Did Chinese TV Air Map of Carved Up Russia During Xi-Putin Summit?

Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to Moscow to meet his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin has fueled much speculation and debate about the possibility of resuming peace negotiations in Ukraine, and China's potential role in that process.

But the meeting of the two heads of state has also become a magnet for misleading or fabricated content, which has proliferated on social media over the past week.

One particularly striking image to surface on the back of the summit appeared to show a Chinese state TV program with a background map of Russia seemingly carved up and parts allocated to various nations that it borders, from Ukraine and Estonia to China, and also the U.S.

The apparent screengrab was widely shared alongside the narrative that China setting its sights on a huge landgrab should Moscow's invasion of Ukraine falter, leading to the collapse of Putin's regime.

But as Newsweek Misinformation Watch found, as is often the case with out-of-context pictures of maps going viral, all was not as it seemed.

"Even #China knows #RussiaIsLosing as #Chinese state TV channel CCTV showed a map illustrating which countries will receive the territories of the #Russian Federation after its collapse," a tweet by Anonymous Operations said on March 13.

The claim was picked up over the past week by various pro-Ukraine accounts and Putin's opponents, including exiled former Russian MP Gennady Gudkov and dissident Artemy Troitskiy.

"And this is what, perhaps, will be discussed by Pu[tin] and Xi: Chinese TV is discussing the future carving up of Russian territories. There is a China-Norway border, and Kazakhstan also gets a hefty chunk, as does Estonia," Troitsky wrote on March 17, shortly after Xi's Moscow visit was confirmed.

English language accounts also shared the screengrab, making similar claims.

"Chinese state TV channel CCTV showed a map illustrating which countries will receive the territories of the russian Federation after its collapse," the pro-Ukraine EuromaidanPR account wrote.

But despite getting thousands of shares and user views, the "screengrab" consists of a number of misinformation elements.

First of all, it is not related to the Xi-Putin meeting, and predates it by at least a year.

As reported over the past year by a number of outlets, the apparent "screengrab" began to surface on social media shortly after Russia launched the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

More importantly, the "screenshot" is not genuine, but instead yet another example of impostor content, which typically features materials misattributed to different media—in this case, a decontextualized map superimposed deceptively onto the background of an unrelated TV program.

The clipped image actually originates from a business news show on Chinese TV featuring Tao Ye, an investment consultant, according to the Google Translation of the news ticker text.

The background in fact features financial charts and graphs related to the story, not any maps of Russia. Additionally, the fake image features a digitally added Chinese State TV "CCTV" logo, which is not present in the original video.

And the map itself is also misleadingly stripped of context. It can be traced to a popular 2020 Reddit post showing Russia and its nearest neighbors, depending on one's geographical location inside the country.

While entirely unrelated to politics, the map has been a boon for misinformation agents, who previously shared it without the necessary headline and context to support the narrative of China, the West or both plotting to break up Russia.

These posts received tens of thousands of views on Twitter, Telegram and Reddit, among other platforms, despite there being no evidence that the map appeared on Chinese television.

This isn't the only example of manipulated or digitally altered content being used for misinformation purposes during the Putin-Xi summit.

As Newsweek reported, an image seemingly showing Putin kneeling in front of Xi has been shared widely on social media, but the official press-released photos from the meeting show an entirely different background setting.

As a number of reporters, including freelance journalist and filmmaker Amanda Florian, pointed out, suspicious aspects in the image indicate it is likely an AI-generated deepfake.

With deepfake technology's complexity and quality increasing at an extraordinary pace, spotting these types of hoaxes is becoming much harder—as demonstrated by the viral series of stills of "Trump's arrest," which proved to be AI-generated material.