Old blast videos falsely linked to Southeast Asia conflict

Published on August 6, 2025 at 05:25
3 min read
By Ei SAN, Harshana SILVA, AFP Thailand, AFP Sri Lanka

Five days of deadly fighting between neighbours Thailand and Cambodia unleashed a flood of misrepresented visuals including unrelated explosion clips. Two widely shared videos supposedly from the Southeast Asian conflict predate the bloody border clashes and have appeared in posts about strikes in Ukraine.

"Cambodia shoots down Thai F-16 fighter jet," reads a Burmese-language Facebook post on July 24, 2025.

It shares footage capturing the moment an aircraft loses altitude and crashes into the ground, with the impact resulting in a massive fireball. Similar posts were shared on YouTube.

Another clip, showing several air strikes, surfaced on Facebook and X posts in Sri Lanka and India.

"Thailand-Cambodia clash is intensifying. Cambodian army base to be attacked and demolished," says a Tamil-language post on July 24.

Screenshots of false posts taken August 5, 2025, with red X added by AFP

Thailand and Cambodia agreed a truce starting July 29, following five days of intense clashes that left more than 40 people dead (archived link).

The latest eruption of a long-standing dispute over contested border temples on their frontier also drove more than 300,000 from their homes.

But the two clips circulating online predate the conflict.

Ukraine news reports

A reverse image and keyword search on Google found an uncropped version of the first video shared by Russia's Pravda newspaper on April 30, 2025 (archived link).

"Strike of the Geranium UAV on a target in Kharkov," reads the headline, using another spelling for the northeast Ukraine city Kharkiv.

Screenshot comparison of the false post (left) and the Pravda news report

Further keyword searches found the video in an Telegram channel named "voenacher", which also shared the location of the attack in another post dated April 26, 2025 (archived link).

A chimney visible in the video -- located in a green patch next to a parking lot in Kharkiv -- can also be seen on Google Maps satellite imagery (archived link).

Screenshot comparison of the video (left, centre) with Google Maps satellite imagery

A separate reverse video search found the second clip posted on Facebook June 6, 2025, more than a month before armed clashes erupted between Thailand and Cambodia (archived link).

"This is Lutsk -- city where my wife was born," reads part of the post.

Video news agency Newsflare distributed the footage with a caption that says in part, "On June 6, 2025, in Lutsk, Ukraine, a video captured a series of explosions caused by four missile strikes in the city's industrial zone" (archived link).

Screenshot comparison between the falsely shared clip (left) and the Facebook post from June 2025

AFP has debunked more misinformation related to Thailand-Cambodia border conflict here.

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