Does an image of a post-blast orange cloud confirm that the Ukrainian Armed Forces used chemical weapons during their August 2024 incursion into Russia's Kursk region? No, that's not true: The picture shared on social media was taken in Iraq in 2015. It's unrelated to Ukraine's surprise cross-border attack on Russian territory.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X, formerly known as Twitter, on August 10, 2024. It said:
First picture of a CHEMICAL attack by Ukrainian artillery in KURSK !!!!!!! The Armed Forces of Ukraine used chemical weapons in the Kursk region According to the Aida group, the enemy used ammunition filled with chlorine. "Everyone who started breathing is having seizures and vomiting now. Sent to toxicology. The mucous membrane is burning," the serviceman reports divisions.
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Fri Aug 16 15:10:36 2024 UTC)
Reused image
According to a TinEye reverse image search, however, the picture of the pillar of the orange smoke has been online since March 2015, years before both Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and Ukraine's August 2024 incursion into western Russia's Kursk region.
The image was a screenshot of footage published in March 2015 by the BBC (archived here) and the The Times (archived here). The video was reported to portray Iraqi forces neutralizing chlorine-containing explosive devices left by the retreating Islamic State on roadsides near the village of Tikrit in Iraq.
Radio France Internationale (RFI) also published an article about chemical-weapons use that included the photo (archived here).
A search of the August 2024 articles indexed by Google News for the keywords seen here (archived here) led to a version of the claim published by EADaily, a Moscow-based site that routinely posts Kremlin-friendly information. The search also showed a Reuters fact check that debunked the claim about Ukraine using chemical weapons in the Kursk region.
As of this writing, no credible media outlets reported Ukrainian troops' use of chemical weapons in Russia's Kursk region.
Claim's origins
Lead Stories found another post on X (archived here), written in Russian, that was published on the same day as the claim that is the target of this fact check and used the same language.
But the initial source of the claim appeared to have been one of the so-called Z-channels on Telegram (archived here) run by a "military correspondent" -- a term used by some pro-Kremlin Russian bloggers and reporters affiliated with media organizations promoting Russia's war propaganda.
That entry on Telegram was widely -- and uncritically -- republished by many loyalist Russian outlets; for example, here (archived here).
As reported by Reuters (archived here), the acting governor of the Kursk region, Aleksei Smirnov, made similar accusations.
Ukraine's State Security Service (SBU) said on Telegram on August 12, 2024 (archived here), as automatically translated into English by the platform, that it has pinpointed "attempts of the special services of the Russian Federation to use the situation in the Kursk region to baselessly accuse Ukrainian defenders of committing war crimes." The SBU added that "the Russian special services may resort to staging crimes, in particular against the civilian population of the Kursk region, in order to later accuse the Ukrainian side of committing them."
Other Lead Stories fact checks of claims about the Russian-Ukrainian war can be found here.
