Was the Ex-President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, Spotted Dancing in a Nightclub in Kiev?

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On September 29th, the news agency PIA published a video depicting a dance of an unknown man. PIA claims that the man from the video is the ex-president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, who made a performance at a nightclub in Kiev. The Facebook post indicates that the video is from the 2019 archive.

The video has also been shared by the Facebook page “Exclusive TV Georgians.” The post mentions that Mikheil Saakashvili is the man dancing in the video. According to the analytical tool Crowdtangle, within the last 24 hours, the video was published on stv.ge’s Facebook page and the Facebook group “41 – Still at the Service of People,” but is no longer available.

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The disseminated information, as if the dancing man featured in the video is the ex-president Saakashvili, is false. The quality of the selected video is too low, so that it is impoosible to identify the face of the person. Nonetheless, by observing the original version of the video spread in 2019, one can confirm that the dancing man is not Mikheil Saakashvili.

The video released by PIA indicates that the material belongs to Политнавигатор. The mentioned media published the video on its website politnavigator.net and Facebook page on July 7th, 2019.

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The mentioned video is of low quality and it is impossible to identify the person as his face is blurred. Politnavigator names the video as follows: “Saakashvili Performs at Kiev Night Club”. According to the results of the video search by the engine InVid, one learns that the video does not belong to Politnavigator and it was present on the internet even before 2019. The video was released in a better quality on social media in January and February 2019, where in some cases, the dancing man was claimed to be Alexei Klevtsov, the governor of Kochubeyevsky District in Russia, while in other cases, the man is deemed to resemble the governor of the Korenovsky District, Sergei Goloborodko.

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Alexei Klevtsov  Sergei Goloborodko

The video went viral on the internet and it is not confirmed whether it was either Alexei Klevtsov or Sergei Goloborodko dancing in a nightclub in Kiev, but according to the original video, where the man’s face is more vivid than in the PIA version, one can say with certainty that the depicted person is not the Georgian ex-president Mikheil Saakashvili. Nonetheless, the similarities with, on the one hand, Klevtsov, and, on the other hand, Goloborodko indeed exist.

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Notworthy, following Politnavigator, disinformation, as if Saakashvili is the man dancing in the video, was disseminated by ГРУЗИНФОРМ – the Russian version of “Sakinform” on July 16th, 2019, and metronome.ge on August 12th, 2019. The video was also shared by geotimes.com.ge and was based on a video posted by YouTube user davit revazishvili on July 8th, 2019.

About “Политнавигатор”

The website Politnavigator.net was created on February 11th, 2014, and its editor-in-chief is Sergei Stefanov. The outlook spreads anti-Ukrainian sentiments and Kremlin propaganda, and it has been included in the EU Stratcom database EUvsDisinfo as one of the Russian disinformation sources. Editor-in-Chief Sergei Stefanov is from Crimea, he considers Sevastopol a part of Russia, which he also mentions on his Facebook profile. Stefanov is a respondent to Kremlin publications such as News Front and ukraina.ru.

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Politnavigator.net is also featured in the materials fact-checked by the Ukrainian fact-checking portal StopFake. Politnavigator.net is often cited by the Kremlin-related publication “Georgia and World.”


The article has been written in the framework of Facebook’s fact-checking program. You can read more about the restrictions that Facebook may impose based on this article via this link. You can find information about appealing or editing our assessment via this link.

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Topic: Politics
Violation: Disinformation
Country: Ukraine
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