russian Foreign Ministry to find out which country the innocent child was a citizen of, as there were speculations that he was a citizen of Iran.
He continued:
Friends from the Russian Foreign Ministry said that we [the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs] have conducted an investigation and the case files are being reviewed by the department in charge of Afghan affairs [in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs], and this innocent child who was slammed to the ground in this manner and is now in a coma in all likelihood comes from an Afghan family.
Jalali added that he couldn't confirm that the suspected attacker identified in news reports as Vladimir Vitkov was Jewish.
This rebuttal also appeared (archived here) in the Russian Parliamentary Newspaper, which is the official publication of the Russian parliament.
Earlier, on June 24, 2025, Ksenia Mishonova (archived here), who is the commissioner for children's rights in the Moscow region, wrote on Telegram (archived here), as translated from Russian to English:
[I] talked to the dad. They live in Moscow. They are Afghans. But they have Russian citizenship.
According to the Russian Investigative Committee (archived here), the incident took place at the Sheremetyevo airport near Moscow on June 23, 2025, local time. A man violently threw an 18-month-old child against the floor. According to Mishonova, the toddler was taken to a hospital in Moscow with multiple skull fractures and then put into a medically induced coma.
Neither the main apparatus of the Russian Investigative Committee in its initial statement nor its local branch disclosed the nationalities of the involved persons in its June 24, 2025, press release. The suspected attacker was described as a "31-year-old foreign citizen" who said he was transferring to a flight bound for "a neighboring country".
Irina Volk, a representative of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, wrote about the incident on Telegram here (archived here) and here (archived here and here), but she said nothing about nationalities, ancestry or identities of those involved, either.
Searches across Russian-language news websites on Google (archived here) and the Russian news aggregator Dzen (archived here) did not show any credible reports referring to Vitkov as Jewish or as an Israeli citizen.
An independent Belarusian outlet, "Nasha Niva", reported (archived here) that Vitkov is a citizen of Belarus who arrived at the Sheremetyevo airport from Cairo, Egypt. The same online newspaper wrote, citing the 112 Telegram channel (archived here), that the injured toddler and his family were Afghan.
Read more
Other Lead Stories fact checks mentioning Iran are here.
Articles concerning Israel are here.
