I’m at my desk paying bills on a Saturday morning, and a headline stops me. A woman accused in a bombing overseas supposedly stood next to Ukraine’s president at a military award ceremony years earlier, and the video attached shows him pinning a medal on her uniform. The caption says it proves she worked for his government all along.

I watch the clip a few times, and the skin around her eyes barely moves even when she blinks. So I looked into it. Here’s what I found.

IBM lost $31B. One blog post did it.


Dear Friend,

One company wiped $31 billion from IBM in a single trading day.

Not with a product launch. With a blog post.

Days later, America's largest legal database company suffered the worst drop in its history.

Then cybersecurity. Then consulting. Then advertising.

$285 billion gone from the software sector in under a week.

Microsoft alone has surrendered $700 billion since this started.

And here's the part that should worry you:

That happened while this company was still private. Still holding its most powerful weapon back.

Now it's about to go public - possibly in October - with a nearly $1 trillion valuation and a war chest to match.

If you own "safe" software, consulting, or services stocks in your retirement account, you may be standing in the blast radius.

I just published the 5 stocks I'd sell before October - and the one backdoor play I'd buy instead.

TODAY’S REALITY CHECK

The Video “Proving” A Bombing Suspect Met Zelenskyy? It’s Not Her Face

2

Fact-Checkers On It

70%

AI Match Score

2 DAYS

To Debunk

MEDIUM

Fooled Index

A uniformed face swapped into a real 2022 award ceremony to frame a bombing suspect

MANIPULATED — The clip shared as proof a Monaco bombing suspect once received an award from Ukraine’s president.

Anastasiia Berezovska was named a suspect this month in a bombing that injured a Ukrainian businessman in Monaco. A video posted on X on July 20, 2026, claimed to show her standing next to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at a 2022 military award ceremony, with a caption saying she worked as a Ukraine Security Service officer years before the bombing happened.

The video shows a wide shot of Zelenskyy and several officers in uniform, and as the camera moves closer, one woman’s face comes into focus next to him. The post treated her presence in the ceremony as proof of a long-standing connection between her and the Ukrainian government.

Fact-checkers ran the woman’s face through the InVID verification tool, and it came back 70% likely to be an AI-generated deepfake. A search of Zelenskyy’s own Telegram channel turned up a longer, clearer recording of the same ceremony, posted back on December 6, 2022, and the officers standing next to him in that version have different faces entirely.

A separate face-comparison tool, Facepair, confirmed the woman in the doctored clip didn’t match Berezovska either. Someone took a real ceremony video and swapped in a face to manufacture a connection the original footage never showed.

🎖

A longer version of the same ceremony exists. Zelenskyy’s own Telegram channel posted a clearer, full-length recording back in December 2022, and the officers standing next to him in it have different faces.

💻

A verification tool flagged the face as fake. The InVID plugin rated the woman’s face 70% likely to be an AI-generated deepfake, a strong sign it was swapped into the video afterward.

🔑

A face-matching tool ruled out the suspect. Facepair compared the woman in the video to real photos of Berezovska and found they were not the same person.

📅

The timeline doesn’t hold up. The ceremony happened in 2022, and Berezovska wasn’t named a suspect in the Monaco bombing until years later, long after this footage already existed.

MANIPULATED

🚨 Real Ceremony, Swapped Face

Zelenskyy did hand out military awards at a real ceremony in 2022. The woman’s face in the viral clip was swapped in afterward, and neither the detection tools nor the original recording back up the claim.

WHAT ELSE GOT FLAGGED

That “Farmer vs. Activist” Cow Argument? Nobody Said Any Of It

FAKE
The same suspiciously photogenic farmer arguing with a different AI activist in a field full of identical cows

Posts showing a young activist arguing with a farmer about cows and carbon have been spreading for months, each one pairing a made-up back-and-forth with a photo of the two of them standing in a field. Lead Stories found dozens of these posts, and the Hive Moderation detection tool rated the images close to 100% likely to be AI-generated. The same farmer shows up looking nearly identical across totally different posts, and the cows in the background are always suspiciously uniform, all the same color and pattern. No version of the story ever names the people involved or says where or when the conversation happened.

Bruno Fernandes Never Signed With That Casino. His Face Did.

FAKE
A soccer star signing a contract with a casino he's never heard of, rendered entirely by AI

An unlicensed offshore casino site posted a one-minute video on its homepage showing Manchester United captain Bruno Fernandes signing an ambassador contract at Old Trafford. Fernandes never signed anything with the company, and the whole video was built with AI. Experts who studied it called it an unusually convincing fake, pointing to small continuity errors and slightly generic facial details as the only real giveaways. The casino used the fake endorsement to target soccer fans overseas who follow Manchester United.

YOUR REALITY DETECTOR TOOLKIT

Today’s Skill: Trust The Original Source, Not The Screenshot

The real record of an event usually still exists somewhere. Go find it.

01

Check if the person’s own channel has the longer version.

Zelenskyy’s own Telegram channel had the full, uncut ceremony video from years earlier, and it showed different people standing next to him. When a claim involves a public figure, check their own channel directly.

02

Notice when the same story keeps repeating itself.

The farmer in the viral “activist” posts looks nearly identical every time, and the cows are always suspiciously uniform. When a story shows up over and over with no real names attached, treat it as fiction.

03

Be extra careful with endorsements on unfamiliar sites.

Bruno Fernandes never signed with the casino site using his face in a video. If a celebrity endorsement leads you to a site you’ve never heard of, assume it’s fake until the celebrity confirms it themselves.

“Trust, but verify.”

— Ronald Reagan