Fact Check: 2005 photo from West Bank shared as Russian soldier holding Ukrainian girls at gunpoint
India Today
Anti-Fake News War room (AFWA) probe has found that a 2005 photo from the West Bank was shared as Russian soldier holding Ukrainian girls at gunpoint.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday, February 25, accused Russia of targeting civilian areas as the invasion force reached Kyiv. A photo that asserts alleged Russian highhandedness towards Ukrainian civilians was tweeted by several people. The said image showed a bunch of girls held at gunpoint by a soldier.
"This is unacceptable. Russian soldiers invading #Ukraine threaten a group of young girls as #Putin defies NATO with a military invasion," one person tweeted.
Similar claims have been archived here and here.
The India Today Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) found this claim to be misleading. The photo was shot in the West Bank in 2005 during a protest in front of an Israeli checkpoint.
The girls in the photo donned hijabs. Around one per cent of Ukrainians reportedly follow Islam. So, there was a probability that the claims alongside the photo were authentic.
A reverse search of the image, however, revealed that many of the top results were blogs that talked about the Palestine-Israel conflict. A blog written by one Hussam Ayloush was one among these. In a post titled "Why Zionism will fail", we found the image now shared as from Ukraine among the long list of pictures shared with this blog post published on April 27, 2010.
