Video shows Bosnian Serb leader, not Croatian president, donning MAGA cap

"Zoran Milanović, President of Croatia, wears a 'Make America Great Again' cap during a press briefing," says a November 7 post sharing the video on X.

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Screenshot from X taken November 14, 2024

Similar posts spread in multiple languages -- including French, Spanish and Portuguese -- across platforms such as X, Facebook and Instagram after Trump defeated Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in the November 5 contest.

Milanović joined a chorus of world leaders who commented publicly on Trump's victory, offering congratulations in a November 6 Facebook post and saying he believes their two countries will remain on good terms (archived here).

But the politician donning a Trump campaign hat in the video shared online is not the Croatian leader but Dodik, the president of Bosnia's Republika Srpska who was indicted for failing to comply with the rulings of an international envoy overseeing the country's peace accords.

Reverse image searches and a watermark on the clip revealed the footage comes from local television station TOK TV, which posted it November 6 on YouTube and Instagram with captions identifying the man as Dodik (archived here and here).

The station reported Dodik organized a cocktail party at the Republika Srpska Palace in Banja Luka, Bosnia in honor of Trump's win (archived here).

Considered a Kremlin ally and facing tightening US sanctions, Dodik had urged the Serbian diaspora living in the United States to vote for Trump ahead of the election.

On X, he shared additional footage and photos of himself putting on and wearing the "Make America Great Again" hat after Trump won (archived here and here). TOK TV and other media outlets also posted other shots of the scene (archived here and here).

PimEyes, a facial recognition website, matched the face in the video shared online to other portraits of Dodik (archived here).

AFP photos show Milanović is a different man.

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President of Bosnia and Herzegovina's entity Republika Srpska Milorad Dodik speaks after laying flowers at the monument dedicated to Bosnian Serb victims of the 1995 war at the City Cemetery in Bratunac, near Srebrenica, on May 23, 2024 (AFP / ELVIS BARUKCIC)

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President of Croatia Zoran Milanović arrives for the NATO 75th Anniversary Celebratory Event at the Mellon Auditorium in Washington on July 9, 2024 (AFP / Brendan SMIALOWSKI)

Since the end of a civil war that claimed almost 100,000 lives between 1992 and 1995, Bosnia has consisted of two semi-autonomous halves that share a weak central government: the Serbs' Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation.

Under international pressure, major reforms were introduced in the post-war years to strengthen the country's central institutions, to the detriment of the entities. But Dodik has sought to reverse that process and frequently stoked ethnic tensions since coming into power in 2006, even threatening to secede.

Milanović, meanwhile, has condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine while also rejecting the deployment of Croatian soldiers to support Kyiv.

AFP has debunked other misinformation about the US election here.