Did a Russian airplane get hit with a missile, killing 50 people, in 2022? No, that's not true: A fatal plane incident happened on May 6, 2019, before the 2022 Russian-Ukrainian war. Forty-one people died as a passenger plane crash-landed at a Moscow airport. Surviving passengers suggested that the crash happened because of a lightning strike that hit the plane.
The claim appeared in a Facebook post on June 20, 2022, with the caption, "PUTIN Panicked! MOSCOW Airport Turned into a Sea of Flames After the Missile Attack............................" The Facebook user added the video to a playlist titled, "RUSSIA VS UKRAINE today." The video opened:
Putin panics when a Russian passenger plane is hit by a missile.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
According to the Facebook video, this moment happened on June 19, 2022, outside a Moscow airport with at least 50 people dying as a result.
A reverse image search of the first still of the Facebook video resulted in a 2019 article on a Vietnamese website about a Russian plane crashing. CNN and BBC articles also confirmed that the plane crash seen in this video happened in 2019, not 2022.
The crash happened on May 6, 2019, at the Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow, with at least 41 people dead. The plane landed shortly after experiencing communication issues.
Other Lead Stories fact checks related to the 2022 Russia-Ukraine conflict can be found here.
