During Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to India on 4 and 5 December 2025 for the 23rd India–Russia Annual Summit, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi presented him with several gifts, including Assam black tea, Kashmiri saffron, a handcrafted silver horse, an ornate tea set, and a Russian edition of the Bhagavad Gita (here, here and here). In this context, a photo (here, here and here) showing President Putin with the Bhagavad Gita inside an aircraft has gone viral on social media, with claims that he was reading the scripture. Let’s find out the truth behind this photo.
Claim: The viral photo shows Russian President Vladimir Putin reading the Bhagavad Gita.
Fact: The image is AI-generated, as confirmed by Google SynthID and Hive AI-detection tools. While Prime Minister Modi did gift a Russian edition of the Bhagavad Gita to President Putin, there is no official photo showing Putin reading it. Hence the claim is MISLEADING.
To verify the claim, we conducted a keyword search on Google, which led us to a post shared on Prime Minister Modi’s official X handle. The post shows PM Modi gifting the Russian edition of the Bhagavad Gita to President Putin, with the caption stating: “I presented President Putin with a copy of the Bhagavad Gita in Russian. The Gita’s teachings inspire millions of people across the world.”
We then reviewed the official website and verified social media handles of the Russian President, but did not find the viral image posted anywhere (here, here, and here). Further, the unusually high resolution and visual quality of the viral image appeared suspicious. When we ran the image through Google SynthID, it confirmed that the image was generated using Google AI. We also tested it using the AI detection tool Hive, which again confirmed that the image is AI-generated. All this evidence clearly establishes that the photo of President Putin reading the Bhagavad Gita is AI-generated and fake. As of 10 December 2025, no authentic image of such a moment has been published by any official source.
To sum up, this viral photo claiming to show President Vladimir Putin reading the Bhagavad Gita is AI-generated and not real.
