Belarusian state media shares photo from 2019 Barcelona protests in slideshow about unrest in Belarus

The Belarusian state news agency BelTA published a video on its Telegram channel about the demonstrations in Belarus, which includes a photo from a 2019 protest in Barcelona, Spain. This was first noticed by the Telegram channel @belteanews (Chai z malinavym varennyem).

The minute-long video is effectively a slideshow of snapshots from the recent opposition protests in Belarus, broken up by captions claiming that demonstrators were paid to cause unrest. For example: “Bought and sold bastards […] ready to sell their own mothers for 20 dollars […] want to appear on our streets […] to wreck everything that we have been building for so long.”

The photo from Barcelona appears at 00:29, TJournal explains. The original photograph was published in a Reuters article about Catalan protests in Barcelona on October 17, 2019.

TJournal adds that the slideshow BelTA published first appeared on the pro-government Telegram Channel @zheltye_slivy on the morning of August 18. This channel known for writing posts “in support of the current government, with criticism of the protesters.”

While the creator of the video remains unknown, the video begins with the caption “Patriots of the Republic of Belarus present.” A basic Internet search didn’t turn up any organizations operating under this name. While there is a group called “Patriots of the Republic of Belarus” on the Russian social networking site VKontakte, it only has 14 members and hasn’t been updated since July 2019.