Soldier in landing gaffe clip is European, not Taiwanese

Published on March 7, 2025 at 09:30
3 min read
By AFP Hong Kong

As Taipei faces constant military threats from Beijing, social media users have falsely claimed a video shows a Taiwanese soldier's uniform getting stuck as he jumps from a landing craft. A Swedish film archives foundation that owns the footage told AFP it was recorded more than a decade ago and that the soldiers are European.

"Ladies and gentlemen, Taiwan's well-trained & unstoppable Marine Corps soldiers! As a mainland Chinese, I'm so scared of them!" reads an X post shared February 23, 2025.

The post includes a clip of a soldier jumping from a landing craft when his uniform gets tangled on the vessel.

The same video racked up tens of thousands of shares elsewhere on X and Douyin.

Screenshots of the false social media posts captured March 6, 2025

China has ramped up the deployment of fighter jets and warships around Taiwan in recent years to press its claim of sovereignty over the island, which Taipei rejects.

Taiwan said February 26 that China staged a combat drill with aircraft and warships and announced "live-fire exercises" in an area about 40 nautical miles (74 kilometres) off the island's south (archived link).

There is also growing concern in Taiwan over the security of its cables after the island's authorities seized a Chinese-crewed cargo ship suspected of cutting an undersea cable that serves one of the outlying islands under Taipei's control (archived link).

While China's Communist Party has never ruled democratic Taiwan, Beijing has threatened to use force to bring the island under its control.

But the soldiers in the video are not Taiwanese.

A reverse image search found a Facebook video shared January 20 with a caption saying it shows a Swedish marine's uniform getting stuck in the skiff's front diving board (archived link).

The falsely shared video also appears to be flipped horizontally.

Screenshot comparison between the falsely shared video (L) and the original footage, flipped horizontally by AFP

Subsequent keyword searches on Google using a keyframe from the video found the search engine indexed the clip in June 2024 after Armé- Marin- och Flygfilm (AMF), a Swedish military film archives foundation, published it (archived link).

AMF's logo appears in the top-right corner.

Screenshot from Google Images showing the date the clip was indexed

Spokesperson Cathrin Starud confirmed in a March 5 email that the clip belongs to the foundation.

"This footage does not depict a military exercise and we can confirm that the soldiers are not Taiwanese," she told AFP. "The clip shows difficulties that can occur during training and the soldiers are European."

She added that the video was filmed about 20 years ago and is no longer available on the foundation's Facebook page after it was published in 2024.

AFP has previously debunked other videos misrepresenting Taiwan's military.

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