Deep-fake prank video call to Vienna Mayor Michael Ludwig posing as Kyiv’s Vitali Klitschko

On 24 June 2022, Vienna's mayor Michael Ludwig took part in a video call with a person he believed to be Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv. The call was a hoax: Ludwig was speaking not with Klitschko but with an impostor using manipulated footage of the Ukrainian mayor. Unlike his counterparts in Berlin and Madrid, Ludwig did not detect the ruse during or immediately after the conversation.

Convinced the exchange had been genuine, Ludwig publicly promoted it: he posted about the supposed talk with Klitschko, and the City of Vienna issued a press release describing the meeting, accompanied by images of the call. Only afterward, as similar approaches to other European leaders came to light, did Vienna recognise it had been deceived; the city later characterised the episode as a serious case of cybercrime, and the original post was deleted. The same operation also reached Berlin mayor Franziska Giffey, who grew suspicious after about half an hour of unusual requests, and Madrid mayor José Luis Martínez-Almeida, who broke off his call within minutes.

The incident was attributed to the pro-Kremlin Russian prankster duo "Vovan and Lexus" (Vladimir Kuznetsov and Alexei Stolyarov), who later acknowledged the calls. While the affair was initially described as a sophisticated deepfake, analysts argued the visuals matched frames from a real Klitschko interview available online, suggesting reassembled or edited footage rather than AI-generated imagery.

Reporting and analysis attribute the operation to the Russia-aligned pranksters Vovan and Lexus, whose activities are widely seen as serving Russian interests, though they deny political motives; attribution and intent should be treated as reported rather than proven. Whether the call used a genuine deepfake or edited real footage remains contested, with several experts leaning toward manipulated existing material. Vienna's case stands out because Ludwig's office amplified the fake before it was exposed, illustrating how low-cost impersonation can generate disinformation and erode trust even without advanced AI.