Authors
Vaibhav is a part of Newschecker’s English team, where he spots and debunks all kinds of misinformation, making the rounds on the internet. A Journalism graduate from St. Xavier's College, Mumbai, he holds an M.A degree in Philosophy and an M.Phil from Delhi University.
As Russia moves to recognise Ukrainian separatist regions of ‘Donbas’ as independent, Putin went on live TV in Russia announcing that a military operation is being carried to lend support to the separatist movements in Eastern Ukraine. Explosions have been heard in Ukraine since yesterday night in the capital city of Kiev. Social media is inundated with unsubstantiated claims and speculations on what is happening in the region. In light of these events a video has been going viral on social media with the claim of showing footage of ‘Russia is invading Ukraine.’
This video has been shared on Twitter by the Twitter account of Anonymous, which is a famous community of hackers who have around 3,14,000 followers on Twitter. The viral video has garnered around 5,50,000 views with around 9,000 likes with the caption ‘BREAKING: Russia is invading Ukraine.’
The archived version of the tweet can be seen here.
Newschecker found other post with similar claims.
In the video, several missiles can be seen flying over the night sky of a city while air raid sirens and explosions can be heard blaring in the background.
Russia has launched a military operation a day after recognising the regions of Donetsk and Lunhans as independent, claiming to lend support to these regions where Vladimir Putin claimed a genocide has been occurring, comparing Ukraine to a Nazi state.
According to a BBC article, in response to Putin’s statements, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky said martial law had been declared across Ukraine as Russia carried out strikes on military infrastructure and border guard units. Zelensky said in a statement that Russia will have to pay for this premeditated attack, as the UN Security Council conducted an emergency meeting to impose sanctions on Russia. The attack on Ukraine was met with heavy criticism from American President Joe Biden and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson stating that the world will hold Russia accountable for these attacks.
Factcheck/ Verification
To verify the authenticity of the video, Newschecker conducted a reverse image search of the key-frames of the video on Google and found a longer version of the video uploaded on the Pandramodo channel on Youtube. Pandramodo is a Youtube channel which posts clips of computer games on their channel with around 80,000 subscribers.
The video is titled Iron Dome in War Thunder. Upon performing a keyword search, we found that the game which is being streamed in the video is War Thunder, which is a cross-platform military online game.
According to their website “In War Thunder, aircraft, attack helicopters, ground forces and naval vessels collaborate in realistic competitive battles. You can choose from over 2,000 vehicles from the early 20th century to the most modern combat units, in an extensive variety of combat situations many of which are exclusive. You can find yourself blasting your pursuers from a bomber turret, defending your teammates on the ground from an air raid with anti-aircraft guns, shooting down enemy aircraft with a firestorm from multiple rocket launchers, or trying to sink an enemy warship with a torpedo from a fast attack boat.”
Conclusion
According to the investigation conducted by the Newschecker team, it was found that the viral video with the claim of it being footage of the war going on between Russia and Ukraine is a video game clip shared out of context.
Result: False context/ False
Our Sources
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Authors
Vaibhav is a part of Newschecker’s English team, where he spots and debunks all kinds of misinformation, making the rounds on the internet. A Journalism graduate from St. Xavier's College, Mumbai, he holds an M.A degree in Philosophy and an M.Phil from Delhi University.
