Apparently Sokolov was only a face on the screen (haven’t seen the video), so prerecorded footage, deepfake or even simple video editing are all possibilities. The rest of Shoiqus quotes are pretty much what you’d expect from him.
Regardless of Sokolov the situation in Crimea seems to be in Ukrainian control, I hope they can close the bridge soon.
To be fair, the Ukrainian claim is also unverified.
It’s about level of believability though.
Ukraine has blown up the naval headquarters so the claim that that they killed the naval commander is not particularly unrealistic.
Meanwhile Russia claims they didn’t kill him, and he’s still alive, and the evidence for this is a video.
So we have to ask ourselves what is the likelihood that the naval military commander would be in the naval command base. And compare that to what the probability that Russia had a recorded video of him.
True, in this case one side is notorious liars.