A video on Instagram appears to show multiple clips of a four legged monster climbing over residential housing blocks in Russia. The narrator claims the first video shown was captured in 2014 and the second in 2013. He asks “Has Chernobyl radiation spread across the country spawning these foul monsters, or is it all a hoax?”.
Nobody has publicly claimed to have made the 2013 video, and Full Fact was unable to find much information about where it came from. However, the fact that giant creatures like this aren’t known to exist indicates that the video was highly likely to have been edited to include the monster.
The other part of the video, however, was uploaded to Youtube in 2014 on a channel that includes other videos of similar CGI monsters. The Daily Star interviewed the creator of the video, Russian graphic designer Dmitry Kataev, a month after it was uploaded.
He told the Daily Star: “I woke up early and couldn’t sleep, and was looking out the window when it was all still and quiet and I thought to myself that if a huge monster would start wandering around, it was the perfect time as nobody would notice.”
He added: “As I couldn’t sleep, I decided to create a monster anyway and uploaded it online.
“It was really easy, I based the monster on a stick insect with a few modifications, and after that it all went crazy.”