Did Polish tv show a map in 2023 'dividing' Ukraine among neighbor states? No, that's not true: a recent news report on national Polish tv did not show such a map. The clip is taken from a old news report aired on Polish public television in 2014. It showed a Russian politician's old proposal to divide Ukraine, shrinking its territory in favor of its neighbouring countries.
The claim appeared in this video on March, 30, 2023, (archived here). It was posted on TikTok by the account elenkalenka_1 which mostly shares content about the Russian-Ukrainian conflict with Russian captions and subtitles.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok.com screengrab taken on Mon Apr 17 13:17:20 2023 UTC)
The voiceover in the video is in Polish but the text is in Russian:
На Польском ТВ уже делят незалежную .....
Я думаю перевод не нужен? Это тот случай, когда все понятно!
Translated in English, the text reads: "On Polish TV they are already dividing independent Ukraine .....
I think we don't need a translation, right? In this case, everything is clear!"
The map did air on the Polish Channel TVP1 on March 23, 2014, but the TikTok video (other examples can be found here, here and here on the platform) did not mention when and why the map was shown, nor the context, while also implying it was a recent broadcast.
The map refers to a proposal presented in 2014 by Russian politician and former leader of the Russian Liberal Democratic party Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who died on April 6, 2022. At the time, he was deputy speaker at the Russian State Duma. He suggested that Ukraine be divided among Russia, Poland, Hungary and Romania; he also proposed for Poland to hold a referendum on the annexation of five Ukrainian regions: Volyn, Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Ternopil and Rivne. In 2014, a Polish presidential adviser dismissed the Russian Liberal Democratic Party's proposal.
Lead Stories performed a Google search for news and images of Polish TV showing a map dividing Ukraine on April 17, 2023, and found no credible reporting of such a map shown in 2023 on Polish TV.
