Fact Check: Old footage of slain Ukrainian soldiers resurfaces with claims of being part of ongoing conflict
India Today
Old footage of slain Ukrainian soldiers has resurfaced on the internet with claims of being part of ongoing conflict.
As the Russian invasion of Ukraine rages on, a video has gone viral on social media, allegedly depicting scenes from battlefields. The highly graphic footage, shot by a soldier, shows corpses of several Ukrainian soldiers lying amid destroyed vehicles and fire. The video also shows soldiers checking the dead bodies and removing inventory from them.
"Stop the war in Ukraine," proclaimed one Twitter user as they shared the video.
Similar posts are archived here and here.
The India Today Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) found this claim to be misleading. While the slain soldiers are Ukrainian, this video is not from the Russian invasion that began on February 24. This video has been in circulation for a long time now.
AFWA probe
When examined closely, we noticed the national flag of Ukraine on the uniform of one of the slain soldiers. So, we reverse searched the keyframes of the video on the Russian search engine Yandex.
Among the top results was a tweet by a user called @Torsy_2. "Russians remove trophies from the corpses of Ukrainian soldiers," read the tweet from February 18, 2018, along with an image of a dead soldier that seemed to be a screengrab from the viral video. This confirmed that the video is not recent.
