Russian-Ukrainian War

Does a video of a long convoy of cars show residents of Belgorod, Russia evacuating their homes after Russian paramilitary groups fighting for Ukraine crossed the Russian-Ukraine border on May 22, 2023, and attacked the Belgorod region? No, that's not true: Lead Stories compared the video footage with photos of Belgorod in Google's Street View and found that the cars…

Does a viral video show a Russian attack on the Ukrainian city of Ternopil during the 2023 Eurovision Song Contest? No, that's not true: The same footage first appeared online four months before, where it was used by Russian state-controlled TV in news reports about Iran. The claim appeared in a tweet (archived here) published on May 13, 2023. It…

Have 80,000 Ukrainian troops totally blockaded Russian invasion forces fighting in Ukraine's semi-occupied eastern Donetsk region? No, that's not true: The post making the claim in its caption does not mention a blockade in an accompanying video. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited Donetsk on December 20, 2022, and did not say his forces had surrounded the Russian invaders. Keyword searches…

Do photos circulating on social media show a recently captured Ukrainian POW with a swastika tattoo on his back? No, that's not true: These are seven-year-old images, taken during fighting in 2015 with armed, Russia-backed separatists in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region. A 2015 video interview with an individual who closely resembles the man in these photos established that he is…

Is North Korea sending troops to Ukraine to help the Kremlin's war efforts? No, that's not true: At the time of writing, Moscow appeared to be considering the idea of North Korean workers, not soldiers, working on reconstruction in Ukraine's Russian-occupied regions, severely damaged during months of fighting between Russia and Ukraine. Previous reports about an alleged agreement to ship…

Did NATO's most lethal fighter jets arrive in Ukraine? No, that's not true: As a close NATO partner -- but not a member country -- in 2022 Ukraine received non-lethal defensive support in its battle against invading Russian forces, according to NATO's website. The photograph with this claim is from 1998, and is of a partially disassembled F-22 Raptor being…

Did NATO send "10 thousand" troops to Ukraine? No, that's not true: There are no credible reports about that. Moreover, the social media posts that made this claim did not contain a single verifiable detail about the purported event. The story appeared in a Facebook post on August 25, 2022. The caption says: Putin is stuck: 10 thousand NATO Troops…

Did France 2 intentionally misinform its audiences about an incident in the war in Ukraine on August 10, 2022? No, that's not true: The French TV channel's report about a strike that hit buildings surrounding Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant overall correctly reflected the situation on that day, but one segment misidentified a building chimney as an unexploded missile. In…

Does a Facebook video show Ukrainian and NATO planes bombing Russia on July 14, 2022, resulting in a gigantic blaze? No, that's not true: The video manipulates information and uses irrelevant images. The claim was posted on Facebook on July 14, 2022. It did not contain any references to the time or dates of the purported events discussed in the…

Does a picture of a grieving girl hugging a tombstone stem from the 2022 Russia-Ukraine conflict? No, that's not true. The photograph first appeared on a Georgian-language website in January 2019. The original image contained a Georgian-language inscription, but it was cut out from the later versions of the picture, adding more ambiguity about where the photograph was taken. The…