The video of the queue of cars on the way to Bukovel was most likely filmed in 2021, not 2023

Today we want to give you a few reasons why the video of the queue of cars on the road to the Bukovel resort is irrelevant and probably belongs to 2021. We used online resources to check the billboards and promotions seen in the video and found that they do not correspond to today's realities, but were most likely common several years ago.

4 December 2023

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The video was indeed recorded on the road to the Bukovel resort, but it’s likely from 2021, not 2023. We have some evidence to support this.

It wasn’t possible to identify the author or the initial publication of the video. The quality, regrettably, does not permit software algorithms to distinctly recognize fragments and search the web.

The post in russian:
“On the way to the Bukovel resort in the west of the country, we noticed a huge queue of cars. Ukrainians on social media suggest that the Territorial Centre for Recruitment and Social Support (TSC) should visit the area.”
A corresponding video was posted by Ukrainian journalist and civic activist Kostiantyn Andriyuk on his Telegram channel.

UPD: Readers in the comments suggested that this video was initially posted on December 2 on TikTok by a user named zozuliaksenya. She claims to have filmed the video in 2021.

The video started going viral in the afternoon of December 3, 2023. Journalist Kostiantyn Andriyuk was among the first to publish it. Realizing the unreliability of the video, he deleted the post from Facebook, but it still remains on Telegram.

Under emotional headlines, the video was also disseminated by media outlets such as RadioTrek and Apostrof.

Apostrophe wrote, “On the way to the Bukovel resort in the west of the country, we noticed a huge queue of cars. Ukrainians on social media suggest that the Territorial Centre for Recruitment and Social Support (TSC) should visit the area.”

The notorious “Trukha” site also joined in. The post has already received almost 800,000 views and more than 1,000 comments.

While watching the video, we noticed the billboards first. At the 3-second mark, we observed a billboard with the text “Top up Scipass online,” mentioning the “Bukovel24” app. You can see a better quality image in a two-year-old Instagram photo posted by sh.agnessa.

The app was developed in 2019, making it suitable for advertising in 2020. However, we were unable to locate a similar advertisement for the app in 2023.

At the 26-second mark, three identical stands along the same stretch of road are visible, offering accommodation bookings with a 30% discount. On the resort’s page, we see that this ad was relevant for the 2020-2021season.

The webpage featuring this loyalty program became inactive after May 2022, a fact confirmed using the resource. It’s highly doubtful that irrelevant advertising would persist on billboards for two years, especially in such an upscale location.

The resort’s official website provides no information about promotions for the current year.

The traffic jam aligns with events from early January 2021 when an actual queue formed on the road to the resort due to the covid lockdown. Journalist Yaroslav Ivanochko published photos from that time, and the atmosphere appears very similar.

Additionally, it’s worth noting that this year’s season commenced on December 2, so it’s unlikely that a large influx of people would occur on the day after the opening. The resort’s online video surveillance corroborates this, showing no evidence of a rush of people