CORRECTION -- STORY UPDATED: check for updates below.
Does a viral video really show a Russian Su-27 jet intercepting a NATO F-15 trying to get closer to a Tu22m3 bomber over Ukraine? No, that's not true: The footage which was widely copied to other social networks carried the watermark of a TikTok channel that publishes aviation videos. The caption under that video claimed it was created in the "War Thunder" video game. However, older, mirrored copies of the video found online place the incident over the Baltic Sea in 2019 and did not involve a bomber at all.
The video (archived here) was published to TikTok on July 9, 2024 with a caption that read:
🔥 A Russian Su-27 intercepting NATO F-15 trying to get closer to a Tu-22m3. #su27 #su27flanker #su27ukraine #su27flanker🇷🇺 #warthunderaviation #aviation
(Bold highlight by Lead Stories)
War Thunder is a simulation videogame featuring various types of military hardware, including tanks, ships and planes.
This is what the thumbnail of the video looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Sep 3 11:11:20 2025 UTC)
On September 3, 2025 several accounts on X started reposting the mirrored video that was more than a year old and presented it as actual events that took place recently and which involved a Tu-22M3 bomber:
(Image source: collage of X posts composed by Lead Stories)
However the original unmirrored video appears to have been first published in 2019 according to reporting from The Daily Mail (archived here) which said:
The Pentagon said that a Russian jet came dangerously close to one of its fighters over the Black Sea on Monday.
It said the Russian aircraft intercepted a US Navy patrol plane in international airspace, coming within five feet of the American plane, according to CBS.
Pentagon spokeswoman Captain Pamela Kunze said the Russian plane flew close to the plane for two hours and 40 minutes before crossing directly into its flight path.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine started in 2022, this footage has nothing to do with that conflict, did not involve a TU-22M3 bomber and was filmed in an entirely different geographical area.
Updates:
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2025-09-04T20:38:07Z 2025-09-04T20:38:07Z An earlier version of this story said this was video game footage based on the TikTok channel watermark on the video and the hashtag used when that channel posted it. However a reader alerted us to even older, mirrored copies of the video that place it over the Baltic Sea in a 2019 incident.
