the times | Friday March 18 2022 9News
The defence secretary condemned
Russian “dirty tricks” after being target-
ed by an impostor posing as the Ukrain-
ian prime minister.
Ben Wallace told The Times that a
man pretending to be Denys Shmyhal
on a video call asked him a series of
questions which “got wilder and wilder
so I ended the call”.
Priti Patel, the home secretary, has
also been the target of a hoax call, but in
her case it was unclear who that caller
was pretending to be.
One line of inquiry is that Wallace’s
call was orchestrated by Russian intelli-
gence to try to extract information or
embarrass him.
The former Scots Guards captain
who was in Poland at the time, ordered
an immediate inquiry to find out how
the impostor was able to speak to him.
It is understood the call lasted less than
ten minutes.
Wallace said: “The man looked like
the prime minister and sounded like
him and had a Ukrainian flag in the
background. He was clearly trying to
dupe us.” The impostor asked if Britain
would send warships to the Black Sea
and about a possible security pact with
questions alluding to whether Ukraine
should get nuclear weapons.
Wallace was also asked about the
prospect of Ukraine dropping its ambi-
tion to join Nato and becoming a “neu-
tral” state. Wallace apparently repliedFake surrender video
intensifies online war
Hugh Tomlinson WashingtonA fake video of President Zelensky call-
ing on his troops to lay down their arms
and surrender to Russian forces has
been pulled from social media but the
incident has raised concerns about a
new front emerging in the information
war around the invasion.
The “deepfake” circulated on social
media and was briefly planted by
hackers on live television in Ukraine
and on a Ukrainian news website
before it was spotted and removed. The
minute-long video also received wide-
spread play on Russian social media.
The broadcaster Ukraine 24, which
saw Zelensky’s message to surrender
planted in the “ticker” along the bottom
of the screen, denounced the work of
“enemy hackers”.
The video was of poor quality and
was spotted immediately. Viewers
noted that Zelensky’s body did not
move at all, while his accent and lip-
sync were wrong.
The incident has raised alarm that
Russia could flood social media with
similar efforts in an effort to discredit all
information put out by the Ukrainian
government as it combats the flood of
pro-Russian support online.
“The fact that it’s so poorly done is a
bit of a head-scratcher. You can clearly
see the difference — this is not the best
deepfake we’ve seen, not even close,”
Mounir Ibrahim at Truepic, a company
backed by Microsoft to root out deep-
fakes and manipulated media online,
told The Daily Beast website. “As we
start seeing more and more cheap fakes,
deepfakes flood the zone, it’s going to
desensitise people and allow bad actors
to allege, ‘Nothing is real on the ground,
you can’t trust anything’.”Zelensky responded to the fake with
a video of his own on his Telegram
channel, assuring supporters: “We are
defending our land, our children, our
families. So we don’t plan to lay down
any arms. Until our victory.”
Ukraine said this month that Russia
and its supporters might seek to spread
disinformation about the invasion
through fake videos and other media. At
home, Russian media is already waging
a rigorous campaign to conceal Russian
casualties on the battlefield and claim
that videos of Ukrainian civilian dead
and destroyed buildings in besieged
cities has been staged by Zelensky’s
government.
“Videos made through such technol-
ogies are almost impossible to distin-
guish from the real ones,” Ukraine’s
Centre for Strategic Communications
and Information Security said in a
statement. “Be aware, this is a fake!
His goal is to disorient, sow panic,
disbelieve citizens and incite our troops
to retreat. Rest assured, Ukraine will
not capitulate!”intervention, the full expulsion of Rus-
sian banks from the Swift global pay-
ments network, and a ban on Russian
energy imports. Germany is under-
stood to be the leader of a group of EU
member states that are obstructing a
push for further sanctions.
The gloomy mood that descended on
the Bundestag was compounded by
jeers from the back benches as theWorld in grip of
pivotal struggle,
US to warn Xi
David Charter Washington
Didi Tang Beijing
Larisa BrownPresident Biden will tell President Xi
today that the world is in the grip of a
defining struggle between democracies
and autocracies, as he attempts to con-
vince China to stop supporting Russia’s
war in Ukraine.
Before a fourth call between the two
leaders, Biden said yesterday that the
West was at a pivotal moment in history
that “occurs every several generations”.
He said: “I think we are in a genuine
struggle between autocracies and de-
mocracies and whether or not democra-
cies can be sustained.”
Biden suggested that Xi would be un-
likely to shift his support for President
Putin’s conflict. “He does not believe
democracies can be sustained in the
21st century because things move so
rapidly, technology’s changing so
much, democracies don’t have time to
arrive at consensus,” Biden said of his
Chinese counterpart.
Last week, in a worrying sign for the
West, China offered strident support for
Russia, praising their “iron-clad” rela-
tionship while condemning the West’s
“naked double standards” on its claims
towards Taiwan.
Russia denied a report that a plane
carrying Sergey Lavrov, its foreign min-
ister, had turned back halfway to
Beijing and returned home on Putin’s
orders. The plane changed course over
Novosibirsk, a city in Siberia, according
to the Germany newspaper Bild. Maria
Zakharova, foreign ministry spokes-
woman, called the report “fake” news.
How we can save Taiwan from Ukraine’s
fate, James Forsyth, page 27The “deepfake” footage was briefly put
on live television in Ukraine by hackerstells Germany
agenda moved on to birthday greetings
and a vaccination debate, leaving MPs
no opportunity to respond to Zelensky.
The Times understands that Ger-
many has tried to use its contacts in Bei-
jing to persuade China to rein in Russia,
as western and Ukrainian officials said
they were pessimistic about the con-
tinuing peace talks with Moscow.
Sources were sceptical about a report
that both sides had made significant
progress on a 15-point plan, under
which Ukraine would drop its ambition
to join Nato and make a binding pledge
not to allow foreign combat troops to be
stationed on its territory.
Even if an agreement could be
reached on these points, there are two
significant obstacles. The first is that
Ukraine has little trust in Russia’s will-
ingness to respect the terms of any deal.
“How are they supposed to expect the
Russians to uphold their end when they
can’t even respect a limited ceasefire for
a humanitarian corridor in Mariupol?”
a senior German official said.
The other is the claims Russia has
staked on Ukraine’s sovereign territory,
including the Crimea, which it has oc-
cupied since 2014, and the entire Don-
etsk and Luhansk regions.
One of Zelensky’s advisers said he
had not changed his position that
Ukraine’s “territorial integrity” was
sacrosanct. A European diplomat said:
“The international community has rec-
ognised Ukraine within its internation-
ally recognised borders. That’s a fact.”than it lets on, the process will be
fraught with difficulty. One probable
flashpoint is that more than half of the
Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts are
under Ukrainian control but claimed by
the Russian-backed puppet states.How can Ukraine trust Russia to
honour any agreement?
That is the reason for the pessimism in
European capitals. Russia has failed to
respect even brief ceasefires intended
to establish humanitarian corridors out
of besieged cities such as Mariupol.
This does not inspire confidence in the
chances of it sticking to a broader
armistice that might simply give Russia
time to resupply and regroup. At the
back of the negotiators’ minds will be
the possibility that any truce could
provide Russia with a stronger platform
for the next war, or that Ukraine could
be plagued for years to come by the
kind of gruelling fighting that has
scarred the Donbas since 2014.PHOTOGRAPHS: GLEB
GARANICH/REUTERS;
UKRAINIAN PRESIDENTIAL
PRESS SERVICEPresident
Zelensky greets
Kateryna
Vlasenko, 16, in a
hospital in Kyiv.
Far left, injured
civilians leaving a
village north of
the capitalNews
Wallace complains of dirty tricks
after impostor’s call gets through
Larisa Brown Defence Editor
Matt Dathan Home Affairs Editor
Steven Swinford Political EditorIngram added that because Wallace
had answered some questions
“they could play them back to try to
generate anti-Ukraine propaganda or
use them to embarrass the British
overnment”.
Wallace, 51, the defence secretary
since 2019, said that “no amount of
Russian disinformation, distortion and
dirty tricks” could distract from the
human rights abuses carried out by
President Putin’s forces.
The fact that a caller was able to
speak directly to the defence secretary
raises security questions, particularly
given Wallace’s suggestion that Russia
was behind it. The Times understands
the call request originated in an email
purporting to be from an aide in the
Ukrainian embassy in London. The
request was sent from a government
department to the Ministry of Defence.
Wallace tweeted: “An attempt was
made by an impostor claiming to be
Ukrainian PM to speak with me. He
posed several misleading questions and
after becoming suspicious I terminated
the call... a desperate attempt.”
The home secretary said the same
had recently happened to her,
tweeting: “Pathetic attempt at
such difficult times to divide us.
We stand with Ukraine.”
Aides refused to disclose any
details of the call, insisting that
doing so would “give these
people exactly what they
want”. The source added: “We
don’t want to give them the
oxygen.”that all subjects were a matter for
“wider discussion” although explained
that the UK would not be deploying
forces to defend Ukraine and could not
be involved in discussions about
nuclear weapons.
The impostor asked whether Wallace
had received a “substance”, to which he
responded that he did not know what
he was talking about.
It is thought that the impostor was a
person who looked like Shmyhal rather
than a “deepfake” manipulation of
video and audio files.
There are fears, however, that there
may be an attempt to distort or edit
Wallace’s answers. Government offi-
cials are concerned about disinforma-
tion being spread by the Russians, with
a Whitehall team working around the
clock to dispel online myths. It is un-
clear if other ministers were targeted.
Philip Ingram, a security expert and
former senior British intelligence offi-
cer, said: “There’s something wrong
in the system if someone like that
has managed to get through to
the secretary of state. The gate-
keepers who should vet all con-
nections clearly haven’t
been effective.” He said
it could have been a
prankster or Russia
“trying to mess
around”.ddBen Wallace ended
the call when the
questions became
implausible