Claim: A video shows US President Donald Trump warning India against continuing relations with Russia.
Fact: An authentic video from a January 2026 press conference was overlaid with AI-generated audio.
On 25 October 2026, a Facebook user named Faraz Shaikh shared a clip of the President of the United States Donald Trump warning India to end its relation with Russia, saying:
“I am warning India to end its relations with Russia. Otherwise, I will deal with you the same way Pakistan did in the May conflict”.
The president hinted towards the four-day military confrontation between the neighbouring countries in 2025.
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check first looked for credible news publications reporting on Trump warning India, but couldn’t find any credible results. Instead it led to a Reuters article, titled “Trump’s Russia sanctions waiver eases India’s energy woes, lifts trade deal chances”. On 19 October 2026, the outlet reported that Trump issued an executive order waiving key Russia-related US sanctions and tariffs, providing leeway to India, one of the top importers of Russian oil.
The article did not mention anything about the US President warning the country against continuing its diplomatic relationship with Russia or of a military conflict like the one with Pakistan in May 2025. Soch Fact Check then conducted a reverse-image search of the video to trace its original source which led to the website of the US Department of War. The government agency published an article on 3 January 2026, titled “Trump Announces U.S. Military’s Capture of Maduro”. The report includes an image that matches a key frame of the video being fact-checked.
A comparison of the clip under investigation and the image published on the government agency’s website showed Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine, standing in the same clothes behind Trump.
Top: Screengrab of video under investigation.
Bottom: An image published on the US Department of War’s website on 3 January 2026.
On the same date, the White House’s YouTube channel posted a presser where Trump announced the capture of then-Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, after an overnight military operation in the country’s capital city of Caracas.
Since the visuals and the context attached to it predates the claim, Soch Fact Check decided to run the clip under investigation through Hive’s AI-Generated & Deepfake Content Detection tool. It flagged the speech as 93.2% AI-generated.
Result by Hive Moderation.
To further confirm this result, we ran the video’s audio through Hiya Deepfake Voice Detector. It gave an authenticity score of 12/100 and 21/100 for different parts of the audio, concluding that the sampled voice is “likely a deepfake.”
Result by Hiya Deepfake Voice Detector.
The fact that the video is from Trump’s presser announcing Maduro’s capture in January 2026, and the results from AI detection tools confirm that the audio of the clip is AI-generated, Soch Fact Check concludes that the claim is false.
Virality
Soch Fact Check first came across a viral post on Facebook with as many as 1,800 likes and 826 shares.
It garnered more reach after it received additional 3,600 and 2,300 likes via separate posts on the platform.
Conclusion: The audio of US President Donald Trump’s video warning India against continuing relations with Russia is AI-generated. The original clip contains no such statements and can be traced back to 3 January 2026 when he announced the capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by the US military.
To appeal against our fact-check, please send an email to appeals@sochfactcheck.com