One morning, an ordinary chap from Iraq suddenly found himself an internet sensation on Ukrainian social media. How did this happen?
It all began with a scandal in the Ukrainian media. During an interview between TV presenter and blogger Masha Efrosinina and MasterChef presenter Olga Martynovskaya, the latter spoke about cruelty to animals she had witnessed as a child. The presenters laughed at these stories, but the incident caught the public’s attention.
Social media users were outraged and began flooding the STB TV channel with complaints. However, due to a mix-up, instead of the Ukrainian TV channel’s official page @stbua, users on Threads started tagging the profile @stb.
The owner of this account was an ordinary Iraqi man named Mobin Nasir.
“To be honest, it was a complete shock! My phone wouldn’t stop vibrating with notifications and messages, and at first I seriously thought my account had been hacked or that I was dreaming. It was like a crazy digital wave, and it took me ages to realise what was actually happening,” the young man told BBC News Ukraine.
He hadn’t known much about Ukraine before — just the basic facts. For example, its geography or the latest news.
Photo: STB
A few days ago, the young man’s profile had just a few hundred followers; now he has over 4,000.
When he started receiving hundreds of messages from Ukraine, he even wrote a post asking people to stop, because he has nothing to do with the conflict that has arisen in Ukraine’s media landscape. He wrote his post in Ukrainian:
‘Hello. I’m asking the Ukrainian people not to mention my account. I have nothing to do with what’s happening. I’m just an ordinary person. Why do so many people remember my account? It’s worrying me,’ reads the foreigner’s post.
Photo: stb
Some Ukrainian users realised their mistake, apologised and briefly explained the situation, which has already spawned hundreds of jokes and memes.
Nasir himself joined in, posting a video featuring a rose in which he appears as the new star of the show *The Bachelor*. The video currently has over 400,000 views.
With the help of Google Translate, he realised that ‘everyone is talking about a particular trend that fits my nickname perfectly’.
Nasir is 20 years old. He is a university student studying Computer Engineering.
“I’m not working at the moment, so I spend most of my time studying and blogging on social media,” he says.
Nasir also noted that he loves Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. He is now very keen to visit Ukraine:
“Seeing how warm, cheerful and hospitable Ukrainians are, I’d like to visit Ukraine one day, when everything is peaceful and safe,” Nasir told BBC journalists.
Now, the Iraqi man’s posts are racking up hundreds of thousands of views, and he himself replies to mentions of his profile in Ukrainian.