Does a viral image authentically portray Russia's Rossotrudnichestvo agency head Igor Chaika? No, that's not true: the picture was likely altered using AI to make the Russian official look bigger than in the original. Chaika's face and the logo of the Russian government media organization did not match what was seen in the video recorded in the identical settings.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published by the @Osinttechnical account on X on Sept. 8, 2026. The caption read:
The head of Rossotrudnichestvo, Igor Chaika, attempted to downplay Russia's deteriorating relationship with Armenia today, but admitted that 'there are ups and downs.' The admission comes as Russia's influence in the Caucasus wanes due to the war in Ukraine.
This is what the attached image looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @Osinttechnical on X.)
Igor Chaika (archived here), a son of Yuri Chaika (archived here), a former Russian Prosecutor General, was appointed the head of Rossotrudnichestvo, an EU-sanctioned (archived here) subagency of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in April 2026 (archived here).
This fact check addresses only the image's authenticity and does not evaluate Chaika's statements about Russia-Armenia relations.
Available photos of him (archived here) suggested that, as of the time of writing, his build appeared rather large.
Three online tools, however, detected the presence of generative AI in the image in question.
According to the InVID plugin, the chances of that were 75%:
(Image source: InVID.)
Sightengine said that it was 99% likely that the image contained AI-generated content:
(Image source: Sightengine.)
Lead Stories submitted the picture to the OpenAI verification tool that searched for the SynthID watermark (archived here), an invisible signal embedded by Google AI tools to identify AI-generated content. Here is the conclusion:
(Image source: OpenAI.)
Yet, in this particular case, positive results for AI meant that the picture was edited with it -- not generated from scratch.
The closest match to the image reviewed in this fact check found by Lead Stories came from a video (archived here) published by the Russian government news agency Sputnik sanctioned (archived here) by the U.S. government.
The composite image below shows a side-by-side comparison between two versions of the picture (click to view larger):
(Image source: Sputnik, post by @Osinttechnical on X.)
As seen in the composite image above, Chaika's facial features appeared to be slightly different in the viral image compared to the original. Furthermore, the picture seemed to have been altered in a way that show him from a lower angle, making his body seem bigger than in the original. Additionally, the Sputnik logo from the viral version of the image did not match that from the Sputnik website.
